The West Virginia University Humanities Center is proud to support a public lecture by 2023-2024 Humanities Center Fellow Jennifer Walker on April 4 from 4:30-6 p.m. in the Evansdale Library, Room 234.
Walker is an assistant professor of musicology in the
College of Creative Arts, School of Music. Her current research as a WVU
Humanities Center Fellow focuses on Hector Berlioz’s musical setting of the
Catholic mass for the dead – his 1837 Requiem (Grande Messe des Morts) and its
use in more secular contexts, such as the open sequence of HBO’s “The Righteous
Gemstones.” Walker will show how her work seeks to move modern hearings and
understandings of Berlioz’s Requiem beyond the confines of Gemstone-style
dramatics and theatricality.
Walker draws heavily on the Requiem’s nineteenth-century
reception to ask what Berlioz’s own listeners found to be notable. More often
than not, the work’s so-called “dramatic effects” were less important than its
religious ethos, whether that sense of religious sincerity was created through
its engagement with the theological sublime or the music’s keen ability to
interact symbiotically with the sacred spaces in which it was performed.
“In a broader sense, hearing the Requiem in these new ways
also invites a deeper consideration into the numerous ways in which sacred
artistic products have been effectively secularized as either broadly spiritual
or as outliers in their creators’ overall oeuvres,” Walker said. “There is no
doubt that the Requiem is a grand work that was written on a large scale—in
fact, a performance that adheres to Berlioz’s exacting instructions requires
upwards of three hundred musicians. In the end, my research shows that sacred
art is rendered sacred when it is received by an audience as such and not only
when produced by an equally ‘sacred’ artist. If Berlioz and the Gemstone family
shared complicated relationships with religion, Berlioz, at least, was capable
of producing a work of art that was understood by his listeners to be genuinely
sacred in its very essence.”
The lecture will be followed by a question and answer session and light refreshments.