Arts and Architecture

Music professor to discuss book on Charles Griffes with Arts and Architecture dean

Credit: Taylor Greer. All Rights Reserved.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Taylor Greer, associate professor of music, will discuss his book, "The Pastoral in Charles Griffes's Music: Aesthetic of Ambivalence” (Indiana University Press, 2024), with B. Stephen Carpenter II, Michael J. and Aimee Rusinko Kakos Dean in the College of Arts and Architecture, at 4 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 6, at the Woskob Family Gallery, located at 146 S. Allen St., State College.

Charles Griffes was a visionary American composer at the turn of the 20th century whose music synthesized many sources of inspiration, including French sensuality, British Aestheticism, non-Western folk music drawn from China, Java and the Arab peninsula, as well as poets including Oscar Wilde, William Sharp and Walt Whitman. Greer’s book argues that Griffes revived and reinvented the 18th-century pastoral tradition, and that a new interpretive framework, called the “ambivalent pastoral,” is needed to calibrate his stylistic eclecticism.

Greer is also the author ofA Question of Balance: Charles Seeger’s Philosophy of Music” (University of California Press, 1998), as well as multiple essays and reviews in music theory journals. He received the Faculty Award for Outstanding Teaching from the College of Arts and Architecture in 2007.

Last Updated February 3, 2025