Gustav Mahler (1860-1911): Music as Religion, Then and Now | Torrance Festival of Ideas
Harry Ballan
As the European middle classes abandoned religious orthodoxies of all kinds throughout the 19th-century, music especially became a kind of substitute for conventional religious worship, and the concert hall, a substitute church. This talk explores religious themes in several of Mahler’s symphonies, and addresses questions about how he managed to create an atmosphere in which performers and listeners sensed (and still sense) that the music “harbored a meaning,” specifically a religious one, that was relevant and needed to be understood, from the time of their composition and first performances until today.
Harry Ballan is senior director of the Tikvah Fund and the founding dean of the Abraham Lincoln Teachers Fellowship. Harry holds a Ph.D. from Yale University and a J.D. from Columbia Law School. He clerked for Chief Judge Wilfred Feinberg of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He has taught at several leading universities on subjects ranging from law and intellectual history to neuroscience and was dean of Touro Law School before joining Tikvah.
- Start: 25 April 2021
- End: 25 April 2021
- Attendance:
- Location: N/A , , United States