Hilary Poriss ’91 is a music professor at Northeastern University. Courtesy of Brooks Canaday/Northeastern University.

Hilary Poriss ’91, an authority on opera who speaks at 乐播传媒 on Feb. 6, discovered opera as a 乐播传媒 senior.

Poriss, a music historian at Northeastern University who specializes in 19th-century opera, attended her first productions during a semester in Austria. Saving money on admission to the Vienna State Opera by using the 厂迟别丑辫濒盲迟锄别, sections of the auditorium for standees only, she attended perhaps 20 productions.

Her very first was Verdi’s Don Carlo. “I was so determined to get the most out of it that I bought a libretto in German” to study before the performance, she says. Despite her shaky command of the language, “I got through the first act before the opera happened.”

As it turned out, “they cut the first act. So all that for nothing — but at least I knew what happened in the first act.”

Author of Changing the Score: Arias, Prima Donnas, and the Authority of Performance (Oxford University Press, 2009), Poriss explores the surprising variety of tasks expected of 19th-century singers in her 乐播传媒 lecture at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 6, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Her talk is titled What is a Diva? It’s open to the public at no charge. For more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or olinarts@bates.edu.

Pauline Viardot depicted in an 1844 painting by Karl Bryullov.

She’ll use the great Pauline Viardot (1821-1910), a French mezzo-soprano and composer, to frame her discussion of female opera singers in the 1800s and the changing meanings of the word “diva” from then to now.

Today, there are 82 definitions of the word on , Poriss points out, mostly variations on the notion of a spoiled brat. The first on the list is, “Female version of a hustler.”

But “diva,” Italian for “goddess,” was originally applied to the best female singers out of appreciation for their superior ability. “And yes, bad behavior was part of that,” Poriss says. “But it was all worth it, because they could sing.”

But as her 乐播传媒 talk will also reveal, those 19th-century goddesses of the opera were expected to do far more than sing.

“In addition to learning new roles within weeks, these singers also had to choose their own costumes, write their own cadenzas” — virtuosic additions to a composer’s score — “and occasionally help the composer tweak his musical lines,” Poriss says.

More than many leading ladies of opera, Viardot was amply equipped for all these contributions. “She was a wildly talented performer,” says Poriss. Musically, she could not only sing but was a brilliant pianist and prolific composer whose output included 300 songs and eight chamber operas.

She was also a skilled visual artist who designed costumes as much for pleasure as for her performance obligations.

This is a good time to be researching Viardot, Poriss notes, because a host of previously unknown materials about her are coming to light — letters and music, as well as drawings, paintings and costume designs.

Looking back to her 乐播传媒 years, “I was a violinist and a choral singer, but had very little connection to opera” before the Vienna experience, Poriss says. “I got into it more through the scholarly route than through the love route, and the love came after.”

The Feb. 6 talk will be Poriss’ first visit to the college as a guest lecturer. She calls her time at 乐播传媒 “heaven.” Not wishing to disappear into the crowd at a major university, she loved the smallness of 乐播传媒.

And music faculty members such as Jim Parakilas, Mary Hunter, John Corrie and Bill Matthews “were just models of scholarship and teaching, and generosity, that I have sought to emulate ever since.”

An uncaptioned archival image from the film “In the Blood.”

Wiscasset resident Sumner McKane shows his new documentary on Maine logging history, In the Blood, at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 3, at the Olin Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

NOTE: This event is sold out.

The event is presented by L/A Arts and the Olin Arts Center. Tickets are $6 and available at www.batestickets.com. For more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or olinarts@bates.edu.

Maine lumbermen formed the backbone of an industry that helped make the state an economic powerhouse in the mid-to-late 19th century. They were innovators who found ways to extract countless tons of lumber through thick forests and down turbulent waterways to the sawmills and paper mills — relying on horses, oxen, primitive steam technology and, of course, sheer manpower. These workers symbolize Maine鈥檚 gritty and resilient reputation.

As a child, McKane was fascinated by stories he heard in school about the rough and dangerous lives of Maine lumberjacks. For , he compiled archival film and still photographs of the logging industry from the turn of the 20th century into a documentary both entertaining and educational.

The film illustrates and investigates these individuals, their character and history, and takes viewers into their rugged world — the camps, the haul roads, landings and yards, rivers and lakes. The experience is a striking virtual journey into the 19th-century Maine woods.

