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Adam Knight Gilbert

@akgilbert.bsky.social

1116 Followers 3476 Following

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.

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
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!
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
Image: Line drawing of animal with furry mane playing pipe that grows out of its nose and body like a bag.
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.
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.
Line drawing cartoon of Porcupipes. Animal bagpipe with four drones for legs and many small drones, making it look like a porcupine.
Cartoon line drawing called Stagpipes. A bagpipe with drones for legs and horns of a stag.
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).
Image: line drawing with six trees with faces forming a triangle 1 on first level, 2 on second, and three on top.
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.
Sketch: black-and-white line drawing of two trees with human faces and something like houses or pyramids, maybe with faces, in the background.
Black cat on table looking up and majestic with orange and yellow painting on wall.
Image if The Two Ronnies in formal wear morning coats and at posh garden party
Benny Hill in sailor ornother uniform
Sketch (line drawing) of four trees (like palm trees) with human faces (but no mouths).
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)
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.
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.
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.
Ink drawing: some trees with mountains like pyramids in the background.
Drawing of person sinking into the floor while holding two more of his own heads in his hands like puppets.
Five gray men, four in one direction, and the other inverted. Captions "Is it him, or us?" and "Is it them, or me?"
Fie ghostly figures in grey watercolor wash.
A man on a ruin of a room sitting on a chair with death looking at him through a door from behind him and a bird looking over him.
Ink drawing or cartoon of two trees, moon, and bird.
25 pitches that are consonant against their retrograde inversion