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LAWRENCE — The Common Book program at the University of Kansas will relaunch in 2021-22 with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s critically acclaimed and bestselling “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.” Programming will include a visit by the author in November and collaboration with Haskell Indian Nations University.
Author illuminates feud between classical composers
LAWRENCE – A University of Kansas music professor’s new book, “Stravinsky in Context,” highlights the artistic conflict between rival 20th-century classical music composers Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg. Alan Street describes the friction between the two preeminent European-born composers as rooted in their aesthetics and exacerbated by media coverage of their work.
KU Army ROTC hosts Ranger Challenge Competition
LAWRENCE — Teams from 35 universities across the country converged on the soggy fields of Rim Rock Farm last weekend to participate in a grueling military skills challenge known as the Ranger Buddy Competition, hosted by the University of Kansas Jayhawk Battalion. The 254 Army ROTC cadets participated in two-person teams, with two KU students winning the co-ed division.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Kate Nygren, Office of Academic Programs & Experiential Learning, 785-864-0237, [email protected]
University of Kansas announces 2021 Common Book
LAWRENCE — After a brief hiatus, the Common Book program at the University of Kansas will relaunch in 2021-22 with new and exciting collaborations. First, KU and Haskell Indian Nations University will unite to explore the same book, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s critically acclaimed and bestselling “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.”
“This partnership will enable our two communities to work together on creating a broad range of opportunities to engage with an extraordinary book, the questions it asks and the ways in which it challenges us to think, feel and act differently,” said Susan Klusmeier, vice provost for academic success. “The Common Book program at KU looks forward to future collaborations with Haskell.”
Second, the Common Book program at KU will move forward as a partnership between Academic Success and the Hall Center for the Humanities, with a reaffirmed commitment to maximizing integration of the Common Book into the curriculum.
“Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift,” writes Robin Wall Kimmerer in “Braiding Sweetgrass.” This thought-provoking collection of essays weaves together botany, the teachings of Indigenous peoples and Kimmerer’s own experiences as a mother, teacher and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Her essays explore the intertwined relationship between humans and the countless plant species that co-inhabit the planet, considering ways in which we can learn from plants as we seek to build a more sustainable world.
“Braiding Sweetgrass” takes on vital and timely themes such as sustainability and the value of reciprocity. It will encourage students at KU and Haskell to engage thoughtfully and in a spirit of compassion with each other and the Earth.
Kimmerer will visit KU and Haskell from Nov. 10 to Nov. 11 to meet with students and to give a public talk hosted by the Hall Center for the Humanities.
Common Book programs have the shared goal of encouraging students to become involved in the intellectual life of their universities. They connect students, faculty and staff across campuses and communities. The selection committee – with representation from KU and Haskell – concluded that “Braiding Sweetgrass” will be a particularly rich addition to courses in a wide range of disciplines and programs.
Details will follow soon about how to obtain copies of the book, and there will be multiple opportunities to participate in discussion groups and events during the fall and spring semesters. These conversations will also take place in a broad network of courses.
Please check in regularly with the KU Common Book website for updates.
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Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman
Author illuminates feud between classical composers
LAWRENCE – He doesn’t go there in the new book “Stravinsky in Context” (Cambridge University Press), but Alan Street is fine if you think of the artistic conflict between rival 20th-century classical music composers Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg as akin to the Biggie-Tupac feud.
No actual shots were fired by Stravinsky, Schoenberg or their crews, but tons of shade was thrown. And those were the days, let’s not forget, when aesthetic arguments could – and performances of works by both men did – cause riots.
“Creative egos are large, and they tend to bounce off each other,” said Street, associate professor of music theory at the University of Kansas. “If we think about Biggie and Tupac, it’s not that sort of muscular standoff. But it is a case of not giving ground, of wanting people to know that you have your opinions, and you have a deep sense of your own significance, when perhaps most of the public is indifferent to the work you do.”
At least in part like the rappers, Street describes the friction between the two preeminent European-born composers as rooted in their aesthetics and exacerbated by media coverage of their work. Street, a specialist in Schoenberg, was one of 35 authors invited to contribute an essay, in his case focusing on the pitched intellectual and musical battle the two men waged from the 1920s through the 1940s, spitting plenty of fire along the way.
Street’s chapter, “Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky: Adorno and Others,” refers to philosopher Theodor Adorno’s contributions to the contretemps, which heavily favored Schoenberg. Street writes that it was Adorno’s 1949 book, “Philosophy of New Music,” that codified the critical notion of Schoenberg as the alienated prophet whose often dissonant 12-tone system was forward-thinking as compared to the example set by Stravinsky, the reactionary apologist for the commodity logic of the culture industry.