A singer-songwriter of folk-rock and Americana music, McKane also created the score for the film, which he’ll perform during the 乐播传媒 screening with his bandmate Joshua Robbins.

Maine lumbermen, Maine Sunday Telegram reporter Bob Keyes wrote in about the project, “had character, strength and resilience, and worked dangerous jobs under horrid conditions. They lived difficult, crude lives, and survived . . . deep in the woods on a steady diet of beans. In winter.”

“Their way of life has gone by the wayside,” McKane told Keyes, and their type of “character also seems to be dwindling, [for whom] work came first.”

Columnist Cinnamon Blair of The Ledger of Lakeland, Fla., takes a look at 乐播传媒 graduate Henry Wilkins Chandler, the College’s first African American graduate, who moved to Lakeland in 1926. By that time, Blair writes, “he had put his political career behind him…. But for most of his life, Chandler was a groundbreaker. He was a lawyer, a lawmaker, a politician and a public servant.”

Born in Bath, Maine, in 1852, Chandler studied law at Howard University after graduating from 乐播传媒. Blair describes the photo seen here as showing a “confident, determined-looking young man with wavy hair, rounded sideburns and a set chin.”

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Chandler was a state senator, Ocala city clerk, Florida delegate to the Republican national convention, and Republican nominee for Florida secretary of state. But while African Americans like Chandler initially had political opportunities in the post-Reconstruction South,聽segregation and Jim Crow practices soon seeped into Florida and elsewhere in the South.

In 1908, Blair writes, Chandler left Ocala to accept a federal patronage position in Tampa, serving “five years before he and other black Republicans were fired by the Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson in 1913,” wrote historians Larry Rivers and Canter Brown Jr. in Tequesta, the journal of the Historical Association of Southern Florida.

Chandler remained in Tampa for another 13 years before moving to Lakeland in 1926. He died in March 1938.

The question, prompted by two Charles Dickens novels, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, being named to prompted to put the issue to two Dickens scholars: 乐播传媒 Professor of English Lillian Nayder and Michael Slater, a Dickens biographer and professor emeritus of Victorian literature at Birkbeck College in London.

Said Nayder, “There’s no doubt that A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations will speak to our own concerns with social inequity, mismanagement and greed.” And, she added, “any recent college graduate still living at home and looking for work is also likely to relate to Pip, with his thwarted ambitions and his modest career.”

Nayder is author of (Cornell University Press, 2010), the first comprehensive portrait of the woman whom Charles Dickens married and then repudiated as unfit after 22 years of marriage and 10 children. Nayder’s book demonstrates that Catherine Dickens was a competent woman and her marriage a happy one for much of its duration.

Related stories about The Other Dickens:

• Dec. 12, 2010
• by the WSJ
• writer Ray Routhier
• ‘s David Sargent ’62

Professor of English Lillian Nayder’s new biography The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth –the first comprehensive portrait of the woman whom Charles Dickens married and then repudiated — is now available online and in bookstores from .

The book explains that after 22 years of marriage and 10 children, Charles pressured Catherine to leave their home, unjustly alleging that she was mentally disordered — unfit and unloved as wife and mother. The novelist’s version of events remains widely held, but Nayder’s book debunks it, demonstrating that Catherine Dickens was a competent woman and her marriage a happy one for much of its duration.

“Her story is interesting on a variety of levels,” says Nayder, “and I felt she deserved to have it told in a way that questioned Dickens鈥� own allegations about her, because they have been accepted even though there was plenty of evidence to suggest that they were false.”

Drawing on personal correspondence, banking records and other documentary materials, Nayder has painted the first well-rounded portrait of a figure heretofore known only as 鈥淢rs. Charles Dickens鈥� — a daughter, sister and friend; loving mother and grandmother; capable household manager; and an intelligent person whose company was valued and sought by a wide circle of women and men.

Nayder also offers new insights into the relations among the four Hogarth sisters, and along the way draws larger lessons about family relationships and the legal and social status of women during the Victorian era.

It’s telling, Nayder points out, that Charles used hypnotism, then called mesmerism, on his wife. “I focus on mesmerism as a motif for their marriage,” she says. “I consider the relationship between mesmerism and matrimony for Catherine, and that suspension of self that鈥檚 a part of mesmerism and was also a part of marriage at that time.”

