Sounds of Medieval Cluny with Christine Smith, Thomas Forrest Kelly, and Blue Heron

Piper Auditorium, Gund Hall
January 30th, 2025
6:30PM

Event Description

The Druker Design Gallery hosts an evening of music to mark the opening of Envisioning Cluny: Kenneth Conant and Representations of Medieval Architecture, 1872–2025, an exhibition that celebrates the study of medieval architecture at Harvard University. Following remarks by curator Christine Smith, the Blue Heron vocal ensemble will perform a selection of music that would have been heard in the medieval monastery of Cluny, with commentary by the musicologist Thomas Forrest Kelly. A reception will follow in the Druker Design Gallery.

This event is free and open to the public. As space is limited, please RSVP to help track attendance. The event will be livestreamed on this page (see the window above), but will not be recorded.

This event is supported by the Melissa Kaish and Jonathan Dorfman Makers Fund.

Speaker

Christine Smith is the Robert C. and Marion K. Weinberg Professor of Architectural History. She teaches courses in Late Antique, Medieval and Italian Renaissance and Baroque architecture.

Christine Smith has published on Early Christian, Italian Romanesque, Italian Renaissance and 20th century art and architecture; most of her publications are in the field of Tuscan Romanesque or on Leon Battista Alberti and Early Renaissance architectural theory.

Her most recent book is Eyewitness to Old St. Peter’s: Maffeo Vegio’s ‘Remembering the Ancient History of St.Peter’s Basilica in Rome,’  with Joseph O’Connor (Cambridge University Press, 2019), making available for the first time an English translation of Vegio’s text, accompanied by full-color digital reconstructions of the basilica as it appeared in Vegio’s day.

Her current project is a book-length study of the experience of wonder as it relates to architecture. Drawn entirely from the evidence of primary sources from the 5th century B.C. to the 18th century A.D, the work explores changing ideas about what the experience of wonder consists of, what the qualities of a “wonderful” building might be, and what role wonder in architecture played in human society at different times and places.

Thomas Forrest Kelly is Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music emeritus at Harvard University and serves on the faculty of the Historical Performance Program at The Juilliard School. He is the author of Capturing Music (Norton, 2015), First Nights: Five Performance Premieres (Yale, translated into Korean and Chinese), Early Music: A Very Short Introduction(Oxford, translated into German and Hungarian), and The Beneventan Chant (Cambridge, translated into Italian), which was awarded the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological. He is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres of the French Republic and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy in Rome, and the Medieval Academy of America.

The vocal ensemble Blue Heron, directed by Scott Metcalfe, has been acclaimed by The Boston Globe as “one of the Boston music community’s indispensables” and hailed by Alex Ross in The New Yorker for its “expressive intensity.” The ensemble ranges over a wide repertoire from plainchant to new music, with specialties in 15th century Franco-Flemish polyphony and early 16th century English sacred music. Blue Heron is committed to vivid live performance informed by the study of original source materials and historical performance practices. Founded in 1999, Blue Heron presents a concert series in Cambridge and has performed across North America and in Europe. Among the ensemble’s many recordings is the 5-CD series Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks, Vol. 5 which was awarded the prestigious Gramophone Classical Music Award for Early Music. The series features the complete songs of Johannes Ockeghem, madrigals by Cipriano de Rore, music by Guillaume Du Fay, Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune, and more, including numerous world premiere recordings. The ensemble also recorded a companion CD for Thomas Forrest Kelly’s book Capturing Music: The Story of Notation.

Harvard University welcomes individuals with disabilities to participate in its programs and activities. If you would like to request accommodations or have questions about the physical access provided, please contact the Public Programs Office at (617) 496-2414 or [email protected] in advance of your participation or visit. Requests for American Sign Language interpreters and/or CART providers should be made at least two weeks in advance. Please note that the University will make every effort to secure services, but that services are subject to availability.

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