Ian Bostridge

Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Classical Music and Music Education (2014-2015)

The Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Classical Music and Music Education is one of the musical highlights in the University of Oxford’s calendar. It holds a breadth of events – ranging from lectures and symposia to recitals and masterclasses – that make accessible some of the world’s leading performers.

Ian Bostridge is a British tenor whose international recital career has taken him to the Salzburg, Edinburgh, Munich, Vienna and Aldeburgh Festivals and to the main stages of Carnegie Hall and La Scala, Milan.

One of the main ways through which this ideal of liberal education works, in its vision of unconstrained but disciplined intellectual exchange, is through what one might call the circulation of metaphor, so that the most unlikely of disciplines can offer inspiration to each other. Sciences inspire the arts, the arts the sciences.

In his first lecture Bostridge discusses the idea of a liberal education. He argues that an education should be free and also free-ranging: so that the unexpected can be discovered and experienced by student and teacher alike, that the intellect might soar and know no boundaries. He also makes the case that a liberal education may, and indeed should, consist as much of science as of history or classics or music

In the above video Bostridge delivers his lecture, ‘Why Winterreise? Schubert’s song cycle, then and now’.