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In the formative years of his conducting career, a young Maestro Rossen Milanov’s diet largely consisted of the works of Austrian composer Gustav Mahler, known for his intimate symphonies that peer into the most vulnerable of life’s moments. Consumed by Mahler’s visceral themes of life’s triumphs and despair, Milanov listened to the symphonist’s compositions all day and night.

“The works of Mahler are something that helped me form myself as a musician, as a conductor,” Milanov said. “It is something that drew me very much into the profession of conducting; just the depth on the diversity of experiences and the scope of the emotions that one could find in this music is something that appeals very much to me, and I’m sure it appeals to a lot of people and musicians that are exposed to it for the first time.” 

One of the symphonies that shaped Milanov in the infancy of his musical career now fittingly fall to the musicians of the Music School Festival Orchestra in a titanic joint performance with the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra. 

Under the baton of CSO Music Director Milanov, the CSO and the MSFO will join forces to perform Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D Major, known as “Titan,” at 8:15 p.m. Thursday, July 21, on the Amphitheater stage.  

This annual collaborative concert follows in the tradition of 2021’s performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Festive Overture, Op. 96, a 2019 performance of Stravinsky’s
“Rite of Spring” and Schnittke’s “(K)ein Sommernachtstraum,” as well as 2018’s “Leningrad,” also from Shostakovich. 

Mahler’s 1888 piece was specifically chosen for the CSO and MSFO performance, as a large orchestra is required to play Mahler’s challenging, intricate composition. The Amp stage will hold 160 musicians total for the evening’s event. 

“The great orchestras of the 19th century, when Mahler would have written this work, would have had no passive string sections,” said MSFO Artistic and Music Director Timothy Muffitt. “For economic reasons, the modern symphony orchestras are slimmed down a little bit, so it’s exciting to go back and experience the sonority a massive string section can create.” 

Defined by four movements, Symphony No. 1 slowly climbs in pace throughout 70 minutes in a story of heroics and nature’s awakenings. Mahler first introduced the piece to the public in Budapest on Nov. 26, 1889, with five movements, and would go on to revise the symphony for the next 10 years, eventually reducing the movements from five to four. The composition goes by the name “Titan,” as Mahler’s music was inspired by the heroic character detailed in Jean Paul Richter’s novel Titan. 

Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 contains themes of deep despair and triumphs, while also combining natural elements that surround people, like bird sounds and outbursts of wind. Milanov described the piece as “a moment that shatters illusions, but also love and tenderness and intimacy. It’s the entire life.”

Muffitt said the way Mahler approaches nature in his music is truly “an enormous spectrum of musical expression.”

“Mahler writes landscapes into his music, he writes the mountains into his music,” Muffitt said. “He writes nature into his music, he writes birds into his music. He creates the feeling of life in rural villages by incorporating elements of folk music. He really paints musical landscapes that are full of the kinds of details that one encounters in life, and are in the life of his time.”

Milanov hopes Chautauquans will have an introspective experience when listening to Symphony No. 1 in D Major. 

“I don’t think that there’s any other composer that has the audacity and the courage to reveal completely what they think in a very intimate way,” Milanov said. “Classical music could be incredibly stylized, and there are a lot of composers that don’t necessarily want you to know what this music is all about. But with Mahler, he is so revealing. That’s why audiences love him, and that’s why musicians and conductors love him. … It’s not about judgment. It’s about kind of looking deeper into ourselves and who we are, and whether we could relate to this moment, in a way that he brings them up for us, deep inside ourselves.”

Symphony No. 1 challenges not only the audience to reflect on their lives, but the students of the MSFO, who have undertaken the task of performing the composition with the CSO. It is especially difficult for musicians early in their career, as the piece moves through different music styles, reflecting the melting pot of Mahler’s home of Vienna; musicians need to be able to read from classical music to Viennese polka in the piece, while keeping Jewish and German musical influences in mind, which is why Muffitt said working with the seasoned professionals of the CSO is a valuable learning experience for the MSFO students.

“The opportunity to sit next to seasoned professionals and absorb the way they approach orchestral music-making, people who have been doing it for some time now, and to be able to soak up that experience of being right next to a person who is doing the job that these musicians hope to have at some time, is extraordinary,” Muffitt said. 

The MSFO has been preparing for the symphony since their last performance on July 11, under the direction of 2022 David Effron Conducting Fellow Yeo Ryeong Ahn. It will join the CSO on the Amp stage for the first time this afternoon for rehearsal.

“This is what Chautauqua is all about,” Milanov said. “I think these kinds of projects could only exist here because we really enjoy working together. All the musicians, whether we are part of a professional group or we are part of an opera company, or we are part of music school, we all have the same goal, and we get along very well. This music happens to be the connective tissue of everything that is happening here artistically.”

Both Muffitt and Milanov look forward to the joint performance and expect a night full of inspiration for the orchestras and audience alike. 

“I’m hoping that this is an enlightening, enriching and inspiring experience,” Muffitt said. “It’s an opportunity to hear a work that will be familiar to many of (the people in the audience). … They’re going to hear something that will be a very powerful and unforgettable evening.”

Barbara Savage, the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought in the Department of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, has a wide range of research interests grounded in history. 

Savage teaches and researches 20th-century African American history; histories of American religion, social movements, media, politics, and the interrelations between those fields; and Black women’s political and intellectual history. Savage’s African American Heritage House Chautauqua Speaker Series lecture, at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, July 20, in the Hall of Philosophy, examines the weekly theme of “The Future of History.”

“The future of history is secure, despite recurring debates about whose history matters and why,” Savage said. “The narratives of American history must be as expansive and diverse and as complicated and contradictory as the lives of the people in it.”

