As part of its Conversations on Art series, The Judah L. Magnes Museum presents Music, Liturgy and Cultural Fusions: The Making of Revisions with panelists Shahrokh Yadegari, composer; Larry Rinder, guest curator; and Charles Hirschkind, professor of anthropology, UC Berkeley. Magnes head of research Francesco Spagnolo moderates the discussion.
Bio
Alla Efimova
Alla Efimova is the Chief Curator at the Judah L. Magnes Museum.
Lawrence R. Rinder
Dean of Graduate Studies at California College of the Arts, Lawrence Rinder was previously Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator of Contemporary Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he organized exhibitions including "The American Effect," "BitSteams," the 2002 Biennial, and "Tim Hawkinson." Prior to his work at the Whitney, Rinder was founding director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and assistant director and curator for twentieth-century art at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. His art criticism has been published in Flash Art, Artforum, Nest, The Village Voice, Fillip, and Parkett.
Francesco Spagnolo
Francesco Spagnolo studied music at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory and Philosophy at the University of Milan. He has been active as an academic in the fields of philosophy and musicology, as a host of cultural programs for RAI (Italian National Radio), and as a producer and performer of music and theater in Europe and the U.S.
In 1997, he founded Yuval Italia, the Italian Center for the Study of Jewish Music. He is the author of several essays and one book (The Dance of the Chameleon: Quotation, Textual Strategies and Survival, Milan 1999) and the editor of the volume Aesthetics of Extreme Situations (Milan 2000) and of the Italian edition of Imre Toth's Palimpsest (Bompiani, Milan 2003). In 2001, the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia (Rome) and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem jointly issued his groundbreaking audio anthology, Italian Jewish Musical Traditions.
A Research Fellow of the Jewish Music Research Center (Jerusalem) and PhD candidate at the Hebrew University, he currently lives in San Francisco, working as the Music Curator of the Judah L. Magnes Museum (Berkeley) and teaching in the Music and Literature departments of the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Shahrokh Yadegari
Shahrokh Yadegari (Sound Design Faculty) has recently joined the faculty of the department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego.
He has collaborated with such artists as Peter Sellars, Hossein Omoumi, Vibeke Sorensen, Keyavash Nourai, Siamak Shajarian, and Yolande Snaith. Yadegari has worked at Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) and is one of the founders of Persian Arts Society, and Kereshmeh Records, organizations dedicated to advancement and preservation of Persian traditional music.
His music has been played internationally in various venues such as the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), the Institut fur Neue Musik und Musikerziehung, Darmstadt, and Contemporary Museum of Art, San Diego. Yadegari's areas of research include the use of interactive computing for live music and theatre performances, spatialization, and applications of non-linear dynamical systems for synthesis.
His recent projects include the sound design for The Children of Herakles directed by Peter Sellars, the music for Through the Veil choreographed by Yolande Snaith, and the music for The Sanctuary, a video installation by Vibeke Sorensen.