At “Singing Truth to Power,” a medieval concert and roundtable discussion held on Oct. 5 at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus, performers and scholars used medieval songs to connect the music of the middle ages to present day issues. They also reflected on how music can inspire people to take action.

The event was co-presented by Fordham’s Department of Art History and Music, Fordham’s Center for Medieval Studies, New York State’s Council on the Arts, and Alkemie, a medieval music ensemble group.

Some of the connections between today’s issues and medieval songs were made quite literally. As Alkemie performed medieval chants, Niccolo Seligmann, a performer with the group, inserted poems that added present-day commentary to the themes expressed in the songs.

“They tell us that their greed is good, tweeting atop the tower/They say, ‘work harder and you could join us and wield our power,” Seligmann recited between medieval songs, which were performed primarily in Old English and Old French. “They tell us their prosperity is earned through God’s just grace/They show the press their charity and warn us to pick up the pace. But those of us out on the streets engaged in mutual aid/can often barely make ends meet and expect no press parade.”

In the panel discussion that followed, Sian Ricketts, a performer with Alkemie, said the group has been trying to figure out how to best convey the messages, both past and current, in their work.

“Are we supposed to be making a political message as we engage with these materials of the past that are so overtly political? And we have to process what that means to project it into the world,” Ricketts said. “All the music on this program is all written by clerics, essentially people who are working in the system—they don’t have a lot of power; they had an education. And that’s the position we can really identify with, so I find it fascinating to grapple with that.”

Reflecting on Activism

For others, the concert made them reflect on their own activism and work in their daily lives.

“When I got the invitation to be a part of this panel, my initial reaction was to ask myself, ‘Am I an activist?’” Natalie Reynoso, a Ph.D. candidate studying the history of Christianity at Fordham said. “But I think for me, and maybe for many of us, the image of someone outside protesting is the image that often comes to mind. And it is not the way my activism looks in my work.”

Reynoso said the performance helped her reflect on how her work studying gendered violence in early Christianity can be considered activism.

“The questions that I ask are really where my activism comes in—who gets to be human in the ancient world and who doesn’t? Who gets left out? And my interest is in those who get left out and telling those stories,” she said.

Patrick DeBrosse, a Ph.D. candidate at Fordham currently studying the political culture of Latin Europe during the Middle Ages, said that the performance reminded him of one of his biggest sources for his dissertation—the music of troubadours from that time period.

“It’s full of protests essentially,” he said. “It’s one of the few places that you can really get perspectives on power, you can get critiques of power… I think this performance was a great way for me to sort of reflect back on the relationship between my sources and protest in general—who gets to protest? What’s the purpose of it?”

DeBrosse also said that the concert made him think back to how music was used in history to bring attention to an issue and “draw a crowd” around a performance.

“Sometimes I think we in the modern world forget that music does this so powerfully because we consume it through headphones,” he said. “In a pre modern society, all of the things we just heard are intended to be consumed, with a much bigger crowd of people who have chosen to … listen to and then go on to presumably comment on whatever message has been given to them by the singer.”

Nicholas Paul, Ph.D., an associate professor of history and the director of the Center for Medieval Studies, said that the “lasting partnership” between the center, Fordham, and Alkemie has been very beneficial and has led to many “great events.”.

“It’s a great joy to be able to see that continuing, to be able to benefit from that partnership by being able to have events like this evening where we premiere new work,” he said.

On Aug. 26., in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the state restrictions on mass gatherings, fall classes at the University commenced under the auspices of a brand-new flexible hybrid learning model.

The model, which was laid out in May by Dennis Jacobs, Ph.D., Fordham’s provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, is designed to be both safe and academically rigorous. After being forced to pivot to remote learning in March, professors and instructors, aided by Fordham’s IT department, spent many hours this summer preparing to use this model for the fall.

Today, some classes are offered remotely, some are offered in-person—indoors and outdoors—with protective measures, and still others are a blend of both. Whatever the method, professors are engaging students with innovative lessons and challenging coursework.

Rethinking an Old Course for New Times

Barbara Mundy, Ph.D., a professor of art history, said the pandemic spurred her department to reimagine one of its hallmark courses, Introduction to Art History. The course, which covers the period from 1200 B.C. to the present day, is being taught both in-person and in remote settings to 327 students in what’s known as a “flipped” format.

Before classes are held, students are provided with pre-recorded lectures, reading material, and videos, such as Art of the Olmec, which Mundy created with the assistance of Digital and Visual Resources Curator Katherina Fostano and her staff. When students meet in person or via live video, they then discuss the material at length. The content was changed as well; it now also addresses the representation of Black people throughout history and showcases artists who tackle themes of racism.