Week Four aims to investigate questions about how our present will be recorded for future generations. It will explore how we will distill a near-infinite amount of information into digestible accounts of our times

The theme’s description asks: “Beyond the logistics of such questions, broader issues are at play: Who are the gatekeepers of our stories, and who do we trust to be stewards of our lives and memories?”

“As an esteemed historian of African American history, Savage brings invaluable perspectives to the grounds,” said Camille Borders, AAHH program director. “Her work across disciplines of religious history and Black feminist studies has had massive impacts within academia and outside of it. This week she will bring voice to the experiences of Black women during the 19th and 20th century, while calling us all to do more in reflecting on our past as we chart new paths for our future.”

Excavating often neglected or misunderstood intellectual, political and social histories is a key element of Savage’s scholarship. Her most recent book, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion, examined the history of diverse thought around the interconnection of Black churches and politics. Savage challenges the assumption that the relationship between Black churches and progressive activism is an indissoluble link, instead presenting a diversity of perspectives and debates on the role of the church in struggles for racial equality. 

Her writing reveals the web of associations and political and economic factors that gave rise to the myth of the inextricable intertwinement of church and political struggle. It uses history as a lens for examining the present and the future.

“The recurring social, political and theological tensions which drove the debates recovered in this book remain as real and as pertinent today as they were a century ago,” Savage wrote. “At a time when African American religion and politics are still viewed as inextricably linked, this book seeks to highlight rather than submerge the inherent and often incurable tensions that mark the connections between Black religion and Black political activism.”

Savage is currently working on an intellectual biography of professor Vernie Merze Tate, an African American woman who, while working at Howard University, was a trailblazer in the fields of diplomatic history and international relations. 

This work is in line with Savage’s overall scholarship on Black women’s political and intellectual history and will tell the story of a Black female intellectual whose work is rarely, if ever, spotlighted in American history classes. Savage co-edited a collection, titled Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, in which her introductory essay on Tate appears. 

In the introduction Savage and her co-editors wrote: 

“Historical scholarship on Black women especially has yet to map the broad contours of their political and social thought in any detail, or to examine their distinctive intellectual tradition as often self-educated thinkers with a sustained history of wrestling with both sexism and racism.” 

Savage will discuss her research on Tate as part of her lecture, asking audiences to consider what one woman’s life and work can teach us about our shared history. Savage is a steward of overlooked, erased and misunderstood histories, highlighting them in our current moment and beyond.

When it comes to new ways of recording history, Wikipedia is often the first thing that comes to mind. Andrew Lih, a technology journalist and historian of Wikipedia, will bring his research and online collaboration experience to Chautauqua, speaking at 10:45 a.m. Wednesday, July 20, in the Amphitheater.

Continuing Week Four’s Chautauqua Lecture Series discussion on “The Future of History,” Lih will present the opportunities Wikipedia and its open source data have for making information more accessible to the world.

Lih began researching the online encyclopedia in the early 2000s when its crowdsourcing model began to generate expansive growth. After a team of volunteers and one paid professional created just 12 articles in their first year, it was apparent that a radical new method was needed to build content.

Using Wiki software, originally created to allow programmers to share and refine computer code, anyone on Earth could now start and contribute to articles, lifting the project off the ground. It was a model that worked “in practice, but not in theory,” Lih said at Harvard Law School in 2009. He was astounded that such a thing could be written by nonexperts.

“I couldn’t believe that all these articles were created by people around the world collaborating on the Internet and producing such great work,” Lih said in 2009.

The “core non-negotiable policy” that makes Wikipedia work is its neutral point of view and objectivity standard; all contributors can work cooperatively in one direction when their goal is to create a cohesive and comprehensive perspective.

Wikipedia’s policy of neutrality has allowed it to flourish, as it aims to “represent fairly, proportionally, and as far as possible without bias, all significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic,” Lih said in a 2014 TEDx talk.

In his book The Wikipedia Revolution: How A Bunch of Nobodies Created The World’s Greatest Encyclopedia, Lih explains how Wikipedia became a solution for humanity, addressing the problem of a “knowledge gap:” the former lack of a complete record of human history between initial reporting by news outlets and encyclopedias writing about it. After a news cycle completed a topic, it was necessary to wait for “heritage institutions, book writers or historians” to further cover the topic. Wikipedia’s technology enabled continuously-edited articles on millions of subjects, bridging that divide.

“What Wikipedia does, how it functions, is it fills in that gap and is this working draft of history,” Lih said in 2014.

For many years after its conception, Wikipedia survived solely on individual donations to cover all operating costs, living a “hand-to-mouth existence,” Lih told his TEDx audience. 

Now, its future looks more sustainable. The Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia and other community projects that aim to develop and distribute freely licensed knowledge and education content, launched an endowment in 2016 — now holding over $100 million — to support its objectives.

Having become well-established as the world’s go-to resource for information, museums and historical institutions across the globe have recognized Wikipedia’s legitimacy and seen opportunities for collaboration to make the site’s articles more accurate and complete. Agencies such as the National Archives and Records Administration and institutions such as the Smithsonian have hired employees known as “Wikipedians in residence,” who are tasked with facilitating these collaborations and building connections between the organization and Wikipedia’s contributor network.

Lih currently works in a similar position as digital and Wikimedia Strategist for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He focuses on the utility of Wikidata, the open data and knowledge base supporting Wikipedia articles, in enriching the Met’s online presence and enabling much more content from cultural institutions like the Met to be imported and made available for free. Lih’s work using linked open data to make connections over humanity’s cultural history will be central to his talk.

