Arnold Berleant
SUMMER 2023
Produced by Witherle Memorial Library with support from Castine Arts Association and initial funding from the Maine Community Foundation.
Publications and compositions are the property of Dr. Berleant unless otherwise specified, and may not be used without permission. All rights reserved.
Project developed by Rich Hewitt with help from Kathryn Dillon and Alicia Anstead. Signatures website designed by Michelle Keyo. © Witherle Memorial Library 2023.
Please click on a book cover for summaries and to order a copy through the state library network.
Aesthetics and Environment: Variations on a Theme
Farnham, UK & Burlington, VT: Ashgate, Publishing Ltd, 2005
To the extent that Berleant’s model of engagement reminds us that there is an alternative mode of being, that life is better and that we are better when we are actively attentive to and involved in our immediate surroundings, I think it a very fruitful and important set of reflections on what we might call our widespread failure to take aesthetic responsibility for our lives. The cure Berleant provides for what ails us is, I think, most evident not in the theory itself, but rather, in the patient and loving way Berleant models for us what it is like to be engaged in the variegated host of environs through which we move in our daily lives.
EASA Conroy 2006
CONTENTS
I. ENVIRONMENTAL AESTHETICS
1. A Phenomenological Aesthetics of Environment
2. Aesthetic Dimensions of Environmental Design
3. Down the Garden Path
4. The Wilderness City: A Study of Metaphorical Experience
5. The Fluid Environment
6. The World from the Water
7. Is There Life in Virtual Space?
8. Is Greasy Lake a Place?
9. Embodied Music
II. SOCIAL AESTHETICS
10. The Idea of a Cultural Aesthetic
11. The Social Evaluation of Art
12. Subsidization of Art as Social Policy
13. Morality and the Artist: Toward an Ethics of Art
14. Getting Along Beautifully: Ideas for a Social Aesthetics
This enticing set of essays testifies to Berleant’s special talent in moving easily between both natural and human environments and opens out the contemporary discussion beyond that of the wilderness to the cultural and social environment. Berleant argues that neither the natural nor the human environment stands alone and both are best understood as distinctions that are coextensive in experience, that one can only speak of environment in relation to human experience. The theme of this book is that such experience suffuses the so-called natural world and shapes the human world. he maintains the idea that in as much as people are embedded in these worlds, relationships, including human relationships, are part of them. The melding of these two worlds leads Berleant to defend ultimately what he has termed ‘social aesthetics.’
Aesthetics Beyond the Arts:
New and Recent Essays
Farnham, UK & Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012.
The scope of his engagement model determines Berleant’s conclusions throughout these essays, as Kantian disinterestedness is dismissed in favour of active appreciation, and the subject–object dualities that shape appreciation are reframed as continuity ‘in an interpenetration of body and place’ (52). The fact that many of the essays—there are eighteen in total—come in under ten pages means that Berleant is able to demonstrate just how wide-ranging his ‘aesthetics beyond the arts’ can be, as he takes in gardens, cities, roadways, forests, and a few of the traditional arts.
Jessica J. Lee. “Book Review: Aesthetics Beyond the Arts: New and Recent Essays.” The British Journal of Aesthetics, Advance Access, October 2013.
I. The Arts as Experience
1 Judging Architecture
2 What Titles Don’t Tell
3 What Music Isn’t
II. Environmental Aesthetics
4 Art, Nature, and Environment
5 The Re-shaping of Experience
6 Two Ways in the Landscape
7 The Art in Knowing a Landscape
8 Reconsidering Scenic Beauty
9 Forestry Aesthetics
10 Distant Cities
11 Ideas for an Ecological Aesthetics
12 Nature and Habitation in a Chinese Garden
III. Implications
13 Aesthetics without Purpose
14 The Legacy of Dewey’s Aesthetics
15 Evolutionary Naturalism and the
Abandonment of Dualism
16 The Aesthetic Politics of Environment
17 The Changing Meaning of Landscape
18 Beauty and the Way of Modern Life
Taking the view that aesthetics is a study grounded in perception, the essays in this volume exhibit many sides of the perceptual complex that is the aesthetic field and develop them in different ways. They reinvigorate our understanding of such arts as music and architecture; they range across the natural landscape to the urban one; they reassess the place of beauty in the modern environment and reassess the significance of the contributions to aesthetic theory of Kant and Dewey; and they broach the kinds of meanings and larger understanding that aesthetic engagement with the human environment can offer. Written over the past decade, these original and innovative essays lead to a fresh encounter with the possibilities of aesthetic experience, one which has constantly evolved, moving in recent years in the direction of what Berleant terms 'social aesthetics', which enhances human-environmental integration and sociality.
