GUSTAVO DUDAMEL RESIDENCY CONTINUES
Events January 7-9, 2019 include performances by musicians from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, students from the El Sistema-inspired Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles, a conversation in Spanish with Maestro Dudamel, a gallery reception for works by local artist Marsha Levin-Rojer, and two panel discussions with Maestro Dudamel: one about the “El Sistema” music education program, and one about Art and Faith.
Maestro Gustavo Dudamel, Princeton University Concerts’ first Artist-in-Residence and current Music & Artistic Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, will return to the Princeton University campus on Monday, January 7, 2019 for a three-day visit through Wednesday, January 9, 2019.
MaestroDudamel’sresidencyisattheheartofPrincetonUniversityConcerts’125thanniversary celebration. In addition to curated concerts and panel discussions, this second chapter of the residency will bring Maestro Dudamel deeper into the local community—both on campus, in Princeton Township, and in Trenton, NJ.
At 7PM on Monday, January 7, 2019, members from the Los Angeles Philharmonic will present a program curated by Maestro Dudamel exploring the intersection of art and spirituality through chamber works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Estonian “holy minimalist” composer Arvo Pärt, and a new work written for the occasion by Princeton University faculty composer Juri Seo. Tickets to this concert are $30 General/$10 Student. All ticketholders are also invited to a Musical Preview at 6PM by students from Maestro Dudamel’s Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles—an El Sistema-inspired program providing free instruments, intensive music training, and academic support to students from underserved neighborhoods founded by Maestro Dudamel—as well as a Post-Concert Panel moderated by Maestro Dudamel focusing on Art and Faith, including Princeton University Professor of Religion Elaine Pagels
and Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature Alexander Nehamas.
The remainder of Maestro Dudamel’s residency events as part of this visit take place outside of the concert hall. Events that are open to the public include:
On Tuesday, January 8, 2019 at 6PM, Associate Professor Javier Guerrero in the Princeton University Department of Spanish and Portuguese will interview Maestro Dudamel in a Spanish- language talk titled “La Música Como Libertad: Gustavo Dudamel en Princeton” (“Music as Freedom: Gustavo Dudamel in Princeton) at the Trinity Church. Free, unticketed.
On Wednesday, January 9, 2019 at 4:30PM in McCosh Hall 10, Maestro Dudamel will participate in a panel discussion about “El Sistema,” a publicly financed music education program for underserved children founded in Venezuela in 1975, which has now grown to provide music access to young students around the world. An alumnus of the program, Maestro Dudamel will be joined by individuals who have similarly devoted themselves to advocating for accessible systematic music education: Elsje Kibler-Vermaas (Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles, Acting Director of Education), Anne Fitzgibbon *98 (Harmony Program, Founder and Executive Director), and Lou Chen ’19 (Founder of the Trenton High School Orchestra). The panel will be moderated by Stanley Katz, Professor of Public and International Affairs and Director of the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at the Woodrow Wilson School, which is hosting the event.
The Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at the Woodrow Wilson School will also host a gallery reception and artist talk on Wednesday January 9 at 6PM at its Bernstein Gallery for an exhibit titled “Music Made Visible: Metaphors of the Ephemeral” by local artist Marsha Levin- Rojer. The exhibit responds to Maestro Dudamel’s understanding that the power of music lies in its invisible beauty, “the fact that sound, vibration, and harmony can create something in us.” This exhibit is on view now through January 31, 2019, and is free and open to all.
In addition to these public events, Maestro Dudamel will visit various Departments across the Princeton University campus, and will also works with students and teachers across Trenton, NJ. These events include an informal discussion at the Princeton University Center for Human Values centered around “Poverty, the Arts, and Civic Engagement” with sociologists Ekédi Mpondo-Dika and Patricia Fernandez- Kelly, interactions with students from the Trenton Center High School Orchestra as well as the Trenton
Music Makers (an El Sistema-inspired youth music and empowerment program in Trenton), a Q&A with dozens of public school music teachers across Trenton, a conducting masterclass with Princeton University students, and more.
