Beauty and Classical Music in the Academy

Dan Asia

Composer and Professor of Music, University of Arizona.

This lecture presents ideas on Beauty, their relationship to classical music, their presence or lack thereof in the academy; and the general state of classical music in the Academy. The composer also presents excerpts of his own music in regards to the aforementioned, with discussion of the listening process and the hearing of various musical parameters, including rhythm, melody, color, harmony, form, and others.

Dan Asia has been an eclectic and unique composer from the start. He recently received a Music Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts Letters, and has received grants from Meet the Composer, a UK Fulbright award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, MacDowell and Tanglewood fellowships, a DAAD Fellowship, Copland Fund grants, the NEA (four times) and Koussevitsky Foundation, the Fromm Foundation, and numerous others. From 1991-1994 he was the Meet The Composer Composer-in-Residence of the Phoenix Symphony, and from 1977-1995 Music Director of the New York-based contemporary ensemble Musical Elements. He has been Professor of Music at the University of Arizona since 1988 and director of the UA Center for American Culture and Ideas since its founding in 2008.

Asia's five symphonies have received wide acclaim from live performance and their international recordings. Under a Barlow Endowment for Music grant, he wrote a work for The Czech Nonet, the longest continuously performing chamber ensemble on the planet. He recently finished the opera, The Tin Angel, after the eponymous book by Paul Pines, his collaborator of over thirty years.

The recorded works of Daniel Asia may be heard on the labels of Summit, New World, and Albany. For further information, visit www.danielasia.net.

Dan Asia's lecture was held in the Escondido Theater at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, TX, February 19, 2014.