Deep Focus: Enriching the Aspen Experience

This deeply researched essay by Dr. Kirsten Paige outlines the ways humanity has defined nature as a category in opposition to the human, and what role music has played in that project. She argues that categorizing humanity (including the arts, like music) as distinct from unruly or “wild” nature has led to environmental exploitation and racial discrimination, while works by new composers wrestle with and try to overcome this legacy.

In this short essay, Professor Denise von Glahn guides the reader in noticing the ways the natural world is present in both familiar and new music, and indeed in appreciating the natural beauty that surrounds us at every concert at the Tent.

Professor Lauryn Salazar provides an introduction to the form and tradition of Mariachi, dispelling an oft-repeated but questionable story about the origins of the performance tradition, then tracing the rise of Mariachi.

The greatest force for reshaping American attitudes toward music was that of one composer—Ludwig van Beethoven—and one genre in particular, his symphonies...classical music, and especially symphony orchestra, still enjoy a prestige born of the first American performances of Beethoven symphonies in the 1840s.

Long a staple of the solo violin repertoire, Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata in A Major (Opus 47) has played an outsized role in American cultural history, but not for the reasons we might think. Beethoven collaborated on the piece with George Polgreen Bridgetower (1778–1860), a violin virtuoso whose capabilities impressed Beethoven enough that he later recommended him to others and called the piece “Sonata mulattica” to acknowledge Bridgetower’s African ancestry.