Department of Communication and Culture

Benjamin Korstvedt  

Benjamin Korstvedt, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Music
Department of Visual and Performing Art
Clark University
Worcester, MA 01610-1477

(508) 793-7369 phone
email: bkorstvedt@clarku.edu

Professor Korstvedt graduated summa cum laude from Clark University with a B.A. in Music in 1987 and received the Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1995. He joined the Clark faculty in 2002 and is currently Program Director for Music. He is also affiliated with the program in Communication and Culture .

 

Current Research and Teaching

Professor Korstvedt's research centers on conjunctions between music and culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has long specialized in the Austrian composer Anton Bruckner (1824-96). His work has analyzed and critiqued the complex text-critical issues surrounding Bruckner's works, the reception of his music by critics and scholars in the Third Reich, the role of Bruckner's music in the culture of fin-de-siècle Vienna, and the form and style of Bruckner's symphonies. He has published a number of articles on these topics, as well as a monograph on the Eighth Symphony, and has presented papers at conferences in the United States, Canada, Germany and Austria.  In 2004 Professor Korstvedt published the first modern edition of the 1888 version of Bruckner's Fourth Symphony for the Bruckner Collected Works edition.

 

In addition to his work on Bruckner and Viennese musical culture, Professor Korstvedt's current projects include a critical study of the role of metaphor in the musical aesthetics of the German philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) and an exploration of the function of the timpani in the symphonic rhetoric of Joseph Haydn.  He has also recently written essays for the American Symphony Orchestra on Bruckner and Goldmark among others.

Professor Korstvedt's teaching covers musical history and culture from the medieval period into the twentieth century, with a special interest in developing critical strategies for exploring connections between music and its many cultural contexts.  In the last few years, his seminar topics have included "Schubert, Beethoven and the Transformation of Music, 1800-1830," "Music and Culture in fin-de-siècle Vienna" and "The Total Work of Art and Cultural Criticism from Wagner to the Present," which he is team-teaching in Spring 2005 with Professor Jiro Tanaka (of the German Program) as the Higgins Seminar in the Humanities.

Before coming to Clark, Professor Korstvedt served on the music faculties of the University of Iowa and the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. he has also held fellowships from the American Musicological Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

 

Selected Publications

Anton Bruckner: IV Symphonie Es-Dur, Fassung von 1888 , Anton Bruckner Sämtliche Werke, Band IV/3 (Musikwissenschaftlicher Verlag, Vienna, 2004)

 

Anton Bruckner: Symphony no. 8, Cambridge Music Handbooks (Cambridge University Press, 2000)  [Link: http://assets.cambridge.org/052163/2269/frontmatter/0521632269_frontmatter.pdf ]

"Bruckner Editions: the Revolution Reconsidered" and "Between Formlessness and Formality: Aspects of Bruckner's Form" in The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner, ed. John Williamson (Cambridge University Press, 2004)

"Resistance, Satire, and Strange Enthusiasm: Progressive Responses to Wagner during the First World War Era" in 'Von Grenzen und Ländern, Zentren und Rändern': Der Erste Weltkrieg und die Verschiebungen in der musikalischen Geographie Europas, ed. Christa Brüstle, Guido Heldt, and Eckhardt Weber (Edition Argus, 2005)

"'Return to the Pure Sources': The Ideology and Text-Critical Legacy of the First Bruckner Gesamtausgabe " in Bruckner Studies, ed. Paul Hawkshaw and Timothy Jackson (Cambridge University Press, 1997)

"Anton Bruckner in the Third Reich and After: an Essay on Ideology and Bruckner Reception," The Musical Quarterly 80 (1996)

He is a contributor to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and his reviews have appeared in The Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music and Letters, The Journal of Modern History and Notes