Symphonic Aspirations

by Karen Painter

Karen Painter lives with her husband Richard, a law professor, and their children Elizabeth, William, and Anne, in Edina, Minnesota. Painter is Associate Professor in the School of Music at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where she also teaches in the History Department, Jewish Studies, and the Department of German, Scandinavian, and Dutch. She was previously a professor in the music departments at Harvard University (1997-2007) and Dartmouth College (1995-1997).  In 2005-2006, Painter was on leave from Harvard to serve as Director of the Office of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts, overseeing a major study of classical music on public radio.

 

 

Raised in California, Painter was introduced to Germany at a young age, during her parents’ residence in Munich. She studied music and philosophy at Yale University and received her training in musicology at Columbia University (PhD, 1996). She lived in Berlin in 1999-2000 as recipient of a Humboldt Research Fellowship from the German government and a Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin.

 

In her publications, Painter has examined the relationship between music, listening, and

ideology in the context of nineteenth-century Austrian and German social history,

fin-de-siècle cultural debates, World War I, Austro-German socialism, and Nazism. Her

research interests include Mozart, Schubert, Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler, Schoenberg,

Richard Strauss, Hindemith and Orff.

 

Painter has remained committed to providing a public stage for musicology. She co-directed symposia with the Boston Symphony Orchestra (2003, 2005) and within the Ojai Music

Festival (2001-2003), from which resulted her Late Thoughts: Reflections on Artists and Composers at Work (Getty Research Institute, 2006), co-edited with the art historian

Thomas Crow. Her Mahler and His World (Princeton University Press, 2002) appeared in a series associated with the Bard Music Festival. Painter has moderated panels with Pierre

Boulez, Kurt Masur, Elliott Carter, and Christopher Hogwood, and organized the American participation in several German and Austrian conferences. In Salzburg, Painter collaborated

with Thomas Hampson and the Mozarteum to organize a symposium on the European

musical encounter with American poetry. Painter has lectured before numerous performance venues, including the Salzburg Festival, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Orange Country

Performing Arts Center, Great Performers at Lincoln Center. She has written program notes

for Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall and contributed to several newspapers in the United

States and Germany.

 

Photo by Jen Frantz