“Because we were looking at a situation where we couldn’t just do business as usual, I proposed that we take this moment to really rethink our intro class, which we’ve been teaching for decades,” Mundy said, noting that the department has expanded in recent years to include experts in art from more diverse sections of the world.

Contemplating the Bard

Before the COVID crisis, Mary Bly, Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of English, presented materials to students in her Shakespeare & Pop Culture class and encouraged them to generate their own ideas on them during live discussions. Now she breaks her students up into pairs, and later “pods,” of about six students on Zoom, to form a thoughtful argument about a particular work of art, video, film, or theater.

“An argument is not a description,” said Bly. “It has to have some evidence or context to make their argument, say, for example, ‘This film is a racist portrayal of the play for the following reasons,’ or, ‘The director of this film pits the values of pop culture against Shakespeare and the British canon.”

To propel the conversations, she created a series of video-taped lectures with Daniel Camou, FCLC ’20. In some cases, students are expected to respond with a video of their own.

Embracing New Technologies

Paul Lynch, Ph.D., an associate professor of accounting and taxation at the Gabelli School of Businesses, is teaching Advanced Accounting to undergraduates and Accounting for Derivatives to graduate students this semester. Of the five classes, four are exclusively online, and one is exclusively in person. For his remote classes, he’s turned to Lightboard, which allows him to “write” on the screen. He jokingly refers to it as his Manhattan Project.

“I love being in the class with the students. I enjoy the interaction, and I thought that was missing,” he said. “This gives me the ability to let the students see me as if I was in class writing onto a transparent whiteboard.”

He said he hasn’t had to change much of the content. The only major difference now is that instead of passing out equations on printed paper, he emails students custom-made problems in PDF format, and then edits within that document after they’re sent back.

“I’ve always given them take-home exams, and always worked off Blackboard, so it’s just a natural extension of what I used to do in class,” he said.

In Jacqueline Reich’s class Films of Moral Struggle, students are using the platform Perusall to examine how films portray moral and ethical issues. They watch and analyze films like Scarface, a 1932 movie about a powerful Cuban drug lord, and The Cheat, which shows the early representation of Asians in American films, said Reich, a professor of communication and media studies.

Among other things, students can use Perusall to annotate scenes from movie clips, such as the classic film Casablanca, where they identified shots ranging from “establishing” and “reaction” to “shot/reverse shot.”

“It’s a really good exercise to do in class when you’re teaching film language or talking about editing or lighting, because students can pause and comment on a particular frame,” Reich said.

She meets with 11 students on Zoom on Thursdays and another eight in person at the Rose Hill campus on Mondays.

In another virtual classroom, Peggy Andover, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology, is teaching undergraduates at Rose Hill how the laws of the environment shape behavior in an asynchronous class called Learning Laboratory. Andover said that platforms like Panopto, which transcribe her lessons, can make it easier for students to look for specific information.

“Let’s say you’re studying for an exam, and you see the word ‘contiguity’ in your notes, and you don’t remember what it means. You don’t have to watch the entire lecture again—you can search for ‘contiguity’ and see the slides and the portion of the lecture where we were talking about it,” Andover said.

Graduate students teaching in the psychology program are also using Pear Deck to make their virtual classrooms more engaging on Google Slides, she said.

“You have this PowerPoint that’s being watched or engaged in asynchronously, but [Pear Deck] allows you to put in interactive features,” including polls and student commentary, she said.

“Our grad students found it’s a way to really get that engagement that they would potentially be missing when we went to online learning.”

Learning from Classmates

Aaron Saiger, a professor at the Law School, made several adjustments to Property Law, a required class for all first-year law students. Instead of meeting in person twice a week for two hours, his class of 45 students meets on Zoom three times a week for 90 minutes, an acknowledgment that attention spans are harder to maintain on Zoom.

The content is the same, but the way he teaches it had to change. While he was able to record four classes’ worth of lectures to share asynchronously, that wasn’t an option for everything.

“I’m spending less time talking to students one-on-one while everyone else listens, which is the classic law school teaching mode; we call it the Socratic method,” he said. “Everyone else is supposed to imagine that they’re the person being called on.”

Saiger’s solution is having students share two-sentence answers to questions in the Zoom chat function to gauge what everyone’s thinking about a topic, having them do more group work, and leaning more on visual material.

“The difficulties are not insubstantial, but I think we are meeting the challenges and finding a few offsetting advantages that will make it a good semester for everyone.”

Getting Creative with Lab Work

Stephen Holler, Ph.D., associate professor of physics, holds most of his experimentation class in person, with a few students attending remotely.

The in-person group is working on a hands-on solar project that allows them to learn about the material, electric, programming, and optical components of physics.