Wikidata, which stores concepts and relationships between subjects in a structured, multilingual, freely-licensed way, has the power to “bring together historically disconnected and incompatible information,” Lih said at a 2019 Museum Computer Network conference. Open-access linked data is a major step towards realizing the original Web dream for a network of databases people can read and contribute to, of which Wikidata is a part.

As Wikipedia has enabled the quick and effective sharing of history across the globe for the past two decades, Wikidata stands now as another “wonderful crowdsourcing experiment,” making possible new connections across cultures and heritages. Free, open and timely data will make the future of history all the more accessible.

The relationship between culture, religion and spirituality are the cornerstones in Rabbi Shaul Magid’s belief of manifesting in the fullness of life. Magid, a distinguished fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, works to exemplify the advances and critiques made by the New Age Movement in the 1970s. He will be giving his lecture, titled “Can Religion Survive Spirituality? A View from Jewish Mysticism after the New Age,” at 2 p.m. Wednesday, July 20, in the Hall of Philosophy.

He takes note from Robert Fuller’s book Spiritual, but not Religious as a guideline to how American counterculture was trying to criticize religion. The New Age Movement drove people in the latter part of the 20th century into the idea of being spiritual, but not religious.

“You can see this in unchurched Christians, the challenges of Jewish denominations and synagogue, the way it was moving away from religion, but not toward the secular as it was conventionally understood,” Magid said. 

Next, he wants to speculate how the last 20 to 25 years have been a sort of “return to religion,” in the mixing of politics and religion within Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

“I want to talk about a kind of trajectory of modernity from the kind of disenchantment of the world that’s called the sociologist maximum to kind of reinvent the world through the New Age,” Magid said. 

Magid said that while he doesn’t have any solutions to these trajectories he thinks are chipping away at religions, he hopes people begin to think creatively and carefully about culture, religion and spirituality.

“Hopefully, they come away feeling a sense of context and understanding a little bit about what these chips (in religion) are and where they come from,” Magid said. “Nothing is created from a plot, so the return to religion, the way we see it, in the rise of religious fundamentalism, it doesn’t come from nowhere. It has its own history.”

Religion has never been separate from politics, contrary to what some may think. Magid cited Islam spreading through the Islamic Conquest as an example. 

Magid said the modern world is trying to create more of a separation between church and state, which is breaking down American society.

“The danger’s really when religion starts to dominate the political sphere and curtails different kinds of movements or different kinds of progress within the society, and then begins to discriminate against those people who don’t hold those religious beliefs,” Magid said.

The tension that holds America together is the political sphere not wanting to erase religion, but to dominate it, Magid said, to be able to implement itself into society. He grew up as a secular Jew, but said Judaism really began to speak to him in his early 20s. 

Magid lived in Israel for a while and became a rabbi, then came back to America and decided to focus on an academic career tied to Judaism. His favorite thing is to watch younger students become open to the world and its ideas of humanity and religion, which he also hopes to do in his lecture. 

“The second thing would be really to unsettle the way that people think about these kinds of stories of meaning, because that’s really about the culture and religion,” Magid said. 

He said the job of a scholar is to unsettle some of the conventional notions of how people live their lives and the value systems they adopt.

“Part of what I find rewarding is created from the unsettling of those notions that … it’s very easy to be a pessimist about the world today for a variety of reasons, and there are very good reasons,” Magid said. “It’s those moments of watching people rethink what they thought or watching students become open to a world that they didn’t know existed.”

For guest conductor Yue Bao, the title of this evening’s Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra program — “Fateful Encounter” — holds special meaning, as it was her own fateful encounter with Chautauqua Institution that helped launch her on her path.

Bao was the 2018 David Effron Conducting Fellow at the School of Music, mentored by Music School Festival Orchestra Music Director Timothy Muffitt, and led her fellow students in Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé Suite, op. 60 in a Monday evening Amphitheater performance.

It was a formative summer for Bao, who is now the Ting Tsung and Wei Fong Chao Foundation Assistant Conductor of the Houston Symphony. She returns to the grounds to conduct the CSO at 8:15 p.m. Wednesday, July 20, in the Amp. On the program are Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4 in A major, op. 90 — simply known as the Italian Symphony — and Beethoven’s Fifth.

Bao remembers sitting in on CSO rehearsals and attending concerts in 2018. She knew a few of the musicians, but never worked directly with them. Now, to conduct the CSO, “making music with them, sharing the music with the audience, is very meaningful,” she said.

“I’m just looking forward to being back and working with these wonderful musicians,” she said. “Hopefully, I can bring a memorable night to Chautauquans.”

After leaving Chautauqua, Bao graduated in 2019 with an Artist Diploma from The Curtis Institute of Music (she also holds degrees in orchestral conducting and opera accompanying from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, and a Master of Music in orchestral conducting from the Mannes School of Music). After graduating from Curtis, she toured China with the Vienna Philharmonic, made her subscription debut with the Houston Symphony on opening night of its 2020-2021 season, conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the 2021 Ravinia Festival and debuted with both the San Francisco Symphony and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

“I’m very lucky to have these great experiences with great orchestras and musicians — and going back to the CSO? I’m so excited to be back,” Bao said.

The evening’s program, Bao said, is designed to be colorful and delightful — perfect for a summer night outdoors.

“The Italian Symphony is a great choice,” she said. “Mendelssohn wrote it during a trip across Europe, and it’s just perfect for a concert like this. You just feel like you’re out in an Italian field, enjoying the summer.”

