Join us for the U.S. launch of the third issue of Music & Literature, featuring presentations by Teju Cole, Hari Kunzru, Peter Breiner, as well as a live performance of three compositions by Vladimír Godár. 

Teju Cole is a writer, art historian, photographer, and Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College. Born in the US in 1975 to Nigerian parents and raised in Nigeria, Teju lives in Brooklyn. He is the author of two books, a novella, Every Day is for the Thief, and a novel, Open City, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New York City Book Award for Fiction, the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Internationaler Literaturpreis, and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and the Ondaatje Prize of the Royal Society of Literature.

Hari Kunzru is the author of the novels The Impressionist (2002), Transmission (2004), My Revolutions (2007), and Gods Without Men (2011), as well as a short story collection, Noise (2006). His work has been translated into twenty languages and won him prizes including the Somerset Maugham award, the Betty Trask prize of the Society of Authors and a British Book Award.

Peter Breiner is one of the world's most recorded musicians, with over 180 CDs released and record numbers sold (1.5 million reached by 2008) both as albums or online streams. Known as a conductor, pianist, arranger, and composer, he has conducted, often doubling as a pianist, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, the Vienna Mozart Orchestra, the Hungarian State Radio Orchestra, and the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, to mention just a few.

Cellist Colin Stokes has been performing to critical acclaim from a young age. At 17, he was featured on NPR’s Performance Today for his concerts with Yo-Yo Ma at Baltimore’s Meyerhoff Hall and Washington DC’s Strathmore Hall. He has collaborated with many other oftoday’s great artists, including Ani Kavafian, James Taylor and Yuri Temirkanov.

Pianist Nathaniel LaNasa has performed at Weill Recital Hall, PianoFest in the Hamptons, Aspen Music Festival, and Mannes College's Institute & Festival for Contemporary Performance, as well as on Vermont Public Radio and King-FM Seattle. He is assistant conductor to Dr. Kristina Boerger of Cerddorion, a NY-based chamber choir, and is a faculty member at Larchmont Music Academy, St. Brendan's Community Music School.

 Music & Literature 3 brings to light the life’s work of three artists who have to date been denied—by geography, by language, and by politics—their rightful positions on the world stage. The Australian writer Gerald Murnane, a rumored Nobel Prize candidate, has been deemed “a genius on the level of Beckett” by Teju Cole. For the first time, Murnane’s entire catalog is introduced by top writers and critics, and we glimpse his three remarkable archives, which the author insists will remain unpublished until after his death. The issue’s second half is devoted to the Slovak composer Vladimír Godár and his unlikely collaborator, the Moravian violinist-singer Iva Bittová, who honed their crafts under the pall of the Communist regime and who only in recent years have begun cultivating worldwide audiences. Now, for the first time, Godar’s artistic writings as well as his manuscripts are available in English, alongside a portfolio of photographs and an oral history of Bittová’s career, as told by some of her closest collaborators and artistic partners.

External Link »