Details — Karl W. Weiss '87 Faculty Lecture Series: Douglas Jurs — December 4
| Date: 12/4 | Time: 7 pm |
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Douglas Jurs, assistant professor of music, will discuss “Envisioning New Forms for Music Performance: A New Play About a Piano Sonata” in Arnold Hall of Music, Room M205, at 7 p.m. Wednesday, December 4. Nicholas Thorne was a leading American composer in the 1980’s and 90’s, amassing a long list of commissions from leading ensembles around the world, prestigious faculty positions at Yale and Michigan, and an impressive collection of composition awards that marked him as a singular, emerging voice in the world of art music. Then he disappeared. What happened? Where did he go? Why? When I set out to find Thorne a decade ago, motivated by my admiration for his Piano Sonata from 1980, no one seemed to know the answers to the mystery. A new play debuting at Allegheny on January 17-18, 2020, “The Dog Runs Because He Can,” seeks to understand the deeper story by using Thorne’s own piano sonata as a structural and emotional guide through the inner life of the composer. In this lecture I will talk about how that works and how seemingly unrelated ideas over time coalesced to form the resulting play.