Blake Wilson, "Modeling Virtue in Renaissance Music: Tales from Virgil's Aeneid"


 New Swan Shakespeare Center     Jan 17 2019 | 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM HG1010

Virgil MusicHow was virtue transmitted from classical literature to Renaissance culture through the medium of music?

Find out at this  lecture by musicologist Blake Wilson, who will share music and art from the Italian Renaissance, with a focus on the transmission and recreation of Virgil's epic poem, the Aeneid.

Illustrated with paintings and musical clips, this lecture will enlighten and delight you! All are welcome.

Blake Wilson is Professor Emeritus of Music at Dickinson College (PA), where he taught courses in music history and directed the Dickinson Collegium. He recently relocated to Los Angeles, where his wife is a professor of voice & opera in the USC Thornton School of Music.

He is a former fellow of Villa I Tatti, and returned there in 2011 as a visiting professor. His research concerns the musical cultures of late medieval and Renaissance Italy, with particular focus on Medici patronage, the musical soundscapes of Italian cities, orality & literacy, and the interface between the aural, visual, and literary cultures. He is the author of Music & Merchants: the Laudesi Companies of Republican Florence (Oxford, 1992), an edition of the Florence Laudario (A-R Editions, 1995), and articles in the New Grove Dictionary, Journal of Musicology, Early Music History, Recercare, Rivista Italiana di Musicologia, and I Tatti Studies. In 2009 he published his 2nd book, Singing Poetry in Renaissance Florence (Olschki), and his current projects include a joint study with Anthony Cummings of Medici musical patronage, and a short monograph on the reception of Virgil's Aeneid in Renaissance music. He recently completed a semester as a fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, where he finished a book titled Singing to the Lyre: Memory, Performance, and Oral Poetry in Renaissance Italy, which will be published by Cambridge University Press.