As for the Beethoven selection, the Fifth is “inimitable,” Bao said. Arguably the composer’s best-known work (from “Looney Tunes” to a riff in “Saturday Night Fever”), Symphony No. 5 is on tonight’s program as a “delayed celebration” of Beethoven’s 250th birthday, celebrated all across the globe — to the extent possible, or not possible — in 2020.

“We still need to celebrate,” Bao said. “(The Mendelssohn and the Beethoven) are definitely two massive symphonies of their times, and I’m excited because this starts some of my own further exploration of Beethoven’s Fifth — I’ll conduct the Minnesota Orchestra in it next week, as well.”

Those performances, on July 28 and July 29, will mark Bao’s debut with the Minnesota Orchestra. Much of her conducting journey, she said, was made possible through what she learned about “cooperative, collaborative process” at Chautauqua.

“It was a wonderful experience for me,” Bao said. “I not only accumulated a lot of repertoire and experiences — I was just able to enjoy the positive vibe there. Everyone is welcoming, everyone seems to enjoy making music and making art there, and communicating with each other. It’s not just a music festival. … Musicians don’t just collaborate with each other, but with dancers, the visual artists. It was such an enjoyable summer for me.”

Starting in the 1790s, Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation, gave birth to six children. Since their birth, the father of the children has been continuously debated. 

In the 1960s, while Annette Gordon-Reed was in elementary school, she became interested in history, including the life of Jefferson. Gordon-Reed has since authored multiple books about the third president of the United States, including The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, which was selected as a 2009 Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle book.

Gordon-Reed’s work has drawn the conclusion that Jefferson was the father of Hemingses children, and has changed scholarship surrounding the topic. 

At 10:45 a.m. Tuesday, July 19, historian, law professor and author Gordon-Reed will deliver a lecture in the Amphitheater following Week Four’s theme of “The Future of History.” Her lecture, “On Juneteenth,” will cover how history is taught. 

“I plan to talk about the recent controversies about the teaching of history,” she said, “why I think it’s important that we resist the efforts to water down the truth for children. It can be told in an age-appropriate manner, but skipping over things is not the answer.”

For The Hemingses of Monticello alone, Gordon-Reed won 16 book prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2009 and the National Book Award in 2008.  

She has authored five other books and written for major publications including The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine and The New York Times. Her most recent book is the 2021 New York Times Bestseller On Juneteenth, which combines memoir with crucial American history. 

Her career has been filled with awards and accomplishments, but she said changing perceptions of history and “getting people to think differently about the institution of slavery and the role of members of the founding generation in the institution” has been the most rewarding. 

Her work changing the narrative of Monticello has been especially gratifying.

“I have enjoyed seeing the changes in the story of Monticello, in particular,” Gordon-Reed said. “Adding the lives of other people  — the enslaved — to the story was what I wanted to do.”

Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. She formerly served as the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard University and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Through her work as a professor, Gordon-Reed said she hopes to impart to her students an ability to view what they hear and read through a critical lens.

She wants the audience at her lecture today to understand the importance of the current political climate of the United States. 

“We should take our politics very seriously at this time,” Gordon-Reed said. “We can look to the past for examples of wrong decisions made, and try to avoid repeating those mistakes.”

She drew parallels between the state of the country now, and its state following Reconstruction. Gordon-Reed recommends reading books on that time period for people trying to educate themselves more on the history of the country.

“The period after the Civil War, when the country was attempting to bring Black people into citizenship, and when the Civil War amendments  — the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution — were created, presented a time not unlike our own,” she said. “We have just come off of having the first Black president, and other enormous cultural changes that have disquieted a number of people.”

With recent legal changes, especially the overturn of Roe v. Wade, Gordon-Reed suggests people take their responsibility of voting and participating in government seriously. The threats to democracy around the world should motivate people to consider what they want the future of the country to look like, she said. 

“There are forces at work that are hostile to the idea of democracy and republicanism, with a small ‘r.’ The authoritarian turn is present in other parts of the world, as well,” Gordon-Reed said. “We have to decide if the experiment (that began) in 1776 will continue.” 

Science cannot exist without religion, and vice versa. The science of evolution plays into the work of God, said Franciscan Sr. Ilia Delio OSF, who works to transform people’s perception of reality into a new understanding of religion in the 21st century.

Delio, who is the Josephine C. Connelly Endowed Chair in Christian Theology at Villanova University, will give her lecture, titled “Infinite Matter, Infinite God: In Search of a New Myth,” at 2 p.m. Tuesday, July 19, in the Hall of Philosophy for the Interfaith Lecture Series.

“Ilia Delio is a cosmic thinker,” said Director of Religion Maureen Rovegno. “Ilia’s consciousness echoes theologian Paul Tillich in universally applicable contexts, and her wisdom for how ‘being’ is evolving in our understanding will be inspiring in a way that will make us all smile.”

The main and first point of her lecture is that matter, matters. Everything in the world — every organism, tree branch, human cell, bird and critter — is made up of matter. Delio cites Tillich and his idea of new materialism, which states matter has its own life force.

“There’s a consciousness that runs throughout nature, there’s a life force that is … basically what we call God. God is the power that’s existing throughout all existence,” Delio said. “I think that’s a real radical turn from our idea of ‘the old guy in the sky.’ ”

With the reality of the fractured state of the world including global warming, environmental crises and more, Delio said people have a naive understanding of matter.

“The first thing is to recognize that matter has divine properties,” Delio said. “Matter is the place of the sacred. Matter is not just particles interacting with one another; matter has an infinite depth.”

The second point in her lecture focuses on wanting her audience to understand that their minds matter. The more mindful people are, the more matter will matter.

Delio’s third point focuses on reshaping people’s perception of God.