Students who are attending the class remotely are doing related mathematical work as a part of their semester-long project.

“One student is studying interference coding in optics, so I have him looking at designs in a paper,” he said. “He’s learning all the underlying physics for what goes into a portion of these mirrors that are used in laser systems.”

Christopher Koenigsmann, Ph.D., assistant professor of chemistry, is sending lab kits to the students in his general chemistry class so they can conduct experiments from home.

“We were between a rock and hard place—you can’t have the kids in the lab, and at the same time, we can’t not have some kind of hands-on,” he said.

The kits will allow students to participate in labs virtually through a Zoom webinar with their professor, as well as in breakout rooms with their lab teams.

“We adapted as many of our experiments as we could to just use simple household chemicals that are all completely safe,” he said.

Elizabeth Thrall, Ph.D., an assistant professor of physical and biophysical chemistry, likewise sent a kit to students that they can use to build a spectrometer. Students can build it out of Legos, using a DVD and a light source to create different wavelengths of light. They capture them using their computer’s webcam which processes the data. They will then design an experiment that everyone in the class will conduct.

“Designing an experiment so that you learn something, that answers the question you set out to answer, and gives a protocol that someone else can follow so they can get the same results that you got, is really at the heart of what it is to do scientific research,” she said.

—Taylor Ha, Kelly Kultys, and Tom Stoelker contributed reporting.

As part of the biennial Fordham Composers Concert, students collaborate with professional musicians; this year the Exponential Ensemble provided expertise. Normally, students work on their compositions at Fordham College at Lincoln Center all semester and get to hear their music played live in May. But the pandemic forced students and musicians to coordinate from their homes across the globe, from New York to Paris to Australia.

When Ott, an associate professor in the Department of Art History and Music, gathered his students and the performers for a virtual concert, several remarked on the challenges one might least expect from playing music: the silent bits. Melodies and rhythms translated across digital distances, but silence proved more difficult. That’s because during a concert in a physical space, eye contact between musicians plays an important role during quiet pauses, something lost in virtual venues.

“There are moments in pieces where there is silence and the players look at each other and you just know, ‘I am breathing with you and we’ll just know when to start,’” said Anna Urrey, flutist with the ensemble. “For this concert, I tried to time out the silence, and I never got it right.”

Likewise, FCLC Senior Evan Donaldson appreciated the challenge.

“I could see where the tempo slows down to 20 seconds, that seems like something that would be extremely difficult to get right between three people on video, and it made me have a greater appreciation that the Exponential Ensemble took in order to sit down with sheet music and say, ‘I will do this as many times as I have to get it right,’” said Donaldson.

Pascal Archer, artistic director and clarinetist of Exponential Ensemble, said he would record his section of an audio file and send it on to oboist Kemp Jernigan. Jerigan would record atop Archer’s section and then send his cut to Anna Urrey to do the same.

“In concert, we would follow each other, and it’s easy to slow down and accelerate,” said Archer. In a concert, this would be done in a split second, but here it took a really long time.”

Although the students missed the live concert, they were left with a gift, said Donaldson.

“At the end of the day I’m grateful to have this perfectly made, plucked, tied-up-in-a-knot-and–bow audio file and video concert that I can show to people,” he said. “That’s really, really special.”

When visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art take in Cristóbal de Villalpando: Mexican Painter of the Baroque, a new exhibition opening on July 25, one of the pieces they’ll see for the first time is the Adoration of the Magi.

For a little over a century, the painting has only been seen by visitors to Fordham’s Office of the President in Cunniffe House. The 1683 painting depicts a scene from the Gospel of Matthew when kings, or magi, visited the infant Jesus. It was given to Fordham shortly after the University’s founding and first put on display in 1900.

Villalpando, who lived from 1649 to 1714, emerged in the 1680s as a leading painter in viceregal Mexico and one of the most innovative and accomplished artists in the Spanish art world. The Adoration of the Magi, which was based on an early-17th-century engraving of the same title by Peter Paul Rubens, is being touted as one of the highlights of the show along with Moses and the Brazen Serpent and the Transfiguration of Jesus, a 28-foot-tall canvas that he painted in 1683.

Ronda Kasl, curator of Latin American Art in the American Wing at The Met, said Adoration of the Magi is significant because it reveals Villalpando’s capacity to envision the divine.

“The subject itself is fundamentally concerned with the revelation of divinity. The holy child’s humanity is manifest in his nakedness, while his divinity (and his mother’s) is revealed in the illumination of their idealized features,” she said.

