Upcoming
The National Award Book Finalist and the Newbery Honoree, Eugene Yelchin, presents his memoir The Genius Under the Table: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain, followed by a performance reenacting a scene from the book against a reconstruction of the author’s room in the Soviet communal apartment.
The Wende Museum begins its new monthly virtual program series In Search of Truth with an hour-long discussion featuring our eight-person In Search of Truth student council.
Join us for an interview with John Emerson, an American diplomat, lawyer, and the United States Ambassador to Germany from 2013 to 2017. He will be interviewed about his views on post-Cold War Germany by Joes Segal, the Wende’s Chief Curator and Director of Programming. Emerson will be joined in conversation by his wife, Kimberly Marteau Emerson, Board of Directors Human Rights Watch and Principle KME Consulting.
Sound House (Everyone is Working) is a site-specific multidisciplinary durational performance conceived by composers John Eagle, Cassia Streb, and interdisciplinary artist Janie Geiser. Sound House is created in collaboration with an ensemble of puppeteers, video and lighting designers, musicians, and performers and is produced by Automata, a 501(c)3 non-profit performance gallery.
The premiere of a curated live score by Five Skins co-artistic directors Daniel Goldblum and Dominyka Šeibok. The performance includes avant-garde wind quintet music from Cold War-Hungary by composers György Ligeti and György Kurtág, paired with Dziga Vertov's landmark cinematic innovation, Man with a Movie Camera (1929, USSR).
Inna Faliks, a renowned pianist and the head of UCLA's Piano department, presents a musical program that explores Mikhail Bulgakov's iconic Soviet novel of art, irony, love, religion, and Faustian legend, The Master and Margarita. Faliks will perform the world premiere of two compositions that celebrate the novel and have been composed especially for this evening: Maya Miro Johnson's Manuscripts Don't Burn, for speaking pianist and Margarita suite for piano by Veronika Krausas.
Ivan Wyschnegradsky was a visionary Russian composer who spent his adult life in Paris, having graduated from law school in 1917, a day before the Russian Revolution. The year before, he had a vision: “I saw the great light in full-day,” and hence dedicated his life to “awakening in every man the slumbering forces of cosmic consciousness” with his music. Another such experience was his “ultrachromatic revelation” that the notes of music were on a continuum and that the received 12 half steps of equal temperament were only isolated locations on an infinite spectrum. He soon moved to Paris in 1920 and began composing in thirds, sixths, eighths, twelfths of a tone, and famously composing for Music for Four Quarter-Tone Pianos to be performed at the Wende Museum.