Adam Knight Gilbert
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Adam Knight Gilbert
@akgilbert.bsky.social
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Recorder, shawm, and bagpipe player, musicologist, Professor, Chair of Musicology, and Director of Early Music Program at University of Southern California. I research historical composition, improvisation, symbolism, and symmetries, and I like to draw.
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Join us for an epic concert with Bach's Cantata "Der Herr denet an uns" (BWV 196), Concerto in F (BWV 1057), Telemann's Concerto for Viola, and some wonderful works by Schein, Vierdanck, J.C. Bach, and Servaes de Koninck.
This image shows performers for USC's Thornton Baroque Sinfonia concert on Friday, May 2nd, 2025 8:00 PM in Newman Recital Hall on the University Park Campus in Los Angeles, CA
April 28, 2025 at 3:18 AM
Southern Californians, you have two chances to join us and guests from Sibelius Academy, Helsinki for a concert of Mission Music from the Americas! March 7th is free but RSVP required: uscthorntonearlymusicprogram.cmail20.com/t/j-l-wlktru... March 9th is free, open to the public, families welcome!
Join us for our first USC Thornton Baroque Sinfonia concert of 2025: "Mission Music of the Americas" directed by Adam Knight Gilbert and Jason Yoshida. With Special Guests: Students from Sibelius Academy, Helsinki, Finland. Featuring works from Guatemala, Mexico, Ecuador, Bolivia, California, and from the Peruvian Trujillo Codex! Friday, Mar. 7, 2025 8:00 PM Mission Music of the Americas Newman Recital Hall 700 Childs Way, Los Angeles, CA 90089 Map ADMISSION FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, BUT YOU WILL NEED TO REGISTER! https://uscthorntonearlymusicprogram.cmail20.com/t/j-l-wlktruk-jdyuthtldi-j/ This concert will be repeated: Sunday, Mar. 9, 2025 2:00 PM Mission San Gabriel Arcángel 427 South Junipero Serra Drive, SG, 91776 Map THIS CONCERT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. FAMILIES ARE WELCOME, NO RSVP NEEDED!
February 24, 2025 at 4:36 AM
Join us today for an online presentation of new Chinese music based on cultural artifacts. Register here: usc.zoom.us/webinar/regi...
Flyer text: From Dunhuang to the World: A Journey through Time in Search of Cultural Resonance in Music February 3, 2025, 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm Pacific, online The Hong Kong Gaudeamus Dunhuang Ensemble creates new music based on cultural artifacts in museums and historic sites. Join us for a discussion, a demonstration of period instruments from Dunhuang and the Silk Road, a live musical performance, and post-concert Q&A. Co-sponsored by the USC Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and the USC Thornton Department of Musicology
February 3, 2025 at 3:50 PM
Morning sketch:
Image: Line drawing of animal with furry mane playing pipe that grows out of its nose and body like a bag.
February 1, 2025 at 4:00 PM
Another pair of animal instruments from Organographiti (2/2). Lyra da braccia
Image: Cartoon line drawing of lyra da braccia. The instrument is named because it is played while being held in the hands like a violin, and it is quite similar to a violin. The imaginary animal musical instrument drawn here is a viola or violin with four hands instead of feet. It is standing on three hands and bowing the string with its fourth leg-hand. Its peg board head is a hand.
January 31, 2025 at 4:33 AM
Another pair of animal instruments from Organographiti (1/2). Viola da gamba
Image: Cartoon line drawing of viola da gamba, or viol with legs. The instrument is named because it is played while being held between the legs. The imaginary animal musical instrument drawn here is a viol with two legs and a bow for a tail. Its pegboard head is a foot.
January 31, 2025 at 4:31 AM
The second animal instrument I drew for "Organographiti", the Porcupipes:
Line drawing cartoon of Porcupipes. Animal bagpipe with four drones for legs and many small drones, making it look like a porcupine.
January 27, 2025 at 7:06 PM
A loooong time ago, I started a series of animal and other odd musical instruments called "Organographiti". Today is a pair (re-posted from earlier). First, the Stagpipes:
Cartoon line drawing called Stagpipes. A bagpipe with drones for legs and horns of a stag.
January 27, 2025 at 7:03 PM
Join us in LA this coming Friday, Jan. 31, 2025
USC Musicology Forum Lecture
Friday, January 31, 2025 1:00 PM
USC Musicology Forum Lecture
Anna Zayaruznaya (Yale University)
“Early Modern Music and Drugs”
Herklotz Seminar Room, Doheny Music Library
#earlymodernstudies
Poster for lecture: USC Musicology Forum Lecture Friday, January 31, 2025 1:00 PM USC Musicology Forum Lecture A. Zayaruznaya (Yale University) “Music and Drugs in the longue durée” Herklotz Seminar Room, Doheny Music Library AZ (A. Zayaruznaya) received their Ph.D. in historical musicology from Harvard University in 2010 and taught at New York University and Princeton before coming to Yale in 2014. Bringing the history of musical forms and notation into dialogue with medieval literature, iconography, and the history of ideas, AZ’s publications have focused on French and northern Italian music of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Their first book, The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet (Cambridge, 2015), explored the functions of monstrous and hybrid exempla in the compositional imaginary of fourteenth-century French motets. Their second book, Upper-Voice Structures and Compositional Process in the Ars nova Motet (Routledge, 2018) explores the compositional procedures and emic music-theoretical understandings that undergird the phenomena that modern scholarship has called “isorhythm” and “isorhythmic form.” And for the last decade AZ has been at work on The Making of Philippe de Vitry, which will be the first book-length study to focus on poet, composer, music theorist, and public intellectual Philippe de Vitry (1291–1361).