The painting had hung at the Rose Hill campus for nearly a century before Barbara Mundy, Ph.D., professor of art history and Latin American and Latino Studies, stumbled upon a mention of it in 2001 in the University’s archives while researching four other paintings.

“I couldn’t believe it, because Villalpando is an immensely important Mexican painter. He’s like the Michelangelo of Mexico in the 17th century,” she said.

“I almost hit the floor when I first I saw the painting.”

Because of its size, (78 inches wide and 99 inches high), it has been Met conservator Dorothy Mahon’s primary focus for the past 10 months. Mahon noted that over the years, the varnish coating the painting had become discolored and needed to be delicately removed and replaced. The backing holding the canvas taut needed to be replaced as well.

“It’s a big picture, so it had lots of varnish and lots of discoloration,” she said, noting that every step of the restoration is painstakingly done by hand with custom-made tools and adhesives. As part of the restoration process, Mahon traveled to Mexico to see in-person other examples of Villalpando’s works from that same period.

At a July 24 press preview at the Met, Diego Gómez Pickering, Consul General of Mexico in New York, said the timing of the exhibit could not come at a better time for the estimated one million Mexican Americans living in the New York Metropolitan area. who, like Villalpando, primarily hail from the state of Puebla.

“The Hispanic community is a founding community of this country, along with the African American, European and the Indian American community.  We cannot understand the fabric of the American society if we do not mention these important roots,” he said.

“I hope you will enjoy the exhibition and have a chance to build with us bridges that will cross boundaries, bridges that connect peoples, cultures, societies and nations, bridges that no wall will ever tear apart.”

Mundy called the inclusion of the painting in the exhibition, which runs through Oct. 15, a long overdue recognition for a masterpiece that was hidden in plain sight.

“Villalpando has a very special way of painting the emotion in scenes. In this one, you can see that response of all of the figures to the Christ Child, who is seated on Mary’s lap. You can see the awe and the adulation that the magi are feeling, and you can see the wonderful, calm serenity in Mary’s face, and the way she’s holding the baby,” she said.

“What’s also fabulous is, the big crowd scene behind them, and every member of the crowd whose peering in to see the Christ Child as he’s seated on his mothers’ lap has their own distinct personality and response to this event.”

“Oscar Wilde was the first philosopher of glam,” said Reynolds. “And there’s a legacy that’s a lot richer than most people think. About 50 percent of the punks were glam diehards.”

Reynolds, author of Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century (Harper Collins, 2016) came to Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus on Oct. 17 to discuss the book with an audience of historians and musicologists.

Reynolds said he extensively “read around the subject,” including Thomas Carlyle’s 1840 tome, On Heros, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. He researched academic articles on decadence and the history of camp, and thumbed through the yellowing pages of Melody Maker, the British music weekly that ceased publication in 1999.

Glam Rock performers were mostly heterosexual men, he said. From David Bowie to Roxy Music to Marc Bolan to Alice Cooper, the subversive use of androgyny was counterbalanced by a hard-charging sound that beckoned the rock idol “back to the 1970s,” after the staid performances of the late 1960s.

“Theatricality is a big part of glam, and that hadn’t been part of rock, especially in the late sixties when there wasn’t much to look at because it was just about the music,” he said. “In reaction to that, people like David Bowie and Alice Cooper brought in all the accoutrements of show biz: the props, the costumes, and choreographed routines with dancers on stage—all the things of Broadway became part of rock.”

Reynolds said that despite its avant-garde reputation, glam rock music actually has its roots in the pop music of the 1950s (albeit incorporating innovations of the late 1960s, like Jimi Hendrix’s layering and stacking of guitar parts).

“What defines glam musically is a reaction against acid rock; it’s back to more simple structures of the 1950s . . . that kind of punchiness and focus,” he said. “But glam also sleuths through all the recording advances of the late 1960s, when rock ‘n’ roll records sound much bigger, tougher, louder, and fatter than in the fifties.”

But glam was much more than the music, he said. Record executives were hungry to recreate the money-generating rock icon that had been lost in the sixties. For someone like Bowie, that meant nearly eight years of trying on different personas—something that started out as an effort to ride the latest popular wave but ended up becoming a key part of his image.

“It becomes his way of differentiating himself at a time when the career trajectory of artists like Neil Young evolved very slowly,” he said. “Bowie invented jumping from style to style, and now that’s a common strategy that loads of artists use.”

Asked whether a glam movement would happen today, Reynolds said that it already has—with women like Lady Gaga and Kesha. In fact, it never really left: British gay men kept alive the movement in the 1980s, with Boy George and Pete Burns of Dead or Alive, to name a few. He said that many women from the 1980s, such as Annie Lennox and Siouxsie Sioux of Siouxsie and the Banshees, could also lay claim to the glam mantle.