“God is nothing like you thought. God is really the whole that keeps driving us onward, and toward which we seek to become the whole within every whole,” Delio said. “I think God is that future and that pull into a world of unity, where peace and charity can really reign, so matter, matter your mind, (be) mindful of our matter and know that God is entangled with the whole thing.”

Franciscan sisters follow the spirituality of St. Francis of Assisi, a medieval saint who found God in nature. As such, they strive to do the same.

“The (reward) is constantly being in touch with the sacred depths of nature, with the God-depths of our reality of our world, of our own selves, of what we’re trying to become,” Delio said. “It’s also challenging because a lot of religion is pretty much stuck with old paradigms, and trying to find ways to shift, like science has undergone significant changes.”

Modern science and technology have made massive advancements, but religion has not made as many. Delio said religion is tied to old structures and philosophical systems, and she tries to transform these paradigms regardless of the challenging opinions of skeptics.

Before becoming a sister, Delio was a research scientist in brain and spinal cord research. She said she loved pursuing unknown questions and decided to continue to pursue those questions in theology.

“A lot of my work has just been trying to ask ‘How do these two disciplines work together?’ And so I just kind of fell in it because I have degrees in both,” Delio said. “It was just natural to try to work bringing these things together.”

Delio said science and religion belong together and when they remain separated, it furthers the world’s problems.

“We can bring religion back into a healthy place in our lives where we can see that no matter what we’re doing, we’re in search of something, we’re in search of more meaning,” Delio said. “I think science can help us know this world. I think religion can help us orient ourselves in this world.”

When the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra performs this evening, the waves of Chautauqua Lake will be lapping the shore just footsteps away from the Amphitheater, the audience nestled in this little corner of Western New York.

But the aim for the CSO, under the baton of guest conductor Tania Miller, music director emerita of the Victoria Symphony, is to share with the 8:15 p.m. Amp audience “Visions from Another Land.” Those visions are sweeping, ranging from a homeland in the Czech Republic, to Moscow, to Germany, to the other lands we all experience after death. 

The evening begins with Czech composer Bedřich Smetana’s “Vltava (The Moldau),” the second of the symphonic poems that make up his “Má Vlast (My Homeland),” before flowing into contemporary Russian-Swedish composer Victoria Borisova-Ollas and “The Kingdom of Silence,” written in honor of her late teacher, Nikolai Korndorf.

Both clock in at 15 minutes or less each, then give way to the evening’s main event: Beethoven’s nearly 40-minute-long Piano Concerto in C minor, op. 37, with guest pianist Sara Davis Buechner, who is on the piano faculty at Temple University, has recorded more than a dozen albums of classical works, and has won prizes at the Queen Elisabeth of Belgium International Piano Competition, the Leeds International Piano Competition, the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition and the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition.

Buechner gave a CHQ Assembly recital of Mozart, Brahms and Gershwin for the School of Music during its remote 2020 season, and previously played a Beethoven piano concerto with the CSO several years ago. But this Beethoven concerto, she said, is her favorite. 

“This is, in many ways, the most defiant of them all, of the five of them. This is the first concerto in which he truly asserts himself, and his true personality kind of shines forth,” Buechner said. “It’s pretty masterfully put together — I mean, you could say that about almost everything that Beethoven wrote, but this is the definition of the classical form.”

Following Mozart’s C Minor Piano Concerto, Buechner said Beethoven uses the key of C Minor in a similar way — “it’s very dark and stormy and turbulent, but then he breathes his own very assertive writing style to bear in this particular concerto” with a “really marvelous cadenza.”

The only of Beethoven’s concertos set in a minor key, Concerto No. 3 shifts to C Major in the finale, and in the middle is a “beautiful, bucolic slow movement” Buechner said. “It’s an oasis of sorts, and then ends in the major key. The coda sort of says, ‘OK, you’ve been through some hard stuff, but there’s glorious times ahead.’ ”

Not long after Beethoven completed work on this concerto, he would start to “confront his own deafness and what that meant in terms of his own life, his legacy, his mortality, all these kinds of deeper, darker issues,” Buechner said. But that’s yet to come.

“Here, he’s a relatively young composer; he’s still the firebrand revolutionary, but he’s going deeper,” Buechner said. “Because of that, it’s my favorite of his five concertos to play — it’s the perfect form, a perfect match. It’s like a great movie, with a lot of dark and stormy scenes, and then it has this great happy ending. I mean, who doesn’t like that?”

Buechner, while on the grounds, will also be leading a Piano Faculty Masterclass at 4 p.m. Wednesday in Sherwood Marsh Studios for the School of Music (masks are required and donations are welcome). Being back at Chautauqua, she said, presents “a very rare combination, doesn’t it? These are very talented young people. The (CSO) is sensational. And then there’s the long history of the place, which goes back so many decades.” 

She specifically noted George Gershwin, who in 1925 sat alone in one of the practice shacks and finished composing his Concerto in F Major for piano.

“I always feel like there’s a bit of foxtrot under my feet when I walk around here,” Buechner said. “It’s to say that the connections are both old and new, and (there) is something quite special about this place.”

Among the newer connections of Chautauqua, Buechner said she was particularly looking forward to taking the stage with Miller, who she counts as a “very old friend.” Buechner lived in Canada for about 12 years, and often played with the Victoria Symphony when Miller was conductor. 

“For me to come here to this beautiful, historic place and to play this concerto with her — that’s  a gift from the heavens,” Buechner said. “It’s beautiful.” 

Just like Homer’s hero Odysseus, the members of Ulysses Quartet had a long, intertwining and meandering journey before the quartet finally formed in 2015.