After his January visit, Maestro Dudamel will return for the final leg of his residency at the end of April. Residency finale public events will include a concert by and Late Night Chamber Jam with members of the Berlin Philharmonic; two concerts by the Princeton University Orchestra and Glee Club conducted by Maestro Dudamel—one of which is free at the Trenton War Memorial; a screening of a film with music composed and conducted by the Maestro; a festival performance by over three hundred students from various El Sistema-inspired programs across the East Coast; and more. A complete residency schedule is available and continually updated at princetonuniversityconcerts.org.
LISTING INFORMATION
GUSTAVO DUDAMEL RESIDENCY: SECOND CAMPUS VISIT
Gustavo Dudamel Artist-in-Residence Series
WHEN: Monday-Wednesday, January 7-9, 2019
WHAT: January 7 (Richardson Auditorium, Alexander Hall)
- 6PM: Musical Preview by students from the Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles (“YOLA”)
- 7PM: Musicians from the Los Angeles Philharmonic
- 9PM: Art & Faith: A Panel Discussion
January 8 (Trinity Church, 33 Mercer Street, Princeton, NJ)
- 6PM: “La Música Como Libertad: Gustavo Dudamel en Princeton,” a Spanish- language talk with Maestro Dudamel and Princeton University Professor Javier Guerrero
January 9
- 4:30PM: El Sistema: A Panel Discussion (10 McCosh Hall, Princeton University)
- 6PM: “Music Made Visible: Metaphors of the Ephemeral,” A Gallery Reception (Bernstein Gallery, Woodrow Wilson School)
TICKETS: Concert tickets for January 7 (including admission to the Musical Preview, Concert, and Post- Concert Panel) are $30 General/$10 Students, available online at princetonuniversityconcerts.org, and by phone at 609-258-9220. The other listed events are free and unticketed.
PHOTOS: Please contact Dasha Koltunyuk at [email protected] or 609-258-6024.
ABOUT THE YOUTH ORCHESTRA OF LOS ANGELES (“YOLA”)
Through Gustavo Dudamel’s Youth Orchestra Los Angeles (YOLA) program – inspired by Venezuela’s revolutionary El Sistema – the Los Angeles Philharmonic and its community partners provide free instruments, intensive music training, and academic support to students from underserved neighborhoods, empowering them to become vital citizens, leaders, and agents of change.
ABOUT THE LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC
The Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, under the vibrant leadership of Music & Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel, presents an inspiring array of music from all genres – orchestral, chamber and Baroque music, organ and celebrity recitals, new music, jazz, world music and pop – at two of L.A.’s iconic venues, Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Hollywood Bowl. The LA Phil’s season at Walt Disney Concert Hall extends from September through May and throughout the summer at the Hollywood Bowl. With the preeminent Los Angeles Philharmonic at the foundation of its offerings, the LA Phil aims to enrich and transform lives through music, with a robust mix of artistic, education and community programs.
ABOUT ELAINE PAGELS
Elaine Pagels joined the Princeton faculty in 1982, shortly after receiving a MacArthur Fellowship. Perhaps best known as the author of The Gnostic Gospels, The Origin of Satan, and Adam, Eve and the Serpent, she has published widely on Gnosticism and early Christianity, and continues to pursue research interests in late antiquity. Her most recent books include Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of
Thomas (was on The New York Times best-seller list) and Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (2012). Her current project is working on new research and completing another book.
ABOUT ALEXANDER NEHAMAS
Alexander Nehamas was born in Athens, graduated from Athens College, and attended Swarthmore College and Princeton University, where he is currently Professor in the Humanities, Philosophy, and Comparative Literature. Before coming to Princeton, he taught at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to the books listed below, he has translated, with Paul Woodruff, Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus into English. At Princeton, he has chaired the Council of the
Humanities, directed the Program in Hellenic Studies, and was the Founding Director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. In 1993, he was the Sather Lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley. He has received a Mellon Foundation Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities, and he was recently named a Brigadier of the Order of the Phoenix by the Greek Government. Influenced by the place of philosophy in the life of Ancient Greece and Rome as well as by Nietzsche, he questions the transformation of philosophy from a way of living into a purely academic discipline. Similarly, he holds the view that the arts constitute an indispensable part of human life and not a separate domain, of interest only to a few. He teaches courses on Plato, Nietzsche, the philosophy of art, and intention and action.