An audience member asked Reynolds why he chose “Shock and Awe” for his title, a phrase that gained fame during the second Gulf War (though Reynolds noted that the concept originated with 19^th-century German military theorist Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz).

“To shock people and have them in awe of you is a dominating thing,” he said. “It’s where you destroy and paralyze the enemy and they’re so stunned by the sheer force of your bombardment that they’re just incapable.”

“They’re two words that capture a chunk of what glam is about.”

The Department of History collaborated with the English, art history, music, and communication and media studies departments in sponsoring the talk.

The exhibit represents the culmination of a productive post-doctorate project by Fordham’s Asato Ikeda, PhD, assistant professor of art history, also the exhibit’s curator.

Ikeda culled “A Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Prints” from more than 2,500 Japanese woodblock prints in the museum’s collection, the largest of its kind in Canada. The images depict adolescent males in Edo-period Japan, who have yet to go through the traditional coming of age ceremony but who were considered sexually active and attractive by the society.

“In the exhibition we’re developing a new definition of gender,” said Ikeda. “It’s not just determined by biological sex, but also age, role in sexual hierarchy, and appearance.”

By focusing on the topic of gender and sexuality, the exhibit provides relevance to contemporary audiences grappling with the issue, said Ikeda.

Most of the prints are from the Edward Walker Collection, which was given to the museum in 1926, but were largely underexplored. With Ikeda’s expertise in Japanese art, the museum was able to begin an overall assessment, while simultaneously curating a show.

“There were boxes that nobody had opened for years,” she said. “It was very challenging because not much was on the museum database, so we had to record all of the information.”

The museum kept a blog of the process, but outside of the database and blog very little of the collection has been seen online. Digitizing would be a costly 5-to-10-year process, said Ikeda. As such, the exhibition represents a rare opportunity not only to examine the wakashu, but also an opportunity to view significant pieces from the collection.

“The museum collection is so comprehensive that we were able to choose such a specific theme,” she said.

Ikeda collaborated on the project with Joshua S. Mostow, PhD, an expert in the gender structure of Japan’s Edo Period, which lasted from the 17^th to the 19^th centuries.

In the process, the curators consulted with the Canada’s LGBT community, social workers, and activists through workshops. The concept was very well received with great interest in the historical aspect of gender issues and appreciation that an established museum would explore the subject in in such depth, said Ikeda.

“We try to be clear that the wakashu are not identical to LGBT culture today,” said Ikeda. “But certainly its culture is very important in terms of thinking about diverse gender and sexuality practices.”

“For example, the word ‘gay’ is very specific to our contemporary culture. It’s very democratic, egalitarian, and individualistic, and you have claim to your identity. In 17^th-century Japan, however, you couldn’t really claim your identity. It was imposed on you by age, gender, and class.”

A section of the exhibition is dedicated to contemporary identity issues, but some of it is also devoted to different gender and sexual norms and ideals—from the pederasty of ancient Greece to 19^th-century binary gender norms in Victorian England to the “two spirited people” of the first nations.

Traditional Form, Edo to the 20th Century

Ikeda’s own area of research and expertise centers on fascist paintings celebrated by the Japanese government and authorities during World War II. “The desire was to return to quote-unquote ‘traditional,’” said Ikeda, “The fascist paintings don’t look violent and don’t show soldiers, but those peaceful looking paintings were meant to evoke pride in Japanese traditions and justify the war against the West.”

When Ikeda was young, stories her grandfather told her sparked an interest in the fascist art. He was from southern Japan, where the kamikaze planes lifted off.

“My grandfather was obsessed with kamikaze and he was ultranationalist,” said Ikeda.

She noted that only since the turn of the century did scholars begin to look at Japanese wartime art. The dominance of the Japanese right-wing in politics, which resulted from the strong U.S.-Japan alliance since the Cold War, prohibits the kind of self-examination engaged in by German people after World War II, she said.

“Japan has trouble understanding this part of history,” she said. “In Germany you can’t deny the holocaust and the Germans collectively tried to be apologetic, but that’s not the case for Japan, where people can publicly claim that the Nanking massacre never happened. There is no consensus. Basic historical facts continue to be contested and dismissed.”

As she worked on her soon-to-be-published book, Soldiers and Cherry Blossoms: Japanese Art, Fascism, and World War II, she discovered that some relatives of wartime artists remained resistant to allowing her to publish the material.

In both the case of the wakashu and the case of the fascist art, Ikeda is taking an unflinching look at history; however, she refuses to make a judgment call on whether the art is good or bad. That, she said, is not an art historian’s job. Instead, her job is to situate artworks in historical context.

