A concert by internationally known pianist Martin Söderberg will be among the highlights of the inaugural Word and Music Festival being presented by the Departments of Fine Arts and English in the College of Arts and Sciences at Misericordia University on Saturday, April 9 in Huntzinger and Alden Trust Rooms 218-219 of Sandy and Marlene Insalaco Hall beginning at 10:15 a.m., and concluding with the concert at 7 p.m. in Lemmond Theater in Walsh Hall.
The festival, with the 2016 theme "Bodies of Art: Music, Literature, and Disability," is being sponsored by The Soyka Fund for the Humanities at Misericordia University. The event is free and the public is invited to attend any one or all of the sessions.
The theme throughout the daylong program is disability and how it is represented and portrayed in art, music and literature. The morning and afternoon schedule includes a variety of sessions on disability in the visual arts, film, music, literature, and the undergraduate curriculum, along with a program on musical prodigies.
The steering committee is comprised of Misericordia University faculty members Amanda Caleb, Ph.D., assistant professor of English, Rebecca Steinberger, Ph.D., professor of English, and Ryan Weber, Ph.D., assistant professor of fine arts.
"For a first-of-its-kind festival, we are hoping members of the community, as well as educators, will take the opportunity to explore the worlds of disability through the topics of music and literature," said Dr. Weber. "Come for the entire day, or just to a session or two that interests you. We know a highlight will be the concert by Martin Söderberg, who is a world class concert pianist – not to be missed."
Concert Pianist Söderberg will perform the program, "Works by Bach, Beethoven, Ravel, and Ginastera," at 7 p.m. in Lemmond Theater. Of Swedish-Spanish descent, Söderberg has been performing since the age of 12, when he made his recital debut in Las Palmas, Spain. After being awarded the First Prize in the 1985 "Pilar Bayona" International Piano Competition in Zaragoza, Spain, he has performed in concert individually and with orchestras throughout Europe, Central America, South America, the United States, Canada and Asia.
Söderberg was a winner at the 1988 Artists International Auditions in New York and was presented in his New York Recital Debut at Carnegie's Weill Hall. The New York Times described Söderberg as a "strong technician who seems to enjoy tapping the energy that lies within the music." In a recent concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the New York Times again described Söderberg's performance of Spanish music as "spectacular," and the Village Voice hailed him with "extraordinary piano playing."
Söderberg earned a doctorate from the Manhattan School of Music, New York City, in 1990. He has recorded 3 CDs, "Piano Music from Spain," "Piano Music of Rafael Landestoy," and "The 24 Chopin Etudes," as part of his ongoing recording project "World Piano Collection."
The daylong festival will begin at 10:15 a.m. with the 45-minute presentation "Visual Arts in the Community" by Gwen Harleman, arts coordinator, Deutsch Institute's Verve Vertu Art Studio, Dallas. The Deutsch Institute offers recreational and leisure activities to people with a wide range of disabilities. An exhibit of work by Verve Vertu artists will be on display throughout the conference.
In Session II, "Disability in the Undergraduate Curriculum," Rebecca Steinberger, Ph.D., professor of English at Misericordia University, will present an undergraduate workshop, "MU Confronts Disability in the Literary Classroom." The session will be held from 11 a.m.-12 p.m.
A member of the Misericordia faculty since 2000 and the former chair of the Department of English Department, her specializations include Shakespeare, Irish Studies, British Literature and Theatre in Performance. She is the author of three books: "Encountering Ephemera 1500-1800: Scholarship, Performance, Classroom," a collection of essays that provides a guide to making historic material relatable to students in the technology-driven 21st century; "Shakespeare and Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Contextualizing Identity and Staging Boundaries," and "The Renaissance Literature Handbook," an edited collection of essays and resources for students and teachers of Renaissance literature. She is working on her fourth book, a study of terror as a thematic thread through British literature, tentatively entitled, "Panic on the Streets of London: Cultural Conflict in the City."
A resident of West Pittston, Dr. Steinberger holds a Ph.D. in English literature and criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She received her bachelor's degree in English from Wilkes University and her master's in English with a concentration in Medieval and Renaissance drama and Irish literature from the University of Scranton.
Following a break for lunch, Session III, "Disability and Film," will be held from 1-2:15 p.m. Ryan Watson, Ph.D., assistant professor of fine arts at Misericordia University, will present "Representing Disability in Documentary Film."
Dr. Watson teaches in the areas of film/media history, theory and aesthetics. His current research focuses on the efficacy and instrumentalization of documentary practices, particularly as they intersect with advances in media technologies, radical political movements, human rights, archives and theories of witnessing and testimony. He is currently working on a book project, based on the research, "Militant Evidence: Witness, Archive, and the Radical Documentary." His writing has been published in Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism; Animation Journal, the first peer-reviewed scholarly journal devoted to animation history and theory; InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, and the Journal of Film and Video, an internationally respected forum published by the University Film & Video Association, that focuses on scholarship in the fields of film and video production.
The fourth session from 2:15-3:15 p.m. will address disabilities in music and literature with the lecture, "Writing Identity Through Musical Practice: Shell Shock, Feminism, and Disability in Dorothy L. Sayers's Detective Fiction," presented by Stephen Armstrong, a Ph.D. student at the Eastman School of Music, Rochester, New York. Armstrong studies virtuosity, mysticism and musical hermeneutics. His interests also extend to musical references in non-musical media, including the study of musical metaphors in the detective novels of Dorothy L. Sayers and sound design in Japanese gaming. He has presented at chapter meetings of the American Musicological Society, as well as at the North American Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music. He recently published an article in the Journal of the American Liszt Society and has given talks on game music to meetings hosted by the Word and Music Studies Association and the North American Conference on Video Game Music.
An active freelance pianist and recitalist, Armstrong has performed throughout his native Michigan as well as in Umbria, Italy. He holds master's degrees in musicology and piano performance from Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan.
Dr. Steffan Rhys Owen, a junior doctor with the National Health Service, United Kingdom, will present, "The Child Prodigy: The Price of Success," from 3:35-4:45 p.m. His talk will look at the phenomenon of being a prodigy and the price of precocious achievement on a child's psychological wellbeing. A native of Wales, his family offered a strong musical background. Breaking from tradition, he was drawn to a career in medicine. As a student at the University of Leicester, Dr. Rhys Owen took a year off from his medical studies to undertake a master's degree in medical humanities. His thesis explored the phenomenon of the musical prodigy from an interdisciplinary perspective. In particular, he explored the nature versus nurture argument in the acquisition of talent, the idea of the prodigy as a construct of society, and the impact of precocious talent on the child's global development.
Since graduating from medical school in 2013, he has worked as a junior doctor for the National Health Service. He plans to begin specialty training in general practice/family medicine in August, with the intent to continue his research in music alongside his medical career.
