Classical Music: Contemporary Perspectives and Challenges

Michael Beckerman is Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor and Collegiate Professor of Music at New York University where he is Chair of the Department of Music. His diverse areas of research include Czech and Eastern European music; musical form and meaning; film music; music of the Roma; music and war; music in the concentration camps; Jewish music, and music and disability. He is author of New Worlds of Dvořák (W. W. Norton & Co., 2003), Janáček as Theorist (Pendragon Press, 1994), and has edited books on those composers and Bohuslav Martinů. He is the recipient of numerous honors, from the Janáček Medal of the Czech Ministry of Culture in 1988 to an Honorary Doctorate from Palacký University (Czech Republic) in 2014, and most recently the Harrison Medal from the Irish Musicological Society. For many years he wrote for The New York Times and was a regular guest on Live From Lincoln Center. From 2016-18 he was the Leonard Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence at the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.

Paul Boghossian is Julius Silver Professor and Chair of Philosophy at New York University. He is also the Founding Director of its Global Institute for Advanced Study. He was previously Chair of Philosophy from 1994–2004, during which period the department was transformed from an MA-only program to being the top-rated PhD department in the country. He earned a PhD in Philosophy from Princeton University and a B.Sc. in Physics from Trent University. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012, his research interests are primarily in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is the author of Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism (Oxford University Press, 2006), which has been translated into thirteen languages; Content and Justification (Oxford University Press, 2008); and the recently published Debating the A Priori (with Timothy Williamson, Oxford University Press, 2020). In addition, he has published on a wide range of other topics, including aesthetics and the philosophy of music. At NYU since 1991, he has also taught at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Princeton University, the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and has served as Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Birmingham in the UK.