“The art is not just important historically, it’s very important politically and ethically,” she said.

The assistant professor in the Department of Art History and Music said he infuses the classical tradition with a “jazz edge.” And it’s not just his music that departs from a purely classical approach, but also his teaching.

“You’re not studying music necessarily to become concert pianist, that’s a very old fashioned and narrow conservatory approach,” he said. “Music is just like anything else in the humanities; there’s not an exact job that corresponds to an English major. This is not a pre-professional training program or trade school.”

Fordham’s instruction, in fact, offers music students a broad humanities education along with any focus on performance, he said.

Lincoln-DeCusatis will be giving a preshow talk on Frank Sinatra to alumni attending the “Sinatra at 100” concert at Jazz at Lincoln Center as part of a sold out Fordham Alumni Culture and Entertainment event. The event marks the centenary of Sinatra’s birth. He said he would focus on Sinatra’s comeback in the 1950s.

“One thing that falls in the scholarship is there is this interregnum between the end of the big band era with jazz and the beginning of rock and roll with Elvis,” he said.

“There’s about 10 years between the end of World War II and the mid-1950s where it was all about the Rat Pack Era with Sinatra, Sammy Davis, and Dean Martin.”

It was also a period in which musicians frequently mixed jazz and classical, as Lincoln-DeCusatis does today.

“My take is there aren’t as many boundaries between those things as you would think,” he said.

Through a Fordham Faculty Research grant, Lincoln-DeCusatis is working with an ensemble composition that blends big band and chamber classical. He said it’s written for 10 musicians and is a long piece with jazz improv that straddles both worlds.

The structure of classical music and free form of jazz improvisation aptly describes Sinatra’s musicality, he said. But he stressed that whether someone improvises, or whether someone even reads music, should not be taken as a reflection of his or her musical intellect.

“Sinatra wasn’t as fluent a music reader as you think,” he said. “But had an encyclopedic musical knowledge. Think of all the tunes that he just knew off the top of his head.”

More importantly, he said, in an age when vibrato and showiness reigns as a sign of musicality, Sinatra was a subtle interpreter.

“We like to think of this guy as a musical genius who was just naturally gifted, but that’s actually a myth,” he said. “Frank Sinatra was someone who worked incredibly hard at his craft to develop his voice (and) expand his range, and he did this very, very carefully.

“For him it wasn’t about this virtuosic Mariah Carey style of musical delivery where it’s all over the place,” he said. “Something we lost in popular song that Sinatra had was a simple, clean style.”

Lincoln-DeCusatis said that Fordham has traditionally taught music by stressing history and theory, essentially couching it within the humanities. But now the program includes the more creative aspects, such as performance, composition, and improvisation. While he still teaches music theory and jazz traditions, he also provides classroom support for Fordham’s collaboration with Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Recently he has partnered with the Department of Communication and Media Studies to create a production class for electronic music. The music department equipped the communication department’s state-of-the-art computer lab with keyboards and appropriate software.

“This first class is a good split between music and communication majors and some Gabelli students in there, too, who want to make beats,” he said.

The class, he said, shows one of the many opportunities that open up to music majors when they begin to “piece things together” to seek a niche in today’s competitive and diverse music industry.

“Fordham offers this broad education that makes you a well-rounded and cultured person in general, but it’ll also support you intellectually in anything you decide to do,” he said.

Music and technology will only grow in the coming years, he said. In addition to New York’s having a burgeoning tech sector, the city remains a center of the performing arts world, one that hires as much—if not more—for the back of the house as it does for the stage.

But thanks to a fine art facsimile of the historic tome in Fordham’s Walsh Library, students can flip through the lush pages and absorb a visual representation of medieval art and religion.

The Très riches heures facsimile is one of 300 books and objects donated to Fordham by Dr. James Leach, a New York physician who’s been curious about medieval manuscripts and liturgical books since he was young.

“When I was growing up, I had an interest in Latin and in the church,” said Leach, who heads the dermatology department at Lincoln Medical Center in the Bronx. “The prayer books I was familiar with were a springboard to begin looking at the older manuscripts.”

He began amassing a collection of fine art facsimiles of medieval manuscripts, which have been produced since around 1990, typically in limited-edition runs of 300 to 900 copies. He thought that Fordham, as a Catholic university with an established medieval studies program, would be the perfect repository for these works. Leach also donated a sizable collection of original Catholic prayer missals from the late-19th to early-20th centuries.

Nina Rowe, PhD, chair and associate professor of art history at Fordham, said the University is lucky to have such high-quality reproductions available for students.

Rowe said the Très riches heures is one of the “greatest hits” of medieval art history. She also has a few other favorites among the collection.