Seven years later and fresh off a three-year residency at The Juilliard School, the Ulysses Quartet comes to perform in the Chautauqua Chamber Music Guest Artist Series at 4 p.m. Monday, July 18, in Elizabeth S. Lenna Hall.

The members of the quartet, violinists Christina Bouey and Rhiannon Banerdt, violist Colin Brookes, and cellist Grace Ho, wanted a name that was meaningful to them.

“The name is such an important thing. We wanted something that resonated with us, but also carried some weight,” Brookes said.

When the group was searching for a name, Brookes was reading Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels: A Novel of the Civil War. Ulysses S. Grant’s first name inspired him, since “Ulysses” is the Latin variant of “Odysseus.”

Buoey happened to be driving through Ulysses, New York, when Brookes proposed the quartet name via text.

“We were like, ‘It’s meant to be,’ ” Ho said.

The group truly was meant to be, as each of the members had overlapping interactions with one another before finally becoming a quartet. Whether it was rooming together at the Manhattan School of Music or attending summer camp together, each member’s histories are interwoven.

Buoey recruited Ho to join her and Brookes, but they needed another violinist.

“We looked for another violinist for quite a while because we wanted somebody, right off the bat, that was going to be really just as dedicated as us,” Buoey said. “It’s hard to find. And so finally we found the missing piece to our puzzle, who was as crazy as us to dedicate their life to a quartet. And that was Rhiannon.” 

For its program this afternoon, the quartet chose an array of music united by a common theme.

“One thread that connects this program in particular is exciting rhythms and the way that we build them,” Brookes said.

He shared that Joan Tower, the composer of the piece “Wild Summer,” spent some time in South America. During her time there, the music of different cultures inspired her to play with rhythm.

“ ‘Wild Summer’ — it is really wild,” Banerdt said. 

He then shared the other music Chautauquans should expect to hear: Haydn’s String Quartet in G Major, and Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No. 5, among others.

“The Mendelssohn just has this effervescent, joyful energy almost the whole way through. The Danish String Quartet arrangement, first of all, I think I get goosebumps because it’s just so fun to play,” he said. “It’s this totally free, fun, joyous experience, and the audience always has this reaction because most of them don’t know them. And so it’s this really exciting discovery. And then Haydn, he’s the pop of the string quartet. Everything that we have kind of comes from him.”

Some of the pieces may have similar energy, but each achieves exciting rhythms through different means.

“(‘Wild Summer’) … is just non-stop unrelenting rhythm,” Buoey said. “And then, when we get to the Haydn, he actually does a lot of his rhythm in pauses and rests. And so he makes a lot of jokes throughout that piece. We’re basically showing how rhythm can be used to achieve different characters, different emotions. Sometimes it’s funny; sometimes it’s serious.”

The Ulysses Quartet is thrilled to bring this program to Chautauqua Institution for its first visit to the grounds.

“We’re all really excited about Chautauqua because it’s a famous institution. It’s been around for years,” Buoey said. “And when we get to go play at such festivals with that kind of history, it makes us feel like we’re also accomplishing something in the art world, which is a nice feeling, but first and foremost, we’re doing it for the music and to share our love for the music.”

Growing up with a taciturn father temperamentally disinclined to speak, Marilynne Robinson chose to express herself through her writing. It led her to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has written a plethora of fiction and nonfiction related to ideology, culture, politics, and to deliver a series of lectures at Yale University in 2009 addressing the debate between science and religion.

Robinson will be giving her lecture, “Let There Be, and There Is: Creation and Reality,” at 2 p.m. Monday, July 18, in the Hall of Philosophy to start off Week Four of the Interfaith Lecture Series theme “The Future of Being.”

Director of Religion Maureen Rovegno said the department’s request of Week Four’s lecturers is to take Chautauqua on a speculative journey of present and future realities.

“In this week, we ponder how our understanding of ‘being’ — both human and divine — might also evolve to reveal more consciously a new experience of what we now simply call ‘life,’ ” Rovegno said. “Marilynne is uniquely positioned, by her own life journey, to begin to lead us on our journey through this week.”

Robinson’s writing journey developed while she was an undergraduate at Brown University and continued as she completed her doctoral work at the University of Washington. Her nonfiction work allows readers to gain a sense of what their role is as human beings in the greater cosmic sense.

“I’m talking about science and religion, about the fact that they’ve been treated as being things that are necessarily opposed,” Robinson said. “I think that’s a big mistake and has been damaging to both of them and to civilization; (it) sort of turned into an adversarial situation where that was not fruitful.”

Both science and religion depend on each other, she said, and thinking otherwise impoverishes both sides of the conversation.

“The idea (is) that we’re all here in a way of trying to understand what we see and what we experience and so on,” Robinson said. “This can be interpreted as having religious meaning; it can also be interpreted in the terms of science. What human beings are is something that religion has dealt with endlessly and science does also with its various anthropologies.”

Modern physics, mathematics and anything in the realm of STEM have opened up the idea of what being consists of, Robinson said.

“I think there are ways in which the covetousness, the fact of complexities, underlies what is apparently true,” Robinson said. “These are things that ancient thought responds to more gracefully, and more fruitfully in many cases, than science or religion has done in the modern period.”

Her interest is piqued by how intertwined science and religion are.

“Science has given us so much to know and to absorb about what being is, more than Galileo could have dreamed of and yet, it seems to have almost no effect on our culture, including religious thought,” Robinson said. 

She hopes her audience will think about these achievements of modern science. “I hope they will reconsider the idea that science and religion are necessarily at odds,” Robinson said. “I hope it has given people some things to think about that are worth their time and attention.”