Art and Engagement
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.
CONTENTS
PART ONE: AESTHETICS AND EXPERIENCE
1. Experience and Theory in Aesthetics
2. The Unity of Aesthetic Experience
PART TWO: ENGAGEMENT AND THE ARTS
3. The Viewer in the Landscape
4. Architecture as Environmental Design
5. The Reader's Word
6. Musical Generation
7. Dance as Performance
PART THREE: ART AND REALITY
8. Film and Other Realities of Art - I
9. Film and Other Realities of Art - II
10. Conclusion: The End of Aesthetics
A bold alternative to the eighteenth-century aesthetic of disinterestedness, aesthetic engagement makes the appreciative experience of both the traditional and contemporary arts more intelligible. After considering the historical and theoretical underpinnings of the idea of engagement, successive chapters demonstrate its importance in landscape painting, architecture and environmental design, literature, music, dance, and film. Emerging from these original studies of the arts is the recognition that the different arts involve experiences that possess their own claim to reality.
Arnold Berleant, Editor
Environment and the Arts:
Perspectives on Art and Environment
Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002.
CONTENTS
Introduction: Arnold Berleant, "Art, Environment, and the Shape of Experience"
Ronald Hepburn, "Data and Theory in Aesthetics"
Yrjö Sepänmaa, "The Two Aesthetic Cultures: The Great Analogy of Art and the Environment"
Arto Haapala, "Art and Nature"
Allen Carlson,"Nature Appreciation and the Question of Aesthetic Relevance"
Kaia Lehari, "Embodied Metaphor"
Kevin Melchionne, "Walking"
Pauline von Bonsdorff, "Urban Richness and the Art of Building"
CONTENTS, continued
Kevin Melchionne, "Front Yards"
Emily Brady, "Aesthetics, Ethics and the Natural Environment"
Holmes Rolston, III, "From Beauty to Duty: Aesthetics of Nature and Environmental Ethics"
Arnold Berleant, "Embodied Music"
Cheryl Foster, "Jane Austen and the Appreciation of Landscape"
Barbara Sandrisser, "Dot.com Dot.edu: Technology and Environmental Aesthetics in Japan"
Yuriko Saito, "Environmental Directions for Aesthetics and the Arts"
The environment raises basic questions about many of the fundamental concepts and doctrines in aesthetics and the arts. Including new work by the leading international contributors to environmental aesthetics, this is the first book to deal with the relations between the arts and environment, directed towards a non-philosophical audience of practitioners and critics, as well as theorists. Introducing many of the basic ideas and issues in the theory of the arts, particularly as they bear on environment, this book addresses the special concerns of an aesthetics of environment and explores the implications of environmental aesthetics for understanding both aesthetic theory and the aesthetic of individual arts. Environment and the Arts provides an introduction to some of the most intriguing and compelling questions about understanding and appreciating the arts and environment, setting a mark for the filed and opening the topics to a wider audience.
Living in the Landscape:
Towards an Aesthetics of Environment
Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1997
CONTENTS
1. Aesthetics and Environment
2. An Emerging Aesthetics of Environment
3. Deconstructing Disney World
4. The Human Touch and the Beauty of Nature
5. Aesthetic Function
6. Environment and the Body
7. Architecture and the Aesthetics of Continuity
8. Education as Aesthetic
9. Aesthetics and Community
10. Reflections on a Reflection: Some Thoughts on Environmental Creativity
11. Sacred Environments
Living in the Landscape develops an aesthetic critique of environment in both concrete and theoretical directions. It provides an introduction to environmental aesthetics, identifying the kinds of experience, meanings, and values it involves, and describing its historical sources and the areas and issues with which it is concerned. The book develops an extended critical analysis of Disney World and elaborates a theoretical basis for the negative aesthetic criticism of environment. Living in the Landscape extends the scope of environmental values to include aesthetic education, body and environment, the aesthetics of community, environmental creativity, and sacred aesthetic environments. Underlying these discussions is the idea of environmental continuity, through which the book explores the forms of environmental interconnections from the body to architecture, place, the educational process, and community.
Arnold Berleant and Yuriko Saito, Editors
Perspectives on Contemporary Aesthetics
RISD Shortrun Publications, 2016.
