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Pre-concert lectures precede most SCMS museum concerts. They are occasionally delivered by visiting scholars, but usually are presented by SCMS artistic director Kenneth Slowik.

The lectures cover a wide range of topics and approaches, as a sampling of titles illustrates:

Christoph Wolff (Harvard University):
“On Brahms’s Chamber Music”

Nancy B. Reich (Bard College):
“Clara Schumann”

Elaine Sisman (Columbia University):
“On the Sublime in Mozart”

Scott Odell (Smithsonian Institution):
“The Great French Harpsichord Chase and Other Conservation Capers”

Thomas Forrest Kelley (Harvard University):
“This is Doktor Brahms”

Jon Newsom (Library of Congress): 
“Brahms Manuscripts in the Library of Congress”

Jaap Schröder (Amsterdam):
“My Seventy-five Years with Haydn”

Ernst Kovacic (Vienna):
“Schubert and Bruckner”

Elise K. Kirk (City University of New York):
“Music of the White House”

Rod Regier (Freeport, ME):
“Piano Building at the Time of Schumann”

Malcolm Bilson (Cornell University):
“The Fortepiano Revival”

Richard Hoffmann (Oberlin Conservatory):
“Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony”

Kenneth Slowik (Smithsonian Institution): 
“Byron, Napoleon, & Schoenberg”
“William Dowd, American Harpsichord Maker”
“Fugue”
“The ‘New’ Shostakovich”
“Bach’s Architectonics”
“Bach and the Dance”
“Schönberg’s Vienna”
“Bartók’s Second Quartet”
“A Glimpse into the Luthier’s Shop: Birth of a Baryton”
“The Cello and the King of Prussia”
“Chamber Music in America”
“The Well-Tempered Clavier”
“Caravaggio, Bernini, and Monteverdi”
“Ground Bass, Passacaglia, Chaconne, and Chacony”
“The Fantazias of Henry Purcell”
“Beethoven’s Große Fuge”
“Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder”
“Wood, Wire, & Gut”
“The Poetry of Die schöne Müllerin”
“Mann, Mahler, Visconti, and Britten: Death in Venice and the Third Britten Quartet”
“Ravel’s Chamber Music”
“Beethoven and the Archduke”
“Haydn in England”
“Bartók’s Third Quartet”
“Words and Music in Die Winterreise”
“Ist es wahr? Mendelssohn, Voss, and Beethoven”
“Schönberg’s Verein für musikalischen Privataufführungen”
“Thomas Jefferson: Musician and President”
“Romeo, Juliet, and Ludwig”
“Haydn’s Quartet Menuets”
“Wagner, Mahler, Schoenberg, and Das Lied von der Erde”
“Beethoven’s Heroic Decade”
“Entartete Musik: Schulhoff, Mendelssohn, Jazz”
“The Life and Times of John Jenkins”
“Temperament”
“Mozart to 1785”
“Mozart’s Final Years”
“Large-Scale Forms in Schubert”
“The Instruments of Antonio Stradivari”
“Schönberg to the Second Quartet”
“Britten and the Passacaglia”
“Schubert’s Vienna”
“Dvořák in America”
“Kreutzer, Beethoven, Tolstoy, Janáček”

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