Lydia Goehr is Fred and Fannie Mack Professor of Humanities in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University. In 2009/2010 she received a Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award, in 2007/8 The Graduate Student Advisory Council (GSAC)’s Faculty Mentoring Award (FMA), and in 2005, a Columbia University Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. She is a recipient of Mellon, Getty, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and in 1997 was the Visiting Ernest Bloch Professor in the Music Department at U. California, Berkeley, where she gave a series of lectures on Richard Wagner. She has been a Trustee of the American Society for Aesthetics and is a member of the New York Institute of the Humanities. In 2012, she was awarded the H. Colin Slim Award by the American Musicological Society for an article on Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. In 2002-3, she was the visiting Aby Warburg Professor in Hamburg and a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. In 2005-6, she delivered the Royal Holloway-British Library Lectures in Musicology in London and the Wort Lectures at Cambridge University. In 2008, she was a Visiting Professor at the Freie Universität, Berlin (Cluster: “The Language of Emotions”) and in 2009, a visiting professor in the FU-Berlin SFB Theater und Fest. In 2019, she was Visiting Professor at the University of Torino, and in 2020, a Mellon fellow at the Tate Museum in London. In 2022-23, she was a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute (Empirical Aesthetics) in Frankfurt and taught at the Courtauld Institute, London. For more information, please click here.

Dr. Kristi Brown-Montesano approaches graduate seminars, adult-education classes, podcasts, and pre-concert lectures with the same philosophy: that offering context—rigorously researched, provocative, and humanistic—empowers listeners and musicians to make their own meaningful connections to classical music. As a faculty member at the Colburn School Conservatory of Music from 2003–22, she served as Chair of Music History and helped shape the degree programs of the institution. Today, Brown-Montesano is a Lecturer in Musicology at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. She is also a busy public scholar who collaborates with many of Southern California’s most distinguished musical organizations, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera, La Jolla Music Society, and the Philharmonic Society of Orange County. For more information, please visit kristibrownmontesano.com.

Cellist Michael Kannen has distinguished himself as a musician and educator of uncommon accomplishment who is comfortable in widely diverse musical situations and venues.  He was a founding member of the Brentano String Quartet, with whom he performed throughout the world and on radio, television and recordings.  He has appeared at chamber music festivals across the country and with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He has also been a member of the Meliora Quartet and the Figaro Trio.  He is currently a member of the Apollo Trio and is the Director of Chamber Music at the Peabody Conservatory of Music, where he holds the Sidney Friedberg Chair in Chamber Music. For more information, please visit michaelkannen.com