Cultural Crash Course - Higdon & Cold Mountain

Join local experts for Folkmoot’s new series, Cultural Crash Courses, featuring lectures on a variety of current cultural issues, including global politics, race, immigration, gender, climate change, technology and multiculturalism. Content will be presented as a 45-minute community lecture followed by questions, answers and discussion. Crash Courses begin on September 18th and occur on a monthly basis. The full schedule with topics and speakers is available online at Folkmoot.org

At our first Cultural Crash Course, WCU professor, Dr. Christina L. Reitz will talk about the compositional history of Jennifer Higdon’s opera Cold Mountain, a musical adaptation of Charles Frazier’s award winning novel of the same name, which is set just outside Asheville during the civil war. The opera received its world premiere at Santa Fe Opera in 2015 and Opera Philadelphia performed it in 2016. North Carolina Opera and Minnesota Opera followed in 2017 and 2018.

Higdon has won both a Pulitzer and a Grammy for previous works.

Reitz’s analysis will focus on the unique challenges of adapting the original work “from page to stage.”

Reitz received a BM in Piano Performance from the Dana School of Music at Youngstown State University where she was the recipient of the Mary P. Rigo Outstanding Keyboard Major. She earned an MM in Piano Pedagogy and a Ph.D. in historical musicology, with external cognates in women’s studies and piano performance at the University of Florida where she received the John V. D’Albora Scholarship for Excellence in Graduate Research as well as the Outstanding Student Paper Award from the College Music Society, Southern Chapter.

Cultural Crash Courses are sponsored by Western Carolina University and the Town of Waynesville. Tickets for Cultural Crash Courses are $10. Doors open at 5:30pm and the lecture begins at 6:00pm.

Limited seating is available. Please purchase Cultural Crash Course tickets in advance by calling 828.452.2997 or purchasing electronically, at Folkmoot.org. Family priced tickets available through the box office only, $40 for 2 adults plus children. Parking is available in the back of the Folkmoot building for year-round events.

Folkmoot’s year-round programming initiatives have been made possible by the Community Foundation of Western North Carolina and the Cherokee Preservation Foundation.

Folkmoot is a nonprofit organization dedicated to celebrating many cultures in one community.