Street concludes that’s not entirely fair to Stravinsky, a creative chameleon who, notably after Schoenberg’s death, wound up adapting Schoenberg’s serialist language widely thought of as progressive. Even so, the two men were like oil and water, Street said. Crucially, (though both wound up in the United States) Schoenberg was German- and Stravinsky Russian-born.
“It’s to do with compositional principles, which are partly technical,” Street said, “but it’s more an antipathy informed by tradition – in particular the widespread assumption that the preeminent musical tradition was German … that lineage from J.S. Bach through Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, all the way to Brahms. Then at the end of the 19th century Wagner comes along, and he forces a choice as to its appropriate continuation.
“Stravinsky is a Russian artist and thus a member of another very strong tradition represented by musicians like Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky. So Stravinsky knew his background counted for a good deal, even if it might be misrepresented as peripheral.
“For him, music became a much more objective mode of expression. There’s this very famous quote from Stravinsky saying music is essentially powerless to express anything at all. Whereas for a German musician of the 19th century, that might be anathema.
“If we think of Schoenberg as typifying this German tradition of expression from within — that everything emanated from the spirit — for Stravinsky it’s exactly the opposite. Aesthetic truth is grounded in the body. And for Russian composers, the ballet would be seen as a preeminent genre.”
Stravinsky composed at the piano, while Schoenberg revered creative spontaneity and simply wrote down what came into his head – “like a kind of automatic transmission from the subconscious,” Street said.
“Stravinsky sits at the keyboard and figures it out underneath his fingers,” the researcher said. “If it feels right, and it sounds right, it is right. It’s almost as though the fingers, for Stravinsky, are miniature ballet dancers on the keyboard. It’s as literal as that: feeling your way, almost grubbing about in the roots of the soil would seem to him to be the right mode of invention. I think that’s a very crucial distinction between them.”
Even toward the end of his life, when he seemed to have assimilated Schoenberg’s theoretical innovation, Stravinsky nonetheless did it on his own terms, Street said.
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Contact: John Clark, Army ROTC, [email protected]
KU Army ROTC hosts Ranger Challenge Competition
LAWRENCE — Teams from 35 universities across the country converged on the soggy fields of Rim Rock Farm last weekend to participate in a grueling military skills challenge known as the Ranger Buddy Competition, hosted by the University of Kansas Jayhawk Battalion.
The competition is held annually but was canceled in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, with pandemic mitigation measures in place, KU hosted the competition once more for 254 Army ROTC cadets. Each school could field men’s, women’s and co-ed teams, each team consisting of two cadets.
The competition began with a 15-kilometer (9.3 mile) march for cadets while carrying a 35-pound ruck sack. Teams then navigated more than a dozen “stations” over a two-mile skills course. They disassembled and reassembled various military weapons, performed first aid, read military topographical maps, communicated on tactical radio equipment, including a call for MEDEVAC, and employed claymores and hand grenades. To finish, they ran a 5-kilometer (3.1 mile) race in their tactical uniforms, then scaled a 9-foot-high wall to cross the finish line.
The winning teams in each division came across the finish line between four and five hours after starting.
“These cadets are tough, and this is a tough course. I don’t think anyone will complain about it being too easy in the after action review,” said Lt. Col. John Finch, the commander of the Jayhawk Battalion.
Though teams from as far as Rhode Island and Virginia competed in the event, the winners in each of the divisions came from closer to home. KU won the co-ed division, the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities won the women’s division, and the University of Central Missouri won the men’s division. The overall winner – determined by the top-placed team in each division – was Kansas, who fielded strong teams in each category.
The overall winner of the competition receives a trophy, a much coveted streamer for their battalion guidon and a guaranteed slot for a cadet in their program to attend Air Assault school in Fort Campbell, Tennessee.
“The conditions this year made the event especially taxing,” said Cadet Rachel Witt, a member of the winning KU co-ed team and a three-time winner of the event (2018, 2019 and 2021).
Witt, who has a full ROTC scholarship and majors in exercise science, will graduate in May and commission as a 2LT in the Kansas Army National Guard as a field artillery officer. Her teammate, Cadet Arik Parker, is majoring in general studies in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.
The University of Kansas Jayhawk Battalion recruits, develops and commissions quality talent who are dedicated, motivated and resilient in order to provide the nation the next generation of agile and adaptive leaders of character who are prepared to lead teams and win in a complex world.
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