“I’m delighted to be able to teach students from the facsimiles of the Lindisfarne Gospels, an English monastic manuscript made around the year 700 and renowned for its so-called Carpet Pages, full-page designs with intricate interlace, often in the form of the cross,” she said.

“Another favorite facsimile of mine reproduces a Moralized Bible (sometimes called the Saint Louis Bible) from Paris, 1226 to 1236. Every page features eight circles arranged in four pairs, each with little scenes linking a vignette from the Hebrew Bible to a Christian or contemporary commentary. The images are especially fun when they depict the perceived vices of early 13th-century Parisian life, evoking the real world of the street in a remote period.”

Linda LoSchiavo, TMC ’72, director of the University libraries, said Leach’s contributions are an important addition to Fordham’s Special Collections.

“The facsimiles are an extraordinary example of medieval artistry,” she said. “They’re done with highly specialized devices, and the bindings are reproductions as well.”

The cover of a facsimile of the Sacramentary of Henry II, a liturgical manuscript from the late-10th to early-11th century, includes an intricate copy of the original’s ivory relief. Other facsimiles Leach has donated include the Eton Choirbook and the Lorsch Gospels.

The recent establishment of Fordham’s Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies, and the collection of Judaica being assembled by Magda Teter, PhD, the chair’s inaugural holder, prompted LoSchiavo to ask Leach if he would consider donating a a Haggadah, a book used during Passover seders. He was happy to oblige, and earlier this year donated a facsimile of the Barcelona Haggadah. The original dates to the middle of the 14th century.

Leach hopes his gifts will help Fordham students learn that art and illuminated manuscripts flourished during the medieval period, even though the era sometimes gets a bad rap.

“Most important is that they realize that ‘medieval’ is not purely a derogatory term,” he said. “It was an age of faith and artistic productivity that contributed to Western civilization.”

Thanks to the generosity of Bronx dermatologist James Leach, MD, a fine art facsimile of this medieval prayer book—one of the most famous illuminated manuscripts of the 15th century—is housed in Special Collections at Fordham’s Walsh Family Library. It is one of 300 facsimiles, prayer missals, and other objects donated to Fordham by Leach for the benefit of art history students and medieval studies scholars.

The image accompanies the prayer for the office of Prime, the third prayer reading of the day. The Virgin kneels before her son, who lies on a bed of straw, surrounded by angels. God the Father appears at the top of the image, in the semicircular lobe at the top of the frame. He is surrounded by flaming seraphim.

The text reads:

Deus in adiutorium meum intende

Domine ad adiuvandum me festina

Gloria Patri, et Filio: et Spiritui sancto

Translation:

Incline unto my aid O God.

O Lord make haste to help me.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son: and to the Holy Ghost.

The prayer continues on the following page.

Read more about Fordham’s collection of fine art facsimiles:

Bronx Doctor Donates Medieval Manuscript Facsimiles to Fordham

Alberto Burri’s paintings are slashed, stitched, slathered. They sometimes secrete media, like glue oozing from sutured burlap.

The artist was part of the avant garde in post-World War II Italy, when the nation was dealing with defeat and destruction. He used abandoned and discarded materials as if the paintings were part of a reclamation project, said Jo Anna Isaak, the John L. Marion Chair in the Department of Art History and Music.

Burri’s work is currently the subject of a Guggenheim Museum exhibit, “Alberto Burri: the Trauma of Painting.” On Dec. 1 Fordham will co-sponsor a symposium, “Alberto Burri: Materials, Methods, and Memory,” bringing exhibition curators Emily Braun and Carol Stringari together with Burri scholars and friends.

Burri entered the war as a doctor and left as an artist. His unconventional journey took him from serving in the Italian army in Tunisia to becoming a prisoner of war in Texas. Isaak called his time in the POW camp a “mixed bag,” in that his treatment wasn’t as severe as might have been experienced by Germans in Russian POW camps. But, she said, it was hardly easy. Rations were cut and he wasn’t always treated well.

As Burri was an officer in the Italian army, he wasn’t relegated to manual labor in the Texas camp. He was also given the chance to create after a priest helped several of the prisoners start art projects.

“This was an entirely self taught, self-activated activity,” said Isaak.

She added that the artistic activity began as de facto therapy for trauma resulting from war experiences and prison. His early work might fall into the category of folk art, but the artist quickly segued into the realm of serious art. The Red Cross shipped many of his paintings back to Italy, where he eventually returned in 1947.

He went home to a ravaged Italy, where Isaak said the people had been “mopping up” from the war for a while. The postwar landscape became fodder for the Italian avant garde, perhaps most familiarly in black-and-white Neorealist films.