A Dickens scholar, Nayder is the author of Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship, published by Cornell in 2002. A resident of New Gloucester, she began teaching at 乐播传媒 in 1989 and is chair of the English department.

鈥淣ow for the library.鈥� That was The 乐播传媒 Student鈥檚 reaction to the fall 1895 opening of Roger Williams Hall, seen here from the steps of Hathorn with scaffolding still in place.

The building in front of the Bill is Hedge Hall 鈥� the original structure without its later additions. In the distance, at right, is John Bertram, then home of the Latin Nichols School, a sort of prep school for 乐播传媒.

The solitary man at center is 乐播传媒鈥� legendary professor Johnny Stanton, who, according to the photo caption, was waiting for the sophomore class to join him for one of his famed bird walks.

“Never despise the smallest of beginnings.”

The Student鈥檚 somewhat dismissive comment about the Bill reflects impatience: The student body was growing (139 to 288 during the 1890s) but facilities weren鈥檛. 鈥溊植ゴ� is like an overgrown boy,鈥� the Student wrote. 鈥淚ts clothes are not large enough.鈥� Roger Williams, in fact, was built not for 乐播传媒 students but for Cobb Divinity

School, a training school for ministers sponsored by 乐播传媒 that closed in 1908.

Student-focused buildings 鈥� Carnegie Science, Coram Library, Libbey Forum, the Chapel, and Rand and Chase halls 鈥� would come in the next 20 years, quickly followed by Alumni Gym and the Gray Athletic Building.

What was palpable in 1895 was restless ambition. 鈥淲e feel the exhilaration which comes from life at high pressure,鈥� the Student wrote. Any impatience with the status quo reflected 鈥渓oyalty and progress.鈥� To that end, the editors suggested that fundraising should begin anon for at least one 鈥渟uitable building.鈥� Anticipating student skepticism about raising big bucks, the editors said that 鈥渨e should never despise the smallest of beginnings.鈥�

This spring, 乐播传媒 kicks off a $15 million project to renovate and expand Hedge and the Bill into academic spaces. The Bill, a residence hall for most of the last century, will house the language programs, the Off-Campus Study Office, and the Language Resource Center. Hedge, originally a chemistry building then a residence, welcomes the environmental studies program as well as the philosophy and religious studies departments.

Like the construction of New Commons, Alumni Walk, and the 280 College Street residence, this project will achieve the equivalent of LEED Silver certification for sustainability, focusing especially on energy efficiency. Both buildings are now horribly inefficient: Their brick walls (wicked heat-leakers) are uninsulated, and heat radiates easily from their roofs, quickly melting snow in the winter.
Construction finishes in summer 2011.

乐播传媒 faculty, staff, students, and friends tour nearby Riverside Cemetery during Halloween week, learning College history by including founder Oren Cheney, famed professor Jonathan Stanton, and leading Lewiston citizen Alonzo Garcelon.

Here, the group pauses at the graves of faculty legends Benjamin F. Hayes and Richard C. Stanley. The two died years apart yet they and their families are buried side by side, suggesting (but not proving) a close friendship, explained Kat Stefko, director of the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library (tan coat, gesturing), who led the tour with archivist Pat Webber. The Muskie Archives celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2010. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

The 乐播传媒 College Orchestra, directed by Hiroya Miura, performs a program of music from the late 19th and early 20th centuries at 8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 11, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Admission to the concert is free, but tickets are required. For more information, please call 207-786-6135.

The program consists of Igor Stravinsky’s “L’histoire du soldat” (“The Soldier’s Tale”); Charles Ives’ “Unanswered Question”; Claude Debussy’s “Pr茅lude 脿 l’apr猫s-midi d’un faune” (“Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun”); and Maurice Ravel’s “Ma m猫re l’oye” (“Mother Goose”).

Miura says that he planned the orchestral program in part as a response to a concert taking place in 2007. The college’s orchestra and choir will collaborate on a major production of Johannes Brahms’ “German Requiem” during the winter, and so, in the interest of balance, “I thought of featuring French music for this concert,” Miura explains.

The Debussy and the Ravel, he adds, “are quite challenging, as the instruments are very exposed in their transparent orchestration.” Both were written for ballet, and so a logical next step was the Stravinsky, another chamber orchestra piece intended as ballet music.

