Music Lecture: Margot Fassler (Notre Dame)

"Hildegard of Bingen's Sounding Model of the Cosmos in the Digital Age." Margot Fassler, Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Music History and Liturgy at Notre Dame, is renowned for her work at the intersection of musicology and theology and is a specialist in sacred music of several periods. At Notre Dame she holds joint appointments in Music and in Theology, and she is a fellow in the Medieval and Nanovic Institutes. Before coming to Notre Dame in 2010, Fassler spent a decade as director of the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University, where she held the Robert Tangeman Chair of Music History. Her book "Gothic Song" (2nd edition, Notre Dame Press, 2011), won both the John Nicolas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy of America and the Otto Kinkeldey Prize of the American Musicological Society. Her interdisciplinary approach is demonstrated in her most recent book, "The Virgin of Chartres: Making History through Liturgy and the Arts" (Yale University Press), a study informed by close work with architecture. The book has won both the Ace Mercers' International Book Award (for a book on art and religion) and the 2012 Otto Gründler Book Prize (for a book in medieval studies). Her new work on Hildegard of Bingen is completely interdisciplinary in nature, combining study of liturgy, theology, music, drama, and the visual arts. This lecture is presented in association with Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts and the Duke Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.