The modular structure of the book is based on the QR code which also appears throughout for ready access to the original publication. Readers can connect with the webpages from the site as well as images sourced from creative commons by simply scanning the QR codes on the book. This set up a connection between the physical book and the complete digital archive.
Scarlett Xin Meng and Nancy Skolos, The Society of Typographic Arts
A 2015 RISD Shortruns Publication, Perspectives on Contemporary Aesthetics is a collection of 17 articles that were published in the first 10 volumes (2003-2012) of Contemporary Aesthetics, a free-access, online and peer-reviewed academic journal. Its content was edited by the journal’s Editor, Arnold Berleant (Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Long Island University) and Associate Editor, Yuriko Saito (Professor of Philosophy, RISD). The book was designed by Nancy Skolos (Dean of Architecture and Design, RISD) and Scarlett Xin Meng (graduate student in Graphic Design, RISD). True to its subject matter, the book itself is an object of aesthetic appreciation.
CONTENTS
I Issues in Contemporary Art Theory
Arthur C. Danto, "Ontology, Criticism, and the Riddle of Art Versus Non-Art in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace" (Vol. 6, 2008)
Aaron Smuts, “Are Video Games Art?” (Vol. 3, 2005)
Larry Shiner, “Architecture vs. Art: The Aesthetics of Art Museum Design” (Vol. 5, 2007)
Silvia Casini, The Aesthetics of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI): from the Scientific Laboratory to an Artwork” (Vol. 8, 2010)
Jonathan Owen Clark & João Lima Duque, "Politics and Aesthetics: Partitions and Partitioning in Contemporary Art" (Vol. 12, 2014)
II Arts without Borders
Ken-ichi Sasaki, "A Silent Rhetoric: The Mechanism of Propaganda as Persuasion" (Vol. 6, 2008)
Eva Kit Wah Man, “Influence of Global Aesthetics on Chinese Aesthetics: The Adaptation of Moxie and the Case of Dafen Cun” (Vol. 11, 2013)
Falguni A. Sheth, "The Hijab and the Sari: The Strange and the Sexy between Colonialism and Global Capitalism" (Aesthetics and Race: New Philosophical Perspectives, Special Volume 2, 2009)
Patrick D. Flores, "Everyday, Elsewhere: Allegory in Philippine Art" (Aesthetics and the Arts in Southeast Asia, Special Volume 3, 2011)
Riva Berleant, "Paleolithic Flints: Is an Aesthetics of Stone Tools Possible?" (Vol. 5, 2007)
CONTENTS, continued
III Aesthetics without Borders
Katya Mandoki, “The Third Tear in Everyday Aesthetics” (Vol. 8, 2010)
Mădălina Diaconu, “Reflections on an Aesthetics of Touch, Smell and Taste” (Vol. 4, 2006)
Heinz Paetzold, “The Aesthetics of City Strolling” (Vol. 11, 2013)
Nathalie Blanc, “Cockroaches, or Worlds as Images” (Vol. 5, 2007)
Wolfgang Welsch, “Reflecting the Pacific” (Vol. 1, 2003)
Robert Frodeman, “Geoaesthetics: New Orleans, Landscape, and Eros” (Vol.5, 2007)
Emily Brady and Arto Haapala, “Melancholy as an Aesthetic Emotion” (Vol. 1, 2003)
Pauliina Rautio, “Hanging Laundry: The Place of Beauty in Managing Everyday Life” (Vol. 7, 2009)
Re-Thinking Aesthetics: Rogue Essays on Aesthetics and the Arts
Farnham, UK & Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004
Berleant's theory of what he calls 'the aesthetic field' incorporates more elements of the artistic process than just the artist, the artworld, and the art object. Specifically, it includes creative, objective, appreciative, and performative factors. Thus, for example, he holds that the art object incorporates within itself signs of the history of its creation. Berleant also stresses the aesthetic experience both of the artist and the audience. On his view, art is designed to be experienced, and in an active way. All art must be re-made, either by a performer, or by an actively engaged audience, to be appropriately experienced.
Tom Leddy Philosophy in Review, Vol. 26, no. 3, June 2006, pp. 155-7.
