Either/Or [How Should We Live And Create?]

Led by Gisèle Becker, Cantate Chamber Singers presents Great Minds: Ideas as Musical Inspiration, an evening of virtuoso choral music inspired by great artists and thinkers. Featured on the program is a ... tribute to Leonardo Da Vinci by ... contemporary composer Eric Whitacre, Frank Martin's peerlessly playful settings of Shakespeare's The Tempest, Gavin Bryars' And so ended Kant's traveling in this world, classic 20th-century works by Luigi Dallapiccola and Gustav Holst, and a special talk on music and philosophy by Jerrold Levinson, Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland. Guests are invited to a post-concert reception.

Cantate Chamber Singers St. John's Episcopal Church, Norwood Parish, Chevy Chase, Maryland, Saturday March 31, 2012 7:30 PM.

Concert Notes and Sung-texts

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Washington's PostClassical Ensemble, an experimental musical laboratory, also this Saturday evening.

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"What Wittgenstein is underscoring here about the appreciation of music is this. Music is not understood in a vacuum, as a pure structure of sounds fallen from the stars, one which we receive via some pure faculty of musical perception. Music is rather inextricably embedded in our form of life, a form of life that is, as it happens, essentially linguistic. Thus music is necessarily apprehended, at least in part, in terms of the language and linguistic practices that define us and our world."

Image credit: Published in two volumes in 1843, Either/Or (original Danish title: Enten ‒ Eller) is an influential book written by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, exploring the aesthetic and ethical "phases" or "stages" of existence. Published before 1923 and therefore in the public domain in the U.S.