Noted musicologist Leon Botstein, President of Bard College and Music Director of the American Symphony Orchestra where he conducts their subscription concert series at Lincoln Center, will consider the parallels and discontinuities in the European musical tradition, with particular attention to Central European styles from the mid-19th century to the period just after the Second World War.

As music director and principal conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra since 1992, Leon Botstein is credited with making it a major innovative force in classical music. He is also artistic director of the American Russian Young Artists Orchestra and editor of The Musical Quarterly, one of the profession's leading scholarly journals. His publications include The Compleat Brahms (ed., 1999) and the forthcoming Music and Its Public: Habits of Listening and the Crisis of Musical Modernism in Vienna, 1870-1914. He recently released two audio CDs: Brahms: Serenade 0p. 1 for Orchestra and Nonet and Hartmann: Symphony No. 1.

Considered one of nation's leading intellectuals, publishing on history, cultural criticism, and higher education, in addition to music, Botstein has achieved national recognition for his views on educational reform. His book Jefferson's Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture (1997) advocates replacing American high schools with a program of smaller, seminar style classes that foster greater opportunity, ability and willingness to contend with ambiguity, difficult subject matter, and complexity, and that takes teens more seriously as thinkers than the current high school system does.

Cosponsored by the Departments of Music and Germanic Languages and Literatures.