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction: Art and the Future of Aesthetics
I. THE FOCUS OF AESTHETICS
1. Re-thinking Aesthetics
2. The Historicity of Aesthetics
3. Beyond Disinterestedness
4. Aesthetics and the Contemporary Arts
II. ICONOCLASTIC IMPLICATIONS
5. The Sensuous and the Sensual in Aesthetics
6. Aesthetic Embodiment
7. Intuition in Art, or Pygmalion Revisited
8. Art without Object
9. The Art of the Unseen
III. RE-THINKING THE ARTS
10. Death in Image, Word, and Idea
11. Brancusi and the Phenomenology of Sculptural Space
12. The Verbal Presence: An Aesthetics of Literary Performance
13. The Intuitive Impulse in Literary Performance
14. A Phenomenology of Musical Performance
The essays, collected by Berleant in this volume all express the impulse to reject the received wisdom of modern aesthetics: that art demands a mode of experience sharply different from others and unique to the aesthetic situation, and that the identity of the aesthetic lies in keeping it distinct from other kinds of human experience, such as the moral, the practical, and the social. Berleant shows, on the contrary, that the value, the insight, the force of art and the aesthetic are all enhanced and enlarged by recognizing their social and human role, and that this recognition contributes both to the significance of art and to its humanizing influence on what we like to call civilization.
Sensibility and Sense:
The Aesthetic Transformation of the Human World
Exeter, England.: Imprint Academic, 2010. St. Andrews Studies in Philosophy and Public Affairs 6.
Historically, one of Berleant's most crucial contributions has been his expansion of the scope of aesthetics. Most important is the attention he has drawn to the experience of landscape and other kinds of environments, whether natural or built, and his probing of ways to open up our philosophical understanding of the "aesthetic" so as to enable us to accommodate the challenges landscape and environment pose to earlier thinking about aesthetic "objects."
Mara Miller. Philosophical Reviews. University of Notre Dame. 2011.09.06.
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
PART ONE: GROUNDING THE WORLD
1 Beginning
2 Understanding the Aesthetic
3 The Aesthetic Argument
4 The World as Experienced
PART TWO: AESTHETICS AND THE HUMAN WORLD
5 Rose by Any Other Name
6 he Soft Side of Stone
7 An Aesthetics of Urbanism
8 Celestial Aesthetics
PART THREE: SOCIAL AESTHETICS
9 The Negative Aesthetics of Everyday Life
10 Art, Terrorism and the Negative Sublime
11 Perceptual Politics
12 The Aesthetics of Politics
Aesthetic sensibility rests on perceptual experience and characterizes not only our experience of the arts but our experience of the world. Sensibility and Sense offers a philosophically comprehensive account of humans' social and cultural embeddedness encountered, recognized, and fulfilled as an aesthetic mode of experience. Extending the range of aesthetic experience from the stone of the earth’s surface to the celestial sphere, the book focuses on the aesthetic as a dimension of social experience. The guiding idea of pervasive interconnectedness, both social and environmental, leads to an aesthetic critique of the urban environment, the environment of daily life, and of terrorism, and has profound implications for grounding social and political values. The aesthetic emerges as a powerful critical tool for appraising urban culture and political practice.
The Aesthetic Field: A Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience
(Springfield, Ill.: C. C. Thomas 1970). Second edition, with a new Preface (Cybereditions: 2001)
CONTENTS
I. Aesthetic Theory as a Cognitive Discipline
II. Surrogate Theories of Art
III. The Aesthetic Field
IV. Aesthetic Experience
V. Art Criticism and Aesthetic Value
VI. Toward an Empirical Aesthetics
The Aesthetic Field develops an account of aesthetic experience that distinguishes four mutually interacting factors: the creative factor represented primarily by the artist; the appreciative one by the viewer, listener, or reader; the objective factor by the art object, which is the focus of the experience; and the performative by the activator of the aesthetic occurrence. Each of these factors both affects all the others and is in turn influenced by them, so none can be adequately considered apart from them. Although the factors are theoretically distinguishable, they are experienced as a unity. It is important, therefore, not to confound the theoretical explanation of aesthetic experience with the experience, itself. The aesthetic field has important implications for understanding the various individual arts, new developments in the arts, and the critical appraisal of the arts. Moreover, the concept transforms traditional issues in aesthetics.
The Aesthetics of Environment
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992.