When Eliot A. Cohen was a young adult working in the archives of Boston’s Old State House, his mentor took him to the State Library of Massachusetts. There, he was presented with William Bradford’s original manuscript Of Plymouth Plantation. Later on, he would see the first charter of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the musket that produced “the shot heard around the world.”

Cohen said these formative experiences are what first interested him in history, and what continuously pull him back to history — his “first love.” 

This love influenced him to attend Harvard University and receive his bachelor’s in government before entering their doctorate program to earn a degree in political science.
Cohen then served as a military intelligence officer with the U.S. Army Reserve; he left his service there as a captain.

Now, he works as Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and as the Robert E. Osgood Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He will open Week Four, “The Future of History,” with his lecture, “Patriotic History: Dealing With the Terrible, the Great, and the Complicated Parts of Our Past” at 10:45 a.m. Monday, July 18, on the Amphitheater stage. 

Cohen’s lecture will look at historical figures Franklin D. Roosevelt, Robert E. Lee and Benedict Arnold, and examine some of the complicated, and contested, decisions they made. Cohen said that handling this analysis effectively is one of the larger challenges of his work. 

“How do you get people interested in the past, as it really was, without losing the ability to be inspired by some of the figures in it?” he asked. “I think if people look on their past as simply a tale of woe and crimes and lies and hypocrisy, then you have nothing in a time of trouble.”

At Chautauqua, Cohen will take a nuanced look at the complexity of historic figures. 

“What I want to do is talk to people about how (to) think about the complexity of individuals, some of whom we can probably basically agree are good, but flawed; some of whom we can agree are terrible, but have some impressive characteristics; and some of them are just complicated,” he said. 

Cohen’s experiences qualify him to lead Chautauquans in enlightened discussion on America’s history. His accomplishments include authoring three — soon to be four — books, mentoring both the current commander of the Marine Corp and the chief of the general staff of the Israeli military, and directing the U.S. Air Force’s first official study of the Gulf War in the ’90s, which earned him the Air Force’s Exemplary Civilian Service Award. He also served in the U.S. State Department, as Secretary Condoleezza Rice’s senior adviser on Iraq and Afghanistan. 

During his lecture, Cohen wants to encourage Chautauquans to hold empathy toward public figures and the decisions they are faced with as they maneuver in uncertain spheres.

“I think serving in government and seeing people make decisions, and live with their consequences, it really gave me … an even deeper appreciation for the difficulties of public life, the uncertainties under which people operate, and the need to empathize with that,” Cohen said. “… We’re in a time where people don’t do that. I’m hoping to encourage people to be empathetic.” 

That empathy is not easy to access, and our history is not always easy to reflect on, he said. A contributing writer to The Atlantic, Cohen authored a piece on America’s patriotic history that was inspired by the political events of recent years. He also authored an essay, “History, Critical and Patriotic” for Fordham Institute’s collection How to Educate an American: The Conservative Vision for Tomorrow’s Schools, which centered on the importance of an education on American history that is inspirational. 

“The country’s obviously at a difficult time and … part of the challenge is coming to terms with our past,” he said. 

Cohen finds importance in accepting the challenging parts of our history and understanding that, sometimes, historic moments are not easy to handle. 

“Who says we get off easy? Who says our life is supposed to be kind of linear and calm?” he asked. “We have no right to assume that ours will be or should be. The challenge is to show some courage and do something about it.”

If Gina Chavez had to describe her music in one word, it would be movimento — movement. 

And when she performed at Chautauqua Institution for the first time in 2019, that’s exactly what she brought with her. 

“We got people to dance,” Chavez said. “And then the security didn’t know what to do, because I guess they wanted to keep people out of certain areas. And I was like, ‘Just let them dance!’ ” 

Chavez will perform at 8:15 p.m. Monday, July 18, in the Amphitheater, marking her third time performing for a Chautuauqan audience and the second time in person (she gave a CHQ Assembly performance in 2020). She replaces the previously announced Ukrainian Chorus Dumka of New York. 

Although Chavez always loved to sing, she first discovered her talent for music when she joined choir in sixth grade. She has come a long way from the school choir, as she was a 2020 nominee for a Latin Grammy for Best Pop/Rock Album. Since the beginning of her career, Chavez has also won an Austin Music Award 12 times and has reached more 1.3 million views on her NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert on YouTube.

Chavez said that her voice saved her. She tends to lift others above herself but, she said, her voice has helped her to overcome that.

“I tend to be the kind of person who very easily makes my own voice small. But I have a big voice, a big singing voice. And so I think in a lot of ways, I’ve realized, ‘Wow, if I hadn’t had a voice that people wanted to listen to, I don’t know where I’d be or what I’d be doing,’ ” she said. “… What a blessing to have been given a voice. And, as a result, it’s such a gift to be able to share it.”

Chavez’s music incorporates multiple genres, such as Latin rock, folk and bossa nova. Her musical inspirations reflect the diversity of her own music, with inspirations including Brandi Carlile, Emily King and Calle 13. Though her music is eclectic, she aims to unite people through it. Chavez’s identity, which encompasses being biracial, queer and Catholic, shines through in different aspects of her music. She hopes people can relate to at least part of her story.

“I want to build bridges with music, and … if I have a superpower, that’s what it is: that I’m the kind of person that I have a lot of intersectionalities,” Chavez said. “I think as a result, I find that people maybe feel comfortable with me, or … can find themselves in parts of my story, or parts of my music. And as a result, I’d like to think that that helps bring different types of people together.” 

Two of her favorite songs that she has written are “La Que Manda” and “The Sweet Sound of Your Name.” 