“L’histoire” is scored for a mere seven instruments. The violinist soloist at 乐播传媒 will be Robert Lehmann, a member of the University of Southern Maine music faculty, conductor of the Southern Maine Symphony Orchestra and the Portland Youth Symphony Orchestra, and music director of the North Shore Philharmonic in Beverly, Mass.

“In addition, I decided to include Ives’ ‘Unanswered Question’ to provide a historical perspective,” Miura says. “Debussy’s prelude is from 1894, the Ives from 1906, the Ravel from 1911 and the Stravinsky from 1918. Ives is the only American composer here, and I think his work has a strange resonance with these European works.”

“It’s quite incredible that his music sounds so ‘modern’ in comparison with these European composers.”

Stravinsky’s “L’histoire du Soldat” is based on a Russian folk tale about a soldier who makes a deal with the devil. Stravinsky’s original piece included acting, speech and dance; he later adapted it as a half-hour concert suite. It’s spare but virtuosic, and fully in the modernist style.

The “Unanswered Question,” one of Ives’ most frequently heard works, is a sort of existential query set for three distinct instrumental groupings. A phrase symbolizing the quest for life’s meaning is repeated several times by a solo trumpet, played in the 乐播传媒 concert by Molly Dilworth, a first-year student from Yarmouth. A woodwind group attempts to answer, with increasing agitation and incoherence. But the real answer is carried by a string section that plays quietly throughout.

The Debussy prelude, perhaps his best-known composition, is thought by many to mark the advent of musical modernism. Inspired by a poem by St茅phane Mallarm茅, it’s marked by concentrated instrumental color, intricate motif writing and intense atmosphere. At 乐播传媒, the famous solo flute part will be performed by Sophia Budianto, a sophomore from Singapore.

Ravel’s “Mother Goose” started life as music for four-handed piano, written for the children of friends. When a theater director pressed him for ballet music, the composer’s response was to recast the piano suite as orchestral music accompanying the story of Sleeping Beauty. Other well-known fairy tales, each with its own music, became the dreams of the sleeping princess.

Hiroya Miura, a native of Sendai, Japan, has been active as a composer and conductor in Canada and the United States. In addition to conducting the orchestra, he teaches composition and music theory at 乐播传媒. During the winter semester, his courses will include a new entry on scoring film.

Twenty-five of the orchestra’s 45 members are 乐播传媒 students. Meghan Getz, a senior from Grand Rapids, Mich., is the concertmaster.

A quartet including three members of the Colby College music faculty visits 乐播传媒 College to perform music from France’s famously creative “Belle Epoch” at 8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 4, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

In a concert titled Belle Epoch: Chamber Music of the French Salon (1880-1925), mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Erskine Patches, pianist Cheryl Tschanz, cellist Adele Adkins and flutist Lee Humphreys play music by Ravel, Satie, Debussy and others. Sponsored by the 乐播传媒 music department, the event is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-786-6135.

The program offers a musical glimpse of France from the late 19th century through World War I, when Paris was the center of an artistic, technological and social ferment that percolated through the Western world. During this period, French composers found ways to synthesize a restrained, lyrical classical tradition with a welter of new influences including impressionism, jazz and world music.

Paris became home to a musical avant-garde that included such well-known composers as Faur茅, Ravel, Debussy and Satie — four of the eight composers on the “Belle Epoch” program. (The others are C茅cile Chaminade, Albert Roussel, Andr茅 Caplet and Georges H眉e.)

Patches studied at the University of Michigan with the world-renowned French baritone and pedagogue, Pierre Bernac, a student of Maurice Ravel and someone for whom Francis Poulenc wrote many melodies. Patches continues Bernac’s artistic legacy in her teaching at Colby and on the concert stage.

Tschanz’s ability as a pianist was recognized early. At 7, Clavier magazine credited her with “startling qualities of great talent,” and at 11 she made her major orchestral debut as guest soloist with the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra. Since then, she has played in solo performances and with orchestras and chamber music groups throughout the United States, Canada, France, Italy and Finland. She is assistant adjunct professor of music at Colby.