January 27, 2025 at 5:01 AM
Quick sketch after morning coffee
Image: line drawing with six trees with faces forming a triangle 1 on first level, 2 on second, and three on top.
January 24, 2025 at 4:26 PM
Have been pondering a sentence about one's reach exceeding one's grasp and wondering if the translation alludes to Browning, if that is coincidental, or if Browning's poem cites an old proverb. In the meantime, the editor wrote one of my favorite paragraphs:
Image contains this quoted text: "Ennui is the great enemy of scholarship, and it takes many guises not only literal boredom with the musty tomes, but fear of readers' boredom and a resultant desire to make old texts palatable or relevant by reducing them to pawns or players in some contemporary contest or struggle. Such reductionism is both self-aggravating and self-defeating. It buries the insights of past thinkers beneath concealing projections and muffles the voices of their advocates, stifling the freshness they might bring us from another age and thus perpetuating ennui by confronting a vision as yet unfocused with an apparent wall of opacity and the temptation merely to silver that wall, on the cynical assumption that scholarship must always be about ourselves. Intellectuals who believe that the texts they study will tell them nothing that does not resolve to partisan advocacy of contemplation or praxis, autonomy or heteronomy, individual or society, universality or particularity, or any other preconceived polarity, are not prepared to glean more from the texts they con than what they have already brought with them-least of all are they prepared to profit from the discovery of alternative problematics." Lenn E. Goodman, Introduction to Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought. State University of New York Press, 1992, 4.
January 20, 2025 at 3:04 AM
First sketch of 2025, testing out etchr Lab A5 watercolor paper ("The Pefect Sketchbook") and trying to remember what pen feels like on paper.
Sketch: black-and-white line drawing of two trees with human faces and something like houses or pyramids, maybe with faces, in the background.
January 20, 2025 at 2:34 AM
Majestic demon cat moment of the day
Black cat on table looking up and majestic with orange and yellow painting on wall.
January 19, 2025 at 7:25 AM
Then again, two runners up:
Image if The Two Ronnies in formal wear morning coats and at posh garden party
January 15, 2025 at 7:08 AM
Benny Hill in sailor ornother uniform
January 15, 2025 at 7:03 AM
Putting off finishing syllabus with tree sketch. Drawn with Sailor "rikyucha" ("green tea") ink on watercolor paper.
Sketch (line drawing) of four trees (like palm trees) with human faces (but no mouths).
January 12, 2025 at 7:14 PM
Image from print of "Guidonian" Hand from. ca, 1500, which a pedagogical tool that places musical pitches and letter names and their possible solmizations (ut, re, mi, fa, sol, and la) on individual joints of the hand, in a circle that outlines 22 pitches of a general vocal range. Also has a melody of ut re mu fa sol la, la sol fa mi re ut with the text: Sancte cherubine, doce me cantare (Holy angels, teach me how to sing)
January 8, 2025 at 6:47 PM
And also wishes for a good 2025 from three stragglers:
Water color and ink of three old chimney people with red tops floating in space, with a small black moon-like spot in the upper center.
January 1, 2025 at 4:24 AM
Happy New Year from some old chimney folk:
A water color and ink drawing of ten chimney-like people, or people-like chimneys, floating in space with something like roots or feet hanging down.
January 1, 2025 at 4:20 AM
Origin of misquote: Fol. 2v of music ms Bologna Q16 (Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna, I-Bc Q. 16), dated 1487 by scribe, probably from the region of Naples. This glued-on inserted opening page lists incipits (index from a lectionary?) from Advent into January. Arms unknown.
Image of music manuscript page with fragmentary sacred Latin text from December to into January "Hodie stephanum est . . ." above two coats of arms (with generic geometric shapes) and titles of four songs in manuscript listed on lower left corner.
December 26, 2024 at 6:37 PM
Found this old sketch while cleaning behind my bookcases, where old drawings go to die.
Ink drawing: some trees with mountains like pyramids in the background.
December 23, 2024 at 5:07 PM
An old sketch that some might find suggestive of NSFW, retrospectively titled "Box of Bad Habits":
Cartoon: Box with arms and legs and spigot for crotch, holding drink and smoking cigarette while apparently flirting with a tropical bush or tree holding a nesting bird wearing sunglasses.
December 20, 2024 at 7:42 PM
Nice! Another is the Chansonnier Cordiforme F-Pnm Rothschild 2973 (Chansonnier Cordiforme; Chansonnier de Jean de Montchenu), ca. 1470-77:
December 16, 2024 at 9:11 PM
Here is another old one from when I first started on the tenure track and I tell my students I still feel this way by the last week of the semester, at the latest:
Drawing of person sinking into the floor while holding two more of his own heads in his hands like puppets.
December 6, 2024 at 5:29 AM
We have a concert of French Baroque Christmas coming up this Friday, Dec. 6 in Los Angeles. A healthy dose of Charpentier, Ballard, and a nice opera scene from Élizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre.
December 4, 2024 at 3:19 AM