ABOUT JAVIER GUERRERO
Princeton University Department of Spanish and Portuguese Professor Javier Guerrero’s research focuses on the intersection between visual culture and sexuality in twentieth- and twenty-first century Latin America. His scholarship places special importance on the body as the site of the enactment and re- enactment of disputes over its materiality. He explores the unexpected ways that the body participates in its own material processes, at times transforming itself, as it deploys novel technologies that destabilize the symbolic sphere of sex. Guerrero is the author of Tecnologías del cuerpo. Exhibicionismo y visualidad en América Latina (Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2014) and the editor of Relatos enfermos (Conaculta/Literal Publishing, 2015) and Vulgaridad Capital. Políticas de lo vulgar y desafíos del “buen gusto” en América Latina (Taller de Letras, 2015). He is the coeditor of Excesos de cuerpo: relatos de contagio y enfermedad en América Latina (Eterna Cadencia 2009, reprinted 2012) and the two-volume dossier Cuerpos enfermos/Contagios culturales (Estudios 2010, 2011). He is also the author of a book on the Venezuelan filmmaker Mauricio Walerstein (FCN, 2002) and the novel Balnearios de Etiopia (Eterna Cadencia, 2010). Javier Guerrero holds a PhD in Latin American Studies from New York University and a L icenciatura in Film Studies from the Universidad Central de Venezuela. Before coming to the US, he was President of the Venezuelan Cinemateca Nacional , where he curated more than twenty-five international film series and festivals. He is Chair of the Section on Venezuelan Studies of LASA.
ABOUT GUSTAVO DUDAMEL
At only thirty-seven, renowned symphonic and operatic conductor Gustavo Dudamel has already done more for the arts than most achieve in a lifetime. Currently in his tenth season as Music & Artistic Director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic and his nineteenth as the Music Director of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, he continues to travel across the globe making guest appearances with some of the
world’s most celebrated musical institutions including, this season, an international tour with the Berlin Philharmonic and a debut at the Metropolitan Opera.
Although the list of world-class ensembles he has conducted is impressive, Gustavo Dudamel’s name commands a sense of awe within the classical music industry and beyond—he has harnessed his role as a leading artist to reach deep into the spheres of innovation, education, and social reform. At the heart of all of Gustavo Dudamel’s initiatives lies a dedication to music’s capacity to unite, and to serve as a source of motivation and inspiration. This dedication is most apparent in his commitment to raising awareness for the role of music education in social development, a subject about which he has spoken at the United Nations, as well as at The White House in a keynote speech at the 2016 National Medal of Arts awards.
In true Dudamel fashion, he does much more than speak about these issues—he actively serves this cause: advising, guest directing, fundraising, and founding countless organizations around the world, all of which are devoted to providing music education in underserved communities. These include Big Noise (Scotland), Superar (Vienna), SerHacer (Boston), and El Sistema Sweden. This devotion to education and social change stems from Dudamel’s own musical background in Venezuela’s El Sistema.
Although for these reasons he is hailed as the “musical messiah,” Dudamel rejects this title; for him, what he does is not just about engaging people in classical music but engaging them in life-changing journey through music. “I cannot say that music is the only thing that will save the world,” he says, “but we have to put art somewhere far more central to the main sense of our society.”
In the past few years alone, he has created the Gustavo Dudamel Foundation, established to promote access to music as a human right and a catalyst for learning, integration, and social change; he was key in establishing Youth Orchestra Los Angeles (YOLA), an educational initiative of the LA Philharmonic providing free instruments, intensive music training, and academic support to students from underserved neighborhoods “empowering them to become vital citizens, leaders, and agents of change;” and he created the “Orchestra of the Future,” taking young musicians from across five continents to perform at the 2017 Nobel Prize Concert.
With the impact of his accomplishments on and off the podium, Dudamel transcends mainstream media: he has been featured on 60 Minutes three times, was the inspiration for the award-winning TV show Mozart in the Jungle, and was recognized as one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” in 2009. Dudamel was the first classical musician to feature in the Superbowl Half-Time Show and was the
subject of the PBS Documentary Dudamel: Conducting a Life. He guest-conducted the film score of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and has appeared with everyone from Conan O’Brien and Stephen Colbert to Elmo on Sesame Street. Dudamel’s influence knows no bounds, and he is able to speak to diverse audiences, always with the same strong, pure message – offering a vision of beauty and hope in troubling times.
