Beethoven 250 Houston 2020 - University of Houston
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Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts
Beethoven portrait

Beethoven 250 Houston 2020

Celebrating Beethoven’s 250th in Houston

Beethoven 250 Houston 2020 brings the worldwide celebration of the 250th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig von Beethoven—one of the great figures in the history of Western art, born in 1770 in Bonn, Germany—to the city of Houston in February 2020. Two weeks of concerts and symposia on the University of Houston campus will include performances of Beethoven’s music by internationally renowned guest artists with Moores School of Music faculty and students; a three-day symposium hosted by the Texas Society for Music Theory and the Southwest Chapter of the American Musicological Society and including recent scholarship on the music of Beethoven; and appearances by six of the world’s leading Beethoven scholars for lectures, keynote addresses, workshops, and seminars.

February 17–29, 2020 on the University of Houston campus

Guest Artists

  • Formose Quartet

    The Formosa Quartet

    Formed in 2002 when the four Taiwanese-descended founders came together for a concert tour of Taiwan, the Formosa Quartet’s cultural identity has since expanded to include broader American and pan-Asian roots. Winners of both the First Prize and Amadeus Prize at the Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition, the Formosa Quartet is “one of the very best quartets of their generation” (—David Soyer, Guarneri Quartet). In 2013, the Quartet founded the annual Formosa Chamber Music Festival, and the Quartet has played a leading role in actively commissioning new works for string quartet.
  • Kristóf Baráti

    Kristóf Baráti, violin

    Jo Dee and Cliff Wright Great Artist, Beethoven 250 Houston 2020

    In 2014, at the age of 35, Baráti was awarded Hungary’s highest cultural award, the Kossuth Prize, following in the footsteps of revered Hungarians András Schiff, György Ligeti and Iván Fischer. Baráti maintains an active international career, with highlights of his most recent season including engagements with the Orchestre National de France, Oslo Philharmonic, Royal Scottish National, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Bern Symphony, Warsaw Philharmonic, Hungarian National Philharmonic, BBC Philharmonic, and the Mariinsky Orchestra. Baráti has appeared with conductors including Charles Dutoit, Valery Gergiev, Marek Janowski, Andrew Manze, Kurt Masur, Andrés Orozco-Estrada, and Jukka-Pekka Saraste. Recent recital appearances include Paris, Chicago, New York, and the White Nights Festival in St. Petersburg, among many others. Baráti plays the 1703 “Lady Harmsworth” violin made by Antonio Stradivarius, kindly offered by the Stradivarius Society of Chicago.

Guest Scholars

  • Scott Burnham

    Scott Burnham

    Scott Burnham holds a B.M. from Baldwin-Wallace College, an M.M. in Composition from Yale University, and a Ph.D. in Music Theory from Brandeis University. He is an expert in the history of tonal theory, problems of analysis and criticism, and 18th- and 19th-century music and culture. His publications have appeared in journals including Beethoven Forum, Current Musicology, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of Music Theory, Musical Quarterly, Music Theory Spectrum, and 19th-Century Music. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Humanities Center. He is the author of Beethoven Hero (1995) and Mozart’s Grace (2012); editor and translator of Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven (1997); and co-editor of Beethoven and His World (2000).
  • Robert Hatten

    Robert Hatten

    Robert S. Hatten joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin in Fall 2011 as Professor of Music Theory, having taught previously at Indiana University and the Pennsylvania State University. His first book, Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation (1994), was co-recipient of the Wallace Berry Outstanding Publication Award from the Society for Music Theory. His second book, Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert (2004), helped launch the book series “Musical Meaning and Interpretation” at Indiana University Press, for which Hatten serves as general editor. His third book, A Theory of Virtual Agency for Western Art Music, was published in 2018. Hatten is President of the Society for Music Theory and is a past President of the Semiotic Society of America. He is an expert on semiotic theories of musical meaning, performance and analysis, music and the poetic text, and twentieth-century opera; and he has lectured widely across North American and Europe, including extended lecture series in Poland, Finland, Spain, and Mexico.
  • James Hepokoski

