Benjamin Korstvedt’s ‘year of Bruckner’

Benjamin Korstvedt, a noted Anton Bruckner scholar, musicologist, and the Jeppson Professor of Music at Clark, will be busy during Austria’s “Bruckner Year,” the 200th anniversary of the 19th-century composer’s birth in 1824. Korstvedt is on sabbatical so that he can conduct research and participate in events celebrating Bruckner during this pivotal year.

Korstvedt’s schedule includes:

• Curating an exhibition and presenting lectures in May as part of Austria’s Steinbach Mahler Festival, which will explore the complex relationship between Bruckner and his younger composer friend Gustav Mahler.
• Speaking in Linz at the Bruckner University for Music and the Performing Arts about the composer’s creation of the Fourth Symphony.
• Chairing the organizing committee for an international conference to be held at the “Bruckner days” festival in August in St. Florian, Austria, where Brucker was a choir boy at St. Florian Abbey. Korstvedt will present a talk, “Varieties of Sublime Experience in Bruckner’s Three Final Adagios.” The event is co-sponsored by the Bruckner Society of America, of which he has been president since 2011.
• Presenting the keynote address in September for the Institute of Austrian and German Music Research’s Fourth International Conference, to be held in Britain.
• Exploring the musical and personal relationship between Bruckner and Mahler as part of his research this fall in Vienna, New York, and Washington, D.C. The project, “Bruckner and/or Mahler: Changing Images of Two Austrian Composers in the Mirror of Sociopolitical Change in Austria and the United States, 1918-1996,” is funded by a grant from the Botstiber Institute.