CONTENTS
1. Environment as a Challenge to Aesthetics
2. The Aesthetic Sense of Environment
3. Descriptive Aesthetics
4. Scenes from a Connecticut Landscape: Four Studies in Descriptive Aesthetics
5. Aesthetic Paradigms for an Urban Ecology
6. Cultivating an Urban Aesthetic
7. Designing Outer Space
8. The Museum of Art as a Participatory Environment
9. Environmental Criticism
10. Environment as an Aesthetic Paradigm
11. The Aesthetics of Art and Nature
12. Reclaiming the American Landscape
Environmental aesthetics is an emerging discipline that explores the meaning and influence of environmental perception and experience on human life. Arguing for the idea that environment is not merely a setting for people but is fully integrated and continuous with us, The Aesthetics of Environment explores the aesthetic dimensions of the human-environmental continuum in both theoretical terms and concrete situations. From outer space to the museum, from architecture to landscape, from city to countryside to wilderness, this book discovers in the aesthetic perception of environment the reciprocity that constitutes both person and place.
Arnold Berleant and Allen Carlson, Editors
The Aesthetics of Natural Environments
Broadview Press: Calgary Alberta Canada, 2007.
CONTENTS
Introduction: The Aesthetics of Nature, Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant
Ronald Hepburn, “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty”
Allen Carlson, “Appreciation and the Natural Environment”
Arnold Berleant, “The Aesthetics of Art and Nature”
Noël Carroll, “On Being Moved by Nature: Between Religion and Natural History”
Stan Godlovitch, ”Icebreakers: Environmentalism and Natural Aesthetics”
Ronald Hepburn, “Landscape and the Metaphysical Imagination”
Yuriko Saito “Appreciating Nature on its Own Terms”
Emily Brady, “Imagination and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature”
CONTENTS continued
Marcia Muelder Eaton, “Fact and Fiction in Environmental Aesthetics”
Holmes Rolston III “The Aesthetic Experience of Forests”
Cheryl Foster, “The Narrative and the Ambient in Environmental Aesthetics”
Ron Moore, “Appreciating Natural Beauty as Natural”
John Andrew Fisher, “What the Hills are Alive With: The Sounds of Nature”
Donald Crawford, “Scenery and the Aesthetics of Nature”
Thomas Heyd, “Aesthetic Appreciation and the Many Stories about Nature”
Yrjö Sepänma, “Environmental Stories: Speaking and Writing Nature”
Some of the main ideas and lines of thought on the aesthetics of the natural world that have developed during the past several decades. The papers address matters such as our understanding of the natural world and the modes of aesthetic appreciation appropriate for it. The essays gathered in this collection present some of the main ideas and lines of thought on the aesthetics of nature that have developed during the past several decades. They give a clear and broad picture of the present state of discussion on philosophical issues about the aesthetics of the natural world. The papers address matters such as our understanding of the natural world and the modes of aesthetic appreciation appropriate for it.
Arnold Berleant and Allen Carlson, Editors
The Aesthetics of Human Environments
Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2007
CONTENTS
Introduction: Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant, “The Aesthetics of Human Environments”
Allen Carlson, “On Aesthetically Appreciating Human Environments”
Pauline von Bonsdorff, “Urban Richness and the Art of Building”
Arnold Berleant, “Cultivating an Urban Aesthetic”
Yrjö Sepänma, “Multi-sensoriness and the City”
David Macauley, “Walking in the City”
Mikita Brottman, “The Last Stop of Desire: The Aesthetics of Shopping”
Arnold Berleant, “Deconstructing Disney World”
Barbara Sandrisser, Cultivating Commonplaces: Sophisticated Vernacularism in Japan”
Thomas Leddy, “Everyday Surface Aesthetic Qualities: Neat, Messy, Clean, Dirty”
CONTENTS continued
Kevin Melchionne, Living in Glass Houses: Domesticity, Interior Decoration, and Environmental Aesthetics”
Janet McCracken, “The Aesthetics of Playtime Recycling”
Yuriko Saito, “The Role of Aesthetics in Civic Environmentalism”
Sally Schauman, “The Garden and the Red Barn: The Pervasive Pastoral and Its Environmental Consequences”
Allen Carlson, “On Appreciating Agricultural Landscapes”
Stephanie Ross, “Gardens, Nature, Pleasure”
Malcolm Andrews, “The View from the Road and the Picturesque”
The Aesthetics of Human Environments is a companion volume to Carlson's and Berleant's The Aesthetics of Natural Environments. Whereas the earlier collection focused on the aesthetic appreciation of nature, The Aesthetics of Human Environments investigates philosophical and aesthetics issues that arise from our engagement with human environments ranging from rural landscapes to urban cityscapes. Our experience of public spaces such as shopping centers, theme parks, and gardens as well as the impact of our personal living spaces on the routine activities of our everyday life are discussed in terms of their aesthetic value and the nature of our aesthetic appreciation.