    James Hepokoski

    James Hepokoski received his M.A. and Ph.D. in musicology from Harvard University. He previously taught at Oberlin College and the University of Minnesota before spending twenty years on the faculty of the Department of Music at Yale University. Hepokoski is a former editor of the journal 19th-Century Music and is a recipient of Yale University’s Sidonie Miskimin Clauss Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities. He is known for his work on synthesizing music history, analysis, and criticism, and his publications include “Beethoven Reception: The Symphonic Tradition,” “Back and Forth from Egmont: Beethoven, Mozart, and the Nonresolving Recapitulation,” and “Dahlhaus’s Beethoven-Rossini Stildualismus: Lingering Legacies of the Text Event Dichotomy.” His book Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata (2006), co-authored with Warren Darcy, won the Wallace Berry Outstanding Publication Award from the Society for Music Theory.
  • William Kinderman

    William Kinderman

    Since receiving an award for lifetime achievement from the Humboldt Foundation in 2010, musicologist and pianist William Kinderman has published two books— The Creative Process in Music from Mozart to Kurtag (2012) and Wagner's 'Parsifal' (2013)—while expanding his performance activities in new directions. Kinderman's interpretations of Beethoven's music have widely influenced the work of others, including Moisés Kaufman’s award-winning play 33 Variations, which reached Broadway in 2009 and has appeared on many other stages since. Among many publications on Beethoven, he is the author of the books Beethoven (1995, rev. 2009) and Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations (1987, rev. 2008), and editor of The String Quartets of Beethoven (2006). The New York Times’ Edward Rothstein has praised Kinderman's “intellectual energy and distinctive insight”; German critic Gerd Kowa has found him “a herald of Beethoven research and interpretation . . . a sovereign artist.”
  • Michael Spitzer

    Michael Spitzer

    Michael Spitzer in an expert on Beethoven, with interests in aesthetics and critical theory, cognitive metaphor, and music and affect. Spitzer is a past President of the Society for Music Analysis and serves as chair of the Editorial Board for the journal Music Analysis. He founded the series of International Conferences on Music and Emotion, and he organized the International Conference on Analyzing Popular Music (Liverpool, 2013). Spitzer is the author of “The Significance of Recapitulation in the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata” (1996), “Convergences: Criticism, Analysis, and Beethoven Reception” (1997), “Inside Beethoven’s ‘Magic Square’: The Structural Semantics of op. 132” (1998), Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven’s Late Style (2006), and Metaphor and Musical Thought (2004).

Schedule of Events

Week 1

February 16—22
Residency: Formosa Quartet. All Formosa Quartet events free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.

Monday, February 17

Formosa Quartet: Viola Masterclass
4:00 PM–6:00 PM
Moores School of Music room 145

Formosa Quartet: Open Rehearsal
7:00 PM–9:00 PM
Moores School of Music room 160

Tuesday, February 18

Formosa Quartet: Open Rehearsal
9:00 AM–11:00 AM
Moores School of Music room 160

Opening Lecture: "Beethoven's Inner Voices"
6:00 PM–7:15 PM
Dudley Recital Hall

Andrew Davis (Dean and Professor of Music)
Rex Koontz (Professor of Art History)
Free and open to the public

Wednesday, February 19

Formosa Quartet: Violin Masterclass
4:00 PM–6:00 PM
Dudley Recital Hall

Formosa Quartet: Chamber Music Masterclass
7:00 PM–9:00 PM
Moores School of Music room 160

Thursday, February 20

Formosa Quartet: Open Rehearsal
10:00 AM–12:00 PM
Moores School of Music room 129
Formosa Quartet: Concert: From East to West with the Formosa Quartet (ticketed event; tickets available here)
7:00 PM
Asia Society Texas Center
1370 Southmore Blvd.
Houston, TX 77004

Program:
Beethoven, String Quartet in B-flat major, op. 18 no. 6
Wei-Chieh Lin, Taiwanese Folk Songs (2017)*
*Formosa Quartet commission

Friday, February 21

Formosa Quartet: Open Rehearsal
10:00 AM–12:00 PM
Moores School of Music room 175
Formosa Quartet: Cello Masterclass
4:00 PM–6:00 PM
Moores School of Music room 160

