Deep Focus: Enriching the Aspen Experience

Gabriela Lena Frank writes music for a wide range of audiences, from seasoned concertgoers to neophytes, in concert halls, community centers, hospitals, schools, prisons, and even less traditional venues. Now she is engaged in an extraordinary educational project.

Dr. Alethea Kilgore brings us a deep dive into Songs of the Seasons, a soon-to-be-published song cycle by Margaret Allison Bonds. Dr. Kilgore’s song-by-song analysis highlights the newfound attention Bonds enjoys from both performers and historians.

Dr. Samantha Ege provides an orientation to an American masters of compositional craft with a resurgent historical profile: Florence Beatrice Price. 

Charles Ives loved a good, old-fashioned, rural barn dance. At least, he thought he did. Ives readily admits that his musical representations of the barn dance—as heard in pieces like “Washington’s...

Musicologist Kevin McBrien takes a sideways look at Ludwig van Beethoven’s Third and Fifth Cello Sonatas, suggesting that they contain comic moments as well as deeply felt emotions, and that the two are not as mutually exclusive as we might think.