A Musical Offering

The fifth Bethlehem Conference on Moravian Music will be held Thursday through Saturday, October 17-19, in Peter Hall, and will bring Moravian music scholars from the European home of the denomination as well as its American centers.

This year’s gathering is co-chaired by Paul Larson, professor emeritus of music, and Albert H. Frank ’67, ’71, director of the Moravian Music Foundation and Moravian Archives (north) in Bethlehem, and coordinated by Hilde Binford, visiting assistant professor of music.

The 2002 conference is a retrospective of research on Moravian music from past conferences and a glimpse of continuing scholarship on composers, works, styles, and instruments.

The first Moravian music conference, on David Tannenberg and Moravian organs and organ-builders, was organized in 1995 by the Moravian Historical Society and Historic Bethlehem Partnership. The Music Department held the conference the following year, continuing it as a biennial event and broadening it to deal with Moravian music outside Bethlehem. Carol Traupman-Carr ’86 and Larson co-chaired the 1996, 1998, and 2000 meetings.

Thursday night’s concert will feature music from the Moravian Archives, performed by College musical embles conducted by Paula Ring Zerkle, director of choral activities, and James Barnes, director of instrumental activities. Zerkle also will lead a reading session of Moravian music at 11:00 a.m. Saturday.

Larson will read from the Bethlehem diaries of Moravian colonists at Friday’s concert by the Lehigh Valley chamber ensemble Satori, whose members include John Arnold and Nora Suggs, artist-lecturers in music. The program is drawn from the Moravian lovefeast tradition.

Saturday’s concert of music exchanged between Moravian centers in Europe and Moravian colonies in America will be performed by the Whitefield Trio, organized in 1998 to explore music in Moravian archives around the world and named for the Colonial-era preacher whose home is preserved by the Moravian Historical Socety in Nazareth. Its musicians are members of Ensemble Soleil, a French baroque chamber group based in Boston.

Speakers include Nola Reed Knouse, and C. Daniel Crews ’70, director and assistant director of the southern branch of the Moravian Music Foundation in Winston-Salem, N.C.

Laurence Libin, former curator, now research associate of the musical instrument collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will speak on “Fr. Frueauff’s clavecin royale,” a keyboard owned by one of the founding brethren of the Moravian community. Libin arranged for the loan of the 1795 chamber organ by Samuel Green that resides in Peter Hall and has been a featured speaker at other Moravian music events.

Two speakers are guests from the Moravian Archives in Herrnhut, Germany: Peter Peucker, who will describe the music collections in Herrnhut, and Ben van den Bosch, who will discuss brass music used in Moravian churches.

Other topics include Moravian composers Christian David Jaeschke and Carl Abraham Mankell, and the musical instrument trade between Europe and the Moravian colonies.

Full-conference registration is $100 for members of collaborating organizations, including Moravian College, and $110 for others. Two-day registration is $70 for members, $90 for non-members, and one-day registration $45 for members, $55 for non-members. The conference banquet on Saturday is $30. Tickets to the concerts are $5 Thursday, $10 Friday, and $15 Saturday. The lovefeast on Saturday is free but reservations are required because seating is limited. All concerts are free to the Moravian College community.

For a brochure, registration, banquet reservations, concert tickets, and all other information: 610 861-1650, fax 610 861-1657 or hbinford@moravian.edu.