Saturday, February 22

Formosa Quartet: Concert: Music of Beethoven (ticketed event: tickets available here)
7:30 PM
Dudley Recital Hall
University of Houston

Program:
Beethoven, String Quartet in B-flat major, op. 18 no. 6
Wei-Chieh Lin, Pasibutbut (2013)* (program notes here)
Beethoven, String Quartet in A minor, op. 132
*Formosa Quartet commission

Week 2

February 23—29
Residency: Kristóf Baráti, violin / Jo Dee and Cliff Wright Great Artist, Beethoven 250 Houston 2020

Tuesday, February 25

Kristóf Baráti: Violin Masterclass
7:00 PM–10:00 PM
Dudley Recital Hall

Concert: University of Houston Wind Ensemble: joyRIDE (ticketed event: tickets available here)
7:30 PM
Moores Opera House
University of Houston

Program:
Michael Markowski, joyRIDE (inspired by Beethoven, Symphony no. 9 in D minor, op. 125, "Ode to Joy," and John Adams, Short Ride in a Fast Machine)

Thursday, February 27

CANCELLED due to City of Houston water service failure and Universty of Houston campus closure

Concert: Moores School of Music Faculty Artists: Chamber Music of Beethoven (ticketed event: tickets available here)
7:30 PM
Dudley Recital Hall
Universty of Houston

Andrew Staupe, piano
Kirsten Yon, violin
Louis-Marie Fardet, cello (guest artist)

Program:
Piano Sonata in A major, op. 2 no. 2
Cello Sonata in C major, op. 102 no. 1 
Violin Sonata in A minor, op. 47 ("Kreutzer")

Friday—Saturday, February 28—29
Conference: Annual meeting of the Texas Society for Music Theory and the Southwest Chapter of the American Musicological Society

Student Center South, University of Houston (map)
RELOCATED to Houston Baptist University; complete information and directions here
Lectures, panel discussions, keynote addresses
Guest scholars in residence: Scott Burnham, Robert Hatten, James Hepokoski, William Kinderman, Michael Spitzer
Full conference schedule and program here

Friday, February 28

RELOCATED due to City of Houston water service failure and University of Houston campus closure

Concert: Moores School of Music Faculty Artists: Chamber Music of Beethoven
(free; no tickets required)

For patrons who purchased tickets for the originally scheduled concert and would like a refund, please contact the Box Office at (713) 743-3388 or kgmcaboxoffice@uh.edu.
Please note: Offices will remain closed until the campus re-opens and responses may be delayed. Leave a voicemail or send us an email with the name on your order or the order number and a member of our staff will get back to you as soon as possible!

7:00 PM (note new start time)
Christ Church Cathedral
1117 Texas Ave., Houston 77002

Aralee Dorough, flute
Timothy Hester, piano
Desmond Hoebig, cellist (guest artist)
Robert Johnson, horn
Timothy Jones, baritone
Suzanne LeFevre, viola
Kirsten Yon, violin

Program:
Horn Sonata in F Major, op. 17
Serenade in D Major for Flute, Violin, and Viola, op. 25
"An die ferne Geliebte," op. 98
Quartet for Piano and Strings in Eb Major, op. 16

Saturday, February 29

Concert: Moores School Symphony Orchestra with Kristóf Baráti: Music of Beethoven (ticketed event: tickets available here)

THIS CONCERT WILL TAKE PLACE ON SCHEDULE AND AS PLANNED. Please note that, due to the City of Houston water emergency, water pressure across the University of Houston campus remains inconsistent and this is affecting some services. Before attending the concert, please know that restrooms in the Moores Opera House may be intermittently out of order during Saturday night’s performance. Water stations and drinking fountains will not be operational. We regret any inconvenience this may cause.

7:30 PM
Moores Opera House
University of Houston

Franz Anton Krager, conductor
Kristóf Baráti, violin and conductor

Program:
Violin Concerto in D Major, op. 61
Symphony no. 3 in E-flat Major, op. 55 ("Eroica")

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