Past Events



Trefoil: Music to Lighten the Heart

Music in the Pavilion
Mar 17, 2023 at - | Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center - Class of 1978 Orrery Pavilion, Kislak Center, 6th floor, 3420 Walnut Street Philadelphia, PA 19104

In this concert, Trefoil, “a hearty trio of medieval minstrels” (Philadelphia Inquirer) active since the start of the current millennium, will present songs from the Pennsylvania Chansonniere by Machaut and his contemporaries. With its trademark combination of voices and medieval plucked strings, Trefoil will bring these meta-texts alive in “otherworldly harmonies” (New York Times) with “subtlety, blend and nuance” (NPR) for the modern listener.



FluCoMa Workshop Series With Ted Moore

Mar 6, 2023 - Mar 10, 2023 at - | Penn Music Building - Lerner 101, 201 S. 34th Street Philadelphia, PA 19104

Composer Ted Moore will teach a week-long workshop March 6-10, 2023 on incorporating machine learning into creative and artistic practices. His workshops will focus on using the FluCoMa (Fluid Corpus Manipulation) toolkit in the MaxMSP programming language.



Daedalus Quartet

In Concert
Mar 2, 2023 at - | Fisher Fine Arts Library - Arthur Ross Gallery, 220 S. 34th Street Philadelphia, PA 19104

Please join us for a live concert performance by the Daedalus Quartet, either in-person or virtually!



Marcos Balter

Recent Compositions
Feb 28, 2023 at - | Penn Music Building - Lerner 101, 201 S. 34th Street Philadelphia, PA 19104

As part of the 2022-23 Penn Music Colloquium Series, the Penn Music Department presents Marcos Balter, Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition at Columbia University, to discuss his recent works.



Yun Emily Wang

Listening Incommensurably: Sounding “out” and Queer Taiwanese Toronto’s Multiple Sexual Modernities
Feb 21, 2023 at - | Penn Music Building - Lerner 101, 201 S. 34th Street Philadelphia, PA 19104

In this talk, Yun Emily Wang will present her paper that draws on fieldwork from 2013 to 2018 (the pivotal years during which Taiwan became the first Asian country to legalized same-sex marriage) and traces how a group of queer Taiwanese immigrants listen to and for multiple incommensurable sexual modernities in Toronto.



Arcana New Music Ensemble: After Shiraz

Music in the Pavilion
Feb 3, 2023 at - | Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center - Class of 1978 Orrery Pavilion, Kislak Center, 6th floor, 3420 Walnut Street Philadelphia, PA 19104

Drawing inspiration from archival exhibition catalogs of the Shiraz Festival in the Penn Libraries collections, this concert features music by contemporary Iranian composers. Throughout its run from 1967 to 1977, the Shiraz Festival was host to an array of contemporary classical and avant garde composers from Europe and the United States. Among them were Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, Olivier Messiaen, Bruno Maderna, John Cage, David Tudor, and Morton Feldman.



Benjamin Bagby's Beowulf

In Performance
Jan 27, 2023 at - | Annenberg Center - Harold Prince Theater, 3680 Walnut Street Philadelphia, PA 19104

With dragons, demons and heroic quests, the Old English epic poem Beowulf has captivated the masses for centuries. Now, in a “double tour de force of scholarly excavation and artistic dynamism,” (San Francisco Chronicle) renowned performer Benjamin Bagby uses his voice and the Germanic harp to present the medieval text, evoking an entire ancient world on stage. Seldom seen in Philadelphia, Bagby makes his Penn Live Arts debut and “comes as close to holding hundreds of people in a spell as ever a man has...That is much too rare an experience.” (The New York Times)