Welcome to the OBF Book Club!
Season 3 will begin in January 11th
Sessions run each Thursday via Zoom from Noon-1pm
Free and open to all. Sign up today to add your name to the list.
HOW IT WORKS
Connect with OBF friends from all over the globe and be a part of a lifelong learning community. Joining is completely free — all you need is a love of music and a copy of the book to enjoy. With no cap limit, new sign-ups are welcome at anytime.
A Literary Offering is offered online where all participants discuss the current book, along with moderated conversations with informed and insightful guest hosts. Each interactive session is 1-hour in length. Prior to each session you will receive a Zoom link along with question prompts for the assignment chapters. Selected books connect with the 2024 Festival programming and for most books, the author is present for a Q&A.
2024 BOOK LIST
March 7-28: No Book This Month
April 4-25: Camille Saint-Saëns and his World by Jann Pasler with host Lindsey Rodgers
Meet the Author
Jann Pasler is distinguished professor in the Department of Music, University of California, San Diego. Musicologist, pianist, documentary filmmaker, Pasler has published widely on contemporary American and French music, modernism and postmodernism, interdisciplinarity, race and gender, material culture, and radio. In recent years, her work on why music mattered in Third Republic France expanded to music, colonial culture, and governance in the French empire, 1860-1960. From 2005-present, it has involved extensive research in archives, complemented by interviews with living musicians, in Hanoi, Saigon, Tunis, Rabat, and Dakar. For publications, video documentaries, professional papers, and access to many of her articles and the source for others, see http://www.writingthroughmusic.com/
Meet the Host
Lindsey Rodgers is a musicologist and organist whose work combines academic research and professional performance. Her dissertation, “The North German Chorale Fantasia: A Sermon Without Words,” explores how the seventeenth-century composers Sweelinck, Scheidemann, Praetorius, and Reincken use musical texture in novel ways, creating aural journeys that mirror the texts that form the basis for their chorale fantasias. She was a panelist at the University of Oregon’s Musicking conference, as well as to the American Guild of Organists. Her scholarly work informs her work as a performer. She has given numerous organ recitals in the Pacific Northwest, and she is currently Associate Organist, as well as Children’s Choir Director, at Central Lutheran Church in Eugene, Oregon, where she has worked since 2006. A native of Pleasant Hill, Oregon, Rodgers received her bachelor’s degree in organ performance from Walla Walla University, her master’s degree in organ performance from the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University, and her doctorate in musicology from the University of Oregon.
May 2-23: Mass of the Endangered libretto by Nathaniel Bellows and Earth’s Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending Songs of the Natural World by Kathleen Dean Moore with host Stephen Rodgers
June 6-20: The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth by Michael Spitzer with host Zach Wallmark
PAST BOOK LISTS
2024
Bach’s Dialogue with Modernity by John Butt
Mozart’s Women by Jane Glover
2023
Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven by John Eliot Gardner
Bach’s Feet by David Yearsley
The Four Seasons by Laurel Corona
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (Later Editions)
Luther and Bach on the Magnificat by Peter Henderson, Bradley Jenson
2022
SHARE YOUR BOOK IDEAS!
Have suggestions for upcoming book club titles?
Submit your ideas to our Book Club Suggestion Box.