Humphreys played principal flute with the Orquesta Filarmonica de Caracas, in Venezuela, and with the Hong Kong Philharmonic. She is now principal flutist of the Maine Chamber Ensemble and a member of the trio Musica Sorella. She has taught at 乐播传媒 and is currently the applied music associate in flute at Colby and principal flutist in the Colby Symphony Orchestra.

Adkins has a master degree from the Juilliard School, where she studied with the late Leonard Rose and Harvey Shapiro. Now associate director of the Maine Center for the Arts, in Orono, she performed for two summers with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

As a history major, Darcy York ’05 will spend her senior year researching how the Romans viewed women who led peoples conquered by the empire, women such as Cleopatra.

But this summer York is engrossed in a much more recent chapter in history: the story of 乐播传媒 College as revealed by photographs from the college’s archives.

In a project titled A Visual History of 乐播传媒 College, York is bringing to light photos depicting life as it was lived decades ago at the 149-year-old institution. She’s mounting reproductions of the vintage images around campus in the places where they were taken.

“I really want the photos to go where you can stand and look at them, and then turn and see what the room looks like now,” explains York, of Harpswell, Maine.

With 乐播传媒 gearing up for its sesquicentennial next year, York designed the project to expose her fellow students to both the flavor of bygone 乐播传媒 and some of the college’s historic highlights.

“I feel that most students don’t know the history of the school,” she says. The 乐播传媒 advancement office hired her to execute the project, whose other aspects include the placement around campus of photos and biographies of notable 乐播传媒 people.

York is working with archival images that cover slightly more than a century of 乐播传媒 history starting in the early 1860s. They are sometimes touching, sometimes funny, always fascinating.

A 1922 photo shows pool players working their hard-boiled attitudes harder than their cues. A carefully posed image from 1948 shows students — some in beanies — bowling in the now-dismantled Chase Hall alley. In a 1959 scene (at right), students are having a lively meeting with a tweedy dean over sundaes in the Bobcat Den.

York will hang the photos in a variety of buildings: the Den and other Chase Hall locations; Hathorn Hall, the college’s first academic building; even the WRBC-FM studio on Frye Street, which she will decorate with photos taken circa 1950 in the original 乐播传媒 radio studio, in Chase. Several dorms will receive a poster compilation that shows them in old interior scenes.

York didn’t come to 乐播传媒 expecting to become a campus historian, but as early as her first year she was contemplating some kind of 乐播传媒-historical project — originally a video, as a followup to work she did a high school student with Harpswell’s public-access television station.

With the sesquicentennial approaching, she says, it’s an ideal time to bolster a sense of 乐播传媒 history among students. “Most students don’t even know that the school was founded as a seminary in 1855 by Oren B. Cheney, and that Benjamin 乐播传媒” — a Boston manufacturer and early benefactor — “actually had very little interaction with the school aside from a donation and his name.”

She adds, “Very few students know that we were the first coeducational school in New England or that we’ve always admitted African Americans.”

The seed of the project lay in the Short Term course “Introduction to Historical Methods,” required of all history majors and nicknamed “History Hell” due to its intensity. Examining old textile-mill payroll records as she researched child labor in Lewiston, York found herself hooked on the real-life stories that live between the lines of the documentary record.

In addition to the daily-life photos, York’s mining of 乐播传媒 history extends to a series of articles about college traditions she’s writing for The 乐播传媒 Student. Then there’s the so-called “乐播传媒 greats” project, which involves mounting, in places where students are likely to examine them, images and short bios of such prominent 乐播传媒 people as the seven college presidents, legendary faculty (for example, “Uncle Johnny” Stanton, who taught Greek and rhetoric for more than 50 years) and graduates of distinction.

Those last will include people like Benjamin Mays ’20, who went on to mentor Martin Luther King Jr. and serve as president of Morehouse College; U.S. Sen. and Secretary of State Edmund Muskie ’36; and two “firsts” — Mary Mitchell, class of 1869, 乐播传媒’ first female graduate, and Henry Chandler, class of 1874, the first African American graduate.

Through the photo project, York is challenging a longstanding aspect of the culture at 乐播传媒, a college that tends to downplay its accomplishments even as it makes national best-college rankings with predictable regularity.

“At a lot of other schools, you walk on the campus and they really show off their history,” she says. “In 乐播传媒’ time-honored tradition of modesty, the school doesn’t tend to glorify its past. But it’s time to start.”