ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—On Thursday, October 20, Bard in China will gather a panel of scholars to discuss arts in Japan. The panel, "Bard Professors Study Arts in Japan: Kuniyoshi and Shomyo to Onkyo," will include a discussion and slide show by music professor Richard Teitelbaum, exploring a wide range of his experiences with Japanese music, and a discussion by art history professor Tom Wolf of his work researching Asian American artists in Japan. The panel takes place at 6:30 p.m. in room 115 of the Olin Language Center. The talk is presented by Bard in China, with support from the Freeman Undergraduate Asian Studies Initiative.

Teitelbaum will present “Travels in Japanese Music from Ancient to Avant Garde,” a discussion and slide show of his experiences working with and observing a variety of Japanese composers and musicians, from Buddhist monks practicing ancient shomyo chants to leading avant-garde performers. Wolf will present “Researching Asian American Artists in Japan,” a look at his work studying Asian American artists in Japan, particularly the painter Yasuo Kuniyoshi. Teitelbaum and Wolf received travel grants from the Freeman Undergraduate Asian Studies Initiative to develop new courses based on their experiences and research in Japan.

Composer and performer Richard Teitelbaum is well known for his pioneering work in live electronic music, and his early explorations of intercultural improvisation and composition. He received his master’s degree in theory and composition from Yale in 1964. After continuing his composition studies with Luigi Nono on a Fulbright fellowship in Italy, he cofounded the live electronic music group Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV) with Frederic Rzewski and Alvin Curran in Rome in 1966, bringing the first Moog synthesizer to Europe the following year. At that time he also met Steve Lacy, with whom he began working, and who joined MEV in 1968. Teitelbaum returned to the United States in 1970 to create the World Band, one of the first intercultural improvisation groups. In 1977 he spent a year on a Senior Fulbright in Tokyo, studying shakuhachi (bamboo flute) with the great master Katsuya Yokoyama. He also studied ancient Japanese court music with the retired chief court musician, Masataro Togi. He has received commissions from Fromm Music Foundation, Venice Biennale, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and Rockefeller Foundation. His CD, Blends (New Albion), featuring Yokoyama, was named one of the ten best contemporary classical CDs of 2002 by The Wire magazine of London. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2002 to create an opera, Z’vi, excerpts of which were performed at the opening of The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College.

Tom Wolf has written extensively about 20th-century American art, including studies of the arts colony in Woodstock, New York, and the Arts and Crafts movement in the United States. His work on the painter Yasuo Kuniyoshi, one of the most esteemed artists in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, has led him to the broader study of Asian American artists in general. Wolf’s paintings have been exhibited at Artists Space, New York; Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art; Koslow Gallery, Los Angeles; and Art Gallery of Western Australia. He is the curator of numerous exhibitions and recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Winterthur Museum and Library Fellowships; and Freeman Foundation grants for research in Japan. He has M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and a B.A. from University of California, Berkeley.