Baylor School of Music Lyceum Series Welcomes Art Historian for Lecture

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Baylor University's School of Music will present Dr. Alessandra Comini, University Distinguished Professor of Art History Emerita at Southern Methodist University, for her lecture, "Alma Mahler and Her Vienna," at 4 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 16, in Recital Hall II of Waco Hall on the Baylor campus.

The event, which is free and open to the public, is part of the Lyceum Series, which, founded in 1976, is a year-long series of lectures, classes and recitals hosted by the School of Music to share professional knowledge and skills from internationally acclaimed artists and teachers with students.

The lecture will focus on Alma Mahler, wife of Austrian composer Gustav Mahler. Born in Vienna in 1879, Alma also was musically active throughout her teens until her marriage to Gustav. Comini will discuss Alma's life, work and loves in the Vienna of mixed marriages, extraordinary creativity and blatant anti-Semitism.

Comini received her bachelor's degree from Barnard College in New York, N.Y., her master's degree from the University of California at Berkeley and her doctoral degree from Columbia University, where she taught for 10 years. She also has taught at the University of California at Berkeley and Yale University, served as the Alfred Hodder Resident Humanist at Princeton University and was named Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at Oxford University in 1996.

She is author of many reviews, essays and articles for national and international publications, and is a regular contributor to Stagebill. She has authored eight books, including "Egon Schile's Portraits" (1974), which was nominated for the National Book Award and received the College Art Association's Charles Rufus Morey Book Award.

A featured speaker at the Leipzig Gewandhaus Symposia under conductor Kurt Masur during the 1970s and 1980s, Comini, who is also an amateur flutist, has participated in many congresses and symposia from Helsinki, Stockholm, Amsterdam, London, Dublin and Oxford to Montpellier, Hamburg, Graz, Vienna, Budapest and St. Petersburg in her field of musical iconography. In recognition of her contributions to Germanic culture she was awarded the Grand Decoration of Honor in l990 by the Republic of Austria and her revisionist work in the history of women artists was acknowledged in 1995 by the Women's Caucus for Art's Lifetime Achievement Award.

Waco Hall is at 624 Speight Ave.
For more information, contact the Baylor School of Music at (254) 710-3571.
by Katy McDowall, student newswriter, (254) 710-6805