Calendar of Events

Come join us in listening to our own Amherst students performing from the Valentine Balcony. Some chairs will be provided, but we recommend you bring a sweatshirt as fall draws near!

M@A's 2020-21 Virtual Series continues with a live, online performance by composer and pianist Conrad Tao hosted by Maestro Mark Lane Swanson. This performance is free and open to the public. Please visit the Music Department Event Live Stream page listed below to catch the show. We look forward to seeing you!

Program
CONRAD TAO: All I had forgotten or tried to
J.S. BACH: Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue
RUTH CRAWFORD SEEGER: Piano Study in Mixed Accents
JASON ECKARDT: Echoes' White Veil
BEETHOVEN: Sonata op 31 no 2, 'The Tempest'
FREDERIC RZEWSKI: Which Side Are You On?
(from North American Ballads)

Conrad Tao has appeared worldwide as a pianist and composer, and has been dubbed a musician of “probing intellect and open-hearted vision” by The New York Times, who also cited him as “one of five classical music faces to watch” in the 2018-19 season. Tao is a recipient of the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant and was named a Gilmore Young Artist—an honor awarded every two years highlighting the most promising American pianists of the new generation. At the 2019 New York Dance and Performance Award (“Bessies”), Tao was the recipient of the award for Outstanding Sound Design / Music Composition, for his work on "More Forever," his collaboration with Caleb Teicher.

Come join us in listening to our own Amherst students performing from the Valentine Balcony. Some chairs will be provided, but we recommend you bring a sweatshirt as fall draws near!

The Department of Theater and Dance is thrilled to host a Zoom masterclass in contemporary dance with Kyle Marshall!

Choreographer and dancer Kyle Marshall is a 2018 Juried Bessie Award winner, New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellow and 2020 Dance Magazine Harkness Promise Awardee. His company, Kyle Marshall Choreography, has performed at venues including BAM Next Wave Festival, Jacob’s Pillow Inside/Out, Joe’s Pub at the Public, Actors Fund Arts Center, NJPAC, and NYC SummerStage. Commissions have included Dance on the Lawn: Montclair's Dance Festival, NJPAC and Harlem Stage. He has received residencies from the 92nd Street Y, Mana Contemporary, CPR and Jamaica Performing Arts Center. Kyle graduated from Rutgers University with a BFA in dance.

Register in advance. Zoom link and password will be sent on the day of the event. This event is sponsored by the Eastman Lecture Fund.

The Department of Art and the History of Art and the Program in Film and Media Studies is excited to present a conversation with filmmaker Brett Story, who will be discussing her award-winning film The Prison in Twelve Landscapes. (We recommend watching the film on Kanopy.com ahead of this event: https://amherst.kanopy.com/video/prison-twelve-landscapes-1.)

Brett Story is a filmmaker, writer and geographer based in Toronto. Her films have screened internationally at festivals such as CPH-DOX, the Viennale, SXSW, True/False and Oberhausen. Her most recent feature documentary, The Hottest August, was a New York Times Critics’ Pick and is currently playing cinemas and festivals around the world.

Brett has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Sundance Documentary Institute. Her 2016 feature documentary, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Hot Docs Documentary Festival and was a nominee for Best Feature Documentary at the Canadian Screen Awards.

Brett is the author of the book Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America and co-editor of the forthcoming volume Digital Life in the Global City. She holds a Ph.D. in geography and is currently an assistant professor in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University.

Please register in advance. This event is sponsored by the Eastman Lecture Fund.

Suhail Yusuf Khan is a Sarangi player, vocalist, composer, and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Music at Wesleyan University. Khan is writing the first in-depth ethnomusicological study by a hereditary sarangi player. His ethnographic scholarship draws on personal experience as an eighth-generation musician belonging to a lineage of Hindustani musicians. He situates this musical tradition in a globalized context, to help new audiences connect with the riches of this repertoire.

All are invited to a live sarangi concert by Suhail Yusuf Khan, followed by a conversation. Yael Rice, assistant professor of art and the history of art and of Asian languages and civilizations, will introduce this event by presenting works of art from the Mead’s collection that feature the sarangi and speak to the rich history of the instrument.

This program is presented in collaboration with the Departments of Art and the History of Art, Architectural Studies, and Asian Languages and Civilizations and will take place via Zoom.

Registration for this event is required. Please use the following link to sign up:
https://engage.amherst.edu/event/registrations/index/1077

London-based artist Heather Agyepong has worked within photographic and performance arts since 2009 and is interested in mental health and well-being, activism, invisibility, the diaspora and the archive. She uses both lens-based practices and performance to create cathartic experiences for herself and her audiences. Agyepong’s works have been published, performed and exhibited extensively within the UK and internationally. A selection of her photographs is currently on view at the Mead Art Museum.

Join us to learn more about Agyepong’s artistic practice; her acclaimed project Too Many Blackamoors; and her forthcoming projects, performances and exhibitions. This conversation will be moderated by Aneeka Henderson, assistant professor of sexuality, women's and gender studies.

This program is supported by the Arts at Amherst Initiative and will take place via Zoom. Registration is required.

The Amherst College Jazz Ensemble (ACJE) performs for Virtual Homecoming and Family Week from Buckley Recital Hall in the Arms Music Center. This performance will be open to the general public through the music department's FREE event livestream on the Amherst College website.

ACJE Director Bruce Diehl and the student members present music chosen from jazz composers and artists Les Hooper, Matt Harris, George Gershwin, Beethoven and others.

Program:
Janáček String Quartet No. 1, Kreutzer Sonata
Beethoven Grosse Fuge

Recipient of a 2018 Avery Fisher Career Grant and a 2017 Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists, the Calidore String Quartet first made international headlines as winner of the $100,000 Grand Prize of the 2016 M-Prize Chamber Arts Competition. The quartet was the first North American ensemble to win the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship and a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist, and is currently in residence with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Bowers Program (formerly CMS Two). The Calidore String Quartet has been praised by the New York Times for its “deep reserves of virtuosity and irrepressible dramatic instinct.” The Los Angeles Times described the quartet as “astonishing” and praised its balance of “intellect and expression.” The Washington Post said, “Four more individual musicians are unimaginable, yet these speak, breathe, think and feel as one.”

The Amherst Choral Society presents a concert from Buckley Recital Hall in the Arms Music Center. The concert will be livestreamed on the Amherst College website, FREE to the public; no in-person audience will be present.

Dr. Noah Horn and Assistant Conductor Theo Peierls '19 conduct traditional Amherst College songs including “Hand Me Down My Bonnet,” “Hymn to Amherst,” “O Amherst, Our Amherst” and “Paige's Horse.” Additional repertoire includes Samuel Barber’s “Under the Willow tree” and a virtual choir to conclude the concert with “Three Gifts” and “To the Fairest College.”

The Amherst Symphony Orchestra (ASO) and Chamber Music Program present works by Hildegard von Bingen, Ethyl Smyth, Amy Beach, Cécile Chaminade, Chrétien Hedwige, Florence Price, Valerie Coleman, Joan Tower and Ellen Taafe Zwillich in a FREE, livestreamed concert in honor of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment establishing women's right to vote.

Female composers have long faced unjust exclusion from the concert hall. Patriarchal gate-keeping and gender bias has unfairly dictated whose music would be heard. Women are dramatically underrepresented both in the music academy and on classical music stages. The ASO seeks to do its part to begin remedying this artistic inequity in a varied program of works by women composers.