Event

Bob Dylan has just released Triplicate, a triple album of songs from the Great American Songbook. What does it mean when one of the greatest songwriters of the past century -- and the recent winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature -- devotes that much energy to songs written by other writers? We will explore those questions and many others -- and listen to live performances of Dylan's songs and the standards with which he has become so infatuated. Moderated by RealArts@Penn impresario Anthony DeCurtis, our panel is composed of singer-songwriter Richard Barone, producer Steve Addabbo, and composer Anna Weesner, chair of the Music Department at Penn. 

RICHARD BARONE is an acclaimed recording artist, performer, producer, and author. Since pioneering the indie rock scene in Hoboken, NJ as frontman for The Bongos, Barone has produced countless studio recordings and worked with artists in every musical genre. He has recently collaborated with Tony Visconti, Beach Boy Al Jardine, Sean Lennon, Dion, John Sebastian, Alejandro Escovedo, Jill Sobule, and Donovan, as well as Moby, the late Lou Reed, and American folk icon Pete Seeger. He has scored shows and staged all-star concert events at Carnegie Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, and the SXSW Music Festival. His memoir Frontman: Surviving The Rock Star Myth was published by Hal Leonard Books. His latest album "Sorrows & Promises" was produced by Steve Addabbo and celebrates the early 1960s music scene of Greenwich Village, where Barone lives. He is affiliated with the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University.

STEVE ADDABBO is best known as a Grammy nominated producer, musician, writer, recording engineer and owner of Shelter Island Sound Recording studio in NYC. Steve's production and engineering work on Suzanne Vega's first two albums set a new standard for the singer songwriter genre and helped pave the way for artists like Shawn Colvin, Tracy Chapman and others. Suzanne's second album, Solitude Standing, with the worldwide hits Luka and Tom's Diner went multiplatinum. Steve also co-produced Shawn Colvin's Grammy Award winning debut album, Steady On. Recent projects include mixing Bob Dylan's Bootleg X, Another Self Portrait, unreleased recordings from 1970, mixing all 400+ tracks from the 2017 Grammy winning Bob Dylan Bootleg XII, The Cutting Edge, Jeff Buckley's recent posthumous release from 1993, You and I, Richard Barone's newly released Sorrows and Promises and Steve's own debut album, Out of Nothing.

Recipient of a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2008 'Academy Award' from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, ANNA WEESNER's music has been performed extensively by such performers as the American Composers Orchestra, Cygnus Ensemble, the Daedalus Quartet, the Cassatt Quartet, Prism Saxophone Quartet, Network for New Music, Orchestra 2001, the Cypress Quartet, Mary Nessinger, Sequitur, Ensemble X, Eighth Blackbird, Dawn Upshaw, Richard Goode, Gilbert Kalish, Metamorphosen, and the New York Virtuoso Singers, among many others. Still Things Move, for string orchestra, was performed by the Riverside Symphony at Alice Tully Hall in October, 2016. Love Progression: A Personal Essay for oboe and string quartet was premiered in Philadelphia and Boston on March 24 and 26, 2016. Recently composer-in-residence at the Weekend of Chamber Music festival in the Catskills (July, 2016; including performances of five works of chamber music), Weesner has been in residence at the MacDowell Colony, the Wellesley Composers Conference, the Seal Bay Festival, Songfest, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the American Academy in Rome, Civitella Ranieri and Fondation Royaumont. Her music has been recorded on CRI and Albany Records. Upcoming commissions include new works for the Lark Quartet and Todd Palmer, and for Mimi Stillman with Dolce Suono. Further awards include a Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe (which she was unable to accept), a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a Lakond Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and an ASCAP Young Composer's award.

Anna Weesner's music has been described as "animated and full of surprising turns" (New York Times, Oct. 10, 2003), as "a haunting conspiracy" (Philadelphia Inquirer, April 24, 2001) and cited as demonstrating "an ability to make complex textures out of simple devices" (San Francisco Classical Voice, March 27, 2001). John Harbison has written that "none of it proceeds in obvious ways. Her vocabulary is subtle and rather elusive; the effect is paradoxically confident and decisive."

Born in Iowa City, Iowa in 1965, Weesner grew up in New Hampshire. She holds degrees from Yale (B.A.), where her composition teachers included Jonathan Berger and Michael Friedman, and Cornell (D.M.A.), where she studied with Steven Stucky, Roberto Sierra, and Karel Husa. She also studied with John Harbison. As a flutist, she studied with Thomas Nyfenger as well as with Nadine Asin at the Aspen Music Festival. She currently lives in Philadelphia, where she is Robert Weiss Professor and Chair of the Music Department at the University of Pennsylvania.