The artist is best known for his series of Sacchi (sacks) paintings made from stitched and patched remnants of torn burlap bags, often combined with fragments of discarded clothing.

“Critics made various connections, none of which he liked, such as seeing his work as a mending or suturing of his wounds,” said Isaak.

Burri familiarized himself with the contemporary art scene in Rome too, influencing but not joining movements such as the Arte Povera, Neo-Dada, and Process art.

American artists dropped by his studio and were profoundly influenced, said Isaak. She called Robert Rauschenberg the “biggest pirate of his work.” The exhibit is the first Burri show in the United States in more than 35 years, she said, and the most comprehensive ever mounted of an influential master who got his start in an American prison.

The symposium is sponsored by the Honors Center of Italian Universities at Sapienza University in Rome and by Fordham’s Department of Art History and Music.

You can watch the symposium live on Dec. 1:

However, in 1521 the Spanish conquistadors arrived, bringing with them foreign diseases and advanced weaponry, and the city succumbed. A letter from Hernán Cortés, who led the expedition through Mexico, to King Charles V of Spain reports that Tenochtitlan had fallen and that his army had “destroyed and razed it to the ground.”

There is one problem with Cortés’ account, though, says Barbara Mundy, PhD: it isn’t true.

The Aztec empire endures

Mundy, a professor of art history who specializes in pre-Columbian America, takes Cortés to task in a new book released this summer, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City (University of Texas Press, 2015). In it, Mundy argues that the fall of the mighty Aztec empire was not a clear-cut victory for Spain. Tenochtitlan was not utterly destroyed by the conquistadors. Moreover, it remained a distinctly Amerindian city ruled by Aztec elites decades after the Spanish invasion.

“The Spaniards presented themselves as totally self-sufficient and in charge once they conquered Tenochtitlan, but it wasn’t like that,” said Mundy, who is the co-creator of the NEH-funded website Vistas, a digital collection of visual culture in Spanish America, and a fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

“There were 300 Spaniards and all around them were tens of thousands of conquered natives. So there was a delicate balance to maintain.”

The balance that was created, said Mundy, was more of a “working relationship” in which the native elite was given just enough power to keep the city running. The Spaniards still depended heavily on the Aztecs to maintain functionality.

Mundy first noticed this historical discrepancy while perusing ancient Aztec texts (she has studied the Aztec language of Náhuatl). Although the famed Tenochtitlan king Moctezuma was killed during the conquest, his reign did not end with his death, Mundy said. His descendants ruled for decades afterward, keeping the Aztecs squarely in power.

“Part of the reason they were so powerful was because they controlled the labor. When you needed 60,000 workers to do something, the Spanish viceroy couldn’t just clap his hand and make it happen—but the Aztec overlord could,” Mundy said.

The ecological genius of Tenochtitlan

Unlike the invading Spaniards, the Aztecs, who called themselves the Mexica (pronounced meh-SHEE-kah), were also master urbanists in an ecologically difficult region. Built on an island in the middle of a saltwater lake, Tenochtitlan drew its potable water from a system of dikes the Mexica built to collect and preserve fresh water that flowed in from the West. These dikes also helped during the rainy seasons, when Tenochtitlan was prone to flooding.

The city included a network of canals and aqueducts to irrigate massive chinampas (floating gardens) that the Mexica cultivated and to dispose of waste in order to curb the spread of water-born diseases such as cholera.

“The Mexica had very sophisticated knowledge of their environment,” Mundy said. “They offer a positive model for us today as we deal with drought and climate change. I think we can take some lessons from the Mexica about how to better cohabitate with Mother Earth and live in our world in a less destructive way.”

A confluence of histories

The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan also describes the Mexica’s brutality—they are infamous for offering human sacrifices to their gods. And yet, Mundy points out in her book, this style of warfare—albeit brutal—was far nobler than that of their European counterparts.

“Mexica warfare was fought among men as a valiant exercise. The idea was to capture your enemies alive, because the most noble thing you could do was bring your captives back and sacrifice them in your temple,” she said.

“The Spaniards were very different. They defeated the Mexica by breaking the water system in Tenochtitlan and starving everyone into submission—including women and children, whom the Mexica would never harm in battle, because behaving like that would compromise their sense of what it means to be human. So, to the Mexica, the Spaniards were horrible barbarians.”

Mundy’s message in the book, and in her research overall, is frank: History does not belong solely to the winners. We have to be attentive to other historical accounts—from both the conquered as well as the conquerors.

“There’s never just one historical narrative. The victors may get to tell their story first, but there are these other enduring stories that belong to other groups of people, and it’s important to understand that those histories have legacies that influenced the way the world is shaped today.”