Jeremy Eichler | Pebbles on the Stump of the Oak

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Music Mondays presents a lecture by Jeremy Eichler, NEH Public Scholar and Chief Classical Music Critic of The Boston Globe.

Societies commemorate their own distant triumphs and tragedies through history books, monuments, and memorials carved from stone. But music also remembers, and in fact serves as a uniquely powerful medium for carrying forward meaning from the past. In this presentation, Jeremy Eichler, an award-winning classical music critic and cultural historian, explores music's memory of the wartime past through the life and art of Richard Strauss. He will present selections from his book in progress — Time's Echo — which blends cultural history, biography, travel log and critical reflection in order to both open up the resonance of Strauss's musical memorial, Metamorphosen (among other works), and to rethink our relationship to the legacies of war, the witnessing of art, and the meaning of music in our lives today.

Jeremy Eichler is an award-winning critic and cultural historian who, since 2006, has served as chief classical music critic of The Boston Globe. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times among many other publications. Eichler holds a doctorate in European History from Columbia University, and his writing and scholarship have been recognized with an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for music criticism, a Public Scholar grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Salo and Jeanette Baron Dissertation Prize, and fellowships from Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study as well the MacDowell Colony. A frequent guest speaker, Eichler previously taught at Brandeis University and is currently a local affiliate of Harvard's Center for European Studies. Time’s Echo, his first book, will be published by Alfred A. Knopf in North America and by Faber & Faber in the United Kingdom.