Chavez described the process of creating “La Que Manda” as a moment when she got “to be the instrument instead of the creator.” 

She was struggling with the melody, so she entered the studio, played the instrumental track, and screamed until she found the track’s sound. 

“It’s like something new, but also kind of ancient, if that makes sense,” she said. “It feels very elemental. I feel like I’m standing barefoot on the ground, you know, 3,000 years ago, just screaming into the wilderness.”

“The Sweet Sound of Your Name” is a softer, acoustic track that acts as a love letter to her wife. 

“It was (written) at a time when neither of us thought that we could really be together because we were Catholic. And so it was kind of this ‘I love you, but I can’t have you’ song,” Chavez said. “It’s beautiful to sing that to her knowing that we’ve been together for 16 years now and have gotten to walk some beautiful paths together.”

Since her 2019 Chautauqua performance, she said she has grown as a performer, and is excited to share that with her audience tonight. 

“I’m bringing you my best self, so I’m very excited to take people on a journey, as we always have, through different sounds, through parts of my story, emotions, parts of the world,” she said. “But (it will be) definitely a next-level performance.”

She hopes that the performance offers people a new perspective and encourage open-mindedness. Given theWeek Four theme “The Future of History,” Chavez was reminded of “the idea that history is written by the winners, those in power.” Along with her goal of uniting people, she hopes to uplift different kinds of voices. 

“I do think that history repeats itself,” she said. “And my hope is that we can step in and start making room for the voices —  not that have not been speaking — but that we haven’t had the ears to hear, and that we would have the ears to hear other and more voices.”

Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, was a composer who counted Mozart, Salieri and Haydn as contemporaries. He was a private tutor to Marie Antoinette, a violinist, conductor, fencer, war veteran and abolitionist — and, as the son of a wealthy French planter and an enslaved African woman, the first-known classical composer of African ancestry. 

His story is one for the history books that have largely ignored his legacy. And when Bill Barclay went searching for Bologne’s compositions, he had to dig deep into archives across the world to find them. It’s a frustrating, ongoing process, but now Bologne’s compositions are the score for a piece of concept theater titled “The Chevalier: Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges.”

The work is a play with music, or a concert with actors, depending on how one looks at it, said Barclay, artistic director of Concert Theatre Works, former director of music at Shakespeare’s Globe, a director, composer, writer and producer — and the creative force behind “The Chevalier,” which will have its Chautauqua debut at 8:15 p.m. Saturday, July 16, in the Amphitheater, with a small group of actors. Ian Unterman plays Mozart, Merritt Janson plays Marie Antoinette, RJ Foster plays Bologne, and Brendon Elliott is the solo violinist — and they’re joined by the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Maestro Rossen Milanov.

“The Chevalier” was commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2018, with a debut the following year at Tanglewood Learning Institute, and in 2021 was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Grant.

Barclay wrote a full-length play of Bologne’s story, all the way through the French Revolution — 18 actors, 16 musicians, on a sweeping scale akin to Les Miserables. It’s a Broadway juggernaut, he said, and is continuing to be workshopped. Saturday’s performance is the concert version of the work, centering its dramatic and comedic scenes of Marie Antoinette, Mozart and Bologne against the backdrop of the French Revolution. It’s an 80-minute show, and will be followed by a talkback session in the Amp. 

Not much of Bologne’s music is played by modern orchestras; his Violin Concerto in A Major Op.7 No.1 is most common, Barclay said. “The Chevalier” is “an attempt to give Bologne a more full examination. We’re contextualizing his music, contextualizing his character and attempting to demonstrate the kind of work that can be done in order to make up for lost time.”

Among the musicians performing with the CSO Saturday are some of the 2022 CSO Diversity Fellows — nine of whom came to Chautauqua via the Sphinx Organization, a nonprofit dedicated to diversity in the arts, and with whom the Institution has frequently partnered in recent years. Concert Theatre Works’ touring production of “The Chevalier” benefits the Sphinx National Alliance for Audition Support — work that Barclay hopes will eventually create equity in the classical music world and “make orchestras look like the audience they deserve.”

“It’s slow moving work, but it’s important work,” he said. 

Saturday’s performance is of special note to Kimberly Schuette, who started in her role of managing director of the CSO in January 2022. “The Chevalier” had been on the books for the 2022 season long before she joined staff, but she had previously served as associate producer on the concert version of “The Chevalier,” and thinks she’s seen nearly every staging since its inception. She’s watched how the music has grown to better suit the story and how the story has grown more focused — and how deliberately the selection shows how influential Bologne was.

“It’s pure stage magic,” she said. “And it’s a good piece for Chautauqua because there’s just so much to dig into and learn about. It’s a concert that brings to light a history that is not well-known.”

Schuette was a music history major, and when she first saw “The Chevalier,” she dug out her old college textbooks. Bologne wasn’t even listed in the indexes. And when Barclay embarked upon this work in 2018, he was starting from “nothing,” and the more he learned, he was “shocked, embarrassed, and a little bit ashamed” to have not heard of Bologne before. As such, he said that “The Chevalier” is a social justice project about “restoring Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, in history where he belongs, and where he never should have left.”

At the beginning of his research, Barclay read what he called the “only one gold standard of solid musicology” on Bologne, written by Gabriel Banat. It’s extensive, Barclay said, and a “gift to the community.” It led him to realize that what he was working on was not just a play about Bologne, but about Marie Antoinette and Mozart.

“There was a need to correct heinous misunderstandings about Marie Antoinette; that classic misogyny thrown at her … mirrored the racism that has prevented Bologne from taking his rightful place in our culture,” Barclay said. “… If you’