In Defense of Transcription

The Library celebrated the bicentennials of composers Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi with lecture/recital double-bill. In the lecture, prominent Liszt scholar Alan Walker spoke about the art of arrangement as exemplified in the transcriptions and paraphrases of Franz Liszt. Perhaps the 19th century's greatest advocate at the keyboard of orchestral and operatic scores, Liszt produced a tremendous body of piano works based on the music of Wagner and Verdi.

Speaker Biography: Alan Walker is professor emeritus of music at McMaster University, Canada. Before settling in North America, he was on the staff of the music division of the British Broadcasting Corporation in London. He has broadcast for the BBC, for the CBC, and for CJRT-FM (Toronto) and gives regular public lectures on the music of the Romantic Era, a period in which he specializes. His 13 published books include "A Study in Musical Analysis," "An Anatomy of Musical Criticism," and symposia on Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt. Walker's three-volume, prize-winning biography of Franz Liszt was a project which took him 25 years to complete, and for which the President of Hungary bestowed on him the medal Pro Cultura Hungarica. The biography also received the Royal Philharmonic Society Prize, presented by HRH The Duke of Kent in London.

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