Piedmont Center Speaker Series:

Nicholas Mathew

"Beethoven and Modern Political Schlock"

Friday, Sept. 23

Piedmont Center Speaker Series:

Nicholas Mathew

"Beethoven and Modern Political Schlock"

Friday, Sept. 23

Nicholas Mathew discusses Beethoven's surprisingly substantial but rarely performed corpus of overtly political music, and what these pieces might have to teach us about Beethoven's more famous works and their own dark history of political appropriation.

Nicholas Mathew is Associate Professor and Weisman Schutt Chair in Music at the University of California, Berkeley.  He was born in England, and studied music at Oxford University and piano at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. While pursuing his doctoral research at Cornell University, he studied period pianos and historical performance with the forte pianist Malcolm Bilson. He is the author of the book Political Beethoven (2013) and co-editor of the volume The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini (2013).  His current book project concerns Joseph Haydn and the place of music in the commercial world of late eighteenth-century London.

Doors open at 5:00 p.m. with wine available for purchase.  Talk begins at 5:30.

There will be ample time for audience members to ask questions.

Admission is free, although a small donation to the Center for the Arts would be appreciated. 

Plenty of free street parking available.