Join us as Zen Tadashi Kuriyama (Bates College) visits Thursday, March 20 for a guest lecture and vocal masterclass.

3:30pm Guest Lecture and Q&A in Eliot 126

4:40pm Vocal Masterclass with singers of Collegium Musicum in PAB 320 

Talk title: “Too Cosmopolitan”: Anti-Alienism, Gerald Finzi, and the English Musical Renaissance

Description: Gerald Finzi (1901–1956) composed at the height of twentieth-century English nationalism during what is referred to as the English Musical Renaissance, a period of nationalist artmaking that defined the musical atmosphere of Britain between from circa 1850 to 1950. Finzi's London Jewish background and the unmistakable Englishness of his music has made him one of the most complex figures in the English concert hall in the last century. For however non-Jewish he made himself, English nationalism precluded a composer from gaining recognition as a reputable composer if born, or intimately associated with, a “member of the tribe.”  His “fame” today is different from his status in 1956, the year of his death, and the reasons are many. For one, Diana McVeagh (1926–), Finzi’s biographer, hinted at his Italian surname: “His name (did he never think to change or anglicize it?) perhaps accounts for his being so insistently insular, by way of compensation. How else could a man of German and Italian descent turn himself into a model English countryman and composer?”  This talk analyzes the complexities of Finzi’s Jewishness and his contribution to an English sound against (and – even – with) the antisemitic and anti-alien tones of the English Musical Renaissance.

About our guest: Zen Tadashi Kuriyama is a musicologist, choral conductor, and vocalist currently serving as Assistant Professor of Music and Director of the College Choir at Bates College. Zen’s published cross-disciplinary scholarship engages with the fields of musicology, Jewish studies, Christian sacred music, liturgical theology, affect theory, and performance. Before teaching at Bates, Zen was Assistant Professor of Music History at Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA. He holds degrees from Brandeis (Ph.D. in Musicology), University of Notre Dame (M.S.M. in Conducting) where he was one of the last protégés of conductor and interdisciplinary artist Carmen-Helena Téllez, SUNY Stony Brook (M.Mus. in Voice Performance), and University of Hawaii at Mānoa (B.A. in Music).

Guest lecture and masterclass made possible by a Mission Grant from the Office for Institutional Diversity.