The Social Aesthetics of Human Environments: Critical Themes
Bloomsbury Publishing, September 2023.
Part I. Wherefore Aesthetics?
1. Questioning Aesthetics
2. Transformations in Aesthetics
Part II. The Complicit Participant
3. Objects into Persons
4. Duchampian Reflections on Descartes
Part III. Environment as Cultural
5. The Cultural Aesthetics of Environment
6. Some Questions for Ecological Aesthetics
Part IV. Aesthetic Exploitation
7. The Critical Aesthetics of Disney World
8. The Subversion of Beauty
Part V. Negative Aesthetics
9. The Aesthetics of Terrorism
10. Reflections on the Aesthetics of Violence
Part VI. Aesthetics as Cultural Critique
11. The Sublime Troubles of Postmodernism
Part VII. Aesthetic Community
12. Getting Along Beautifully: Ideas for a Social Aesthetics
13. Aesthetics and Community
Across these essays Arnold Berleant demonstrates how aesthetic values and theory can be used to reappraise our social practices. He tackles issues within the built environment, everyday life, and politics, breaking down the dichotomy between the natural and the human. His work represents a fresh approach to traditional philosophical questions in not only ethics, but in metaphysics, truth, meaning, psychology, phenomenology, and social and moral philosophy. By critically examining the field in this way and casting new light on social understanding and practice, this collection makes a substantive contribution in identifying and clarifying central human issues, guided by an understanding of aesthetic engagement as a powerful tool for social critique.
Bagaduce Chamber Players
In 1999, Dr. Berleant organized the Bagaduce Chamber Players, a chamber music group, with the assistance of Albert Stwertka, violin, and Penelope Wheeler, flute. For ten years the BCP, with the occasional participation of guest artists, regularly performed a wide variety of chamber music from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. It was a privilege to play mainly in the historic eighteenth century meeting house that is now the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Castine on a newly built resonant stage that reinforced the exceptional acoustics of the building and using the recently acquired fine Steinway grand piano. The final concerts of the BCP were in 2008.
Sunday, December 4, 2005
CASTINE UNITARIAN CHURCH
On the Common, Castine, Maine
Penelope Wheeler, flute
Albert Stwertka, violin
Arnold Berleant, piano
with
Marcia Gronewald Sly, mezzosoprano
Juan Condori, cello
Highlight from Andante, from Sonata for Flute and Klavier, BWV 1030
J.S. Bach, 1685-1750
Presto, from Trio Sonata No. 4 in B major
G. B. Pergolesi, 1710-1736
Aria, for voice and flute
Jacques lbert, 1890-1962
Allegretto, from Duo in A major for Violin and Piano,
K301 W. A. Mozart, 1756-1791
Two Songs by Hugo Wolf, 1860-1903
Gebet (Prayer)
Auf ein altes Bild (On Looking at an Old Picture)
Allegro, from Piano Trio in C major
Franz Josef Haydn, 1732-1809
"Erbarme dich" (Have Mercy on Us)
voice with violin obbligato J. S. Bach
Trio in B major
G. B. Pergolesi
Talks at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Castine
This page features lectures given by Dr. Berleant to the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Castine from 1998 through 2005.
Theodora, a Ballet
1979-1980
Coin of Theodora, Rome, Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Unspecified Collection
Theodora, (c 497- 548, Constantinople, now Istanbul, Turkey), Byzantine empress, wife of the emperor Justinian I (reigned 527–565), probably the most powerful woman in Byzantine history. Her intelligence and political acumen made her Justinian’s most trusted adviser and enabled her to use the power and influence of her office to promote religious and social policies.
Music composed and directed by Arnold Berleant
Scenario, stage design, and introduction by Professor Joyce Rosa, C. W. Post Center, and choreography by Laszlo Tamasik, Director, Calgary Ballet Company. Performed at the 40th Annual meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics, Oct. 28, 1982, by the Calgary Ballet Company, Margaret Greenham Theatre, Banff Performance Centre.
Ballet suite for chamber group of six players: flute, (alto flute), oboe, (English horn), trumpet, piano, percussion (two), including guitar. The eleven movements are Processional, Dance of the Animals (Acacius' Dance, Lion's Dance, Peacock's Dance, Bear's Dance, Monkey's Dance, Leopard's Dance), Theordora's Dance, Justinian's Dance, Justinian and Theordora's Pas de deux, Fanfare and Recessional. This ballet has had two different productions. Performance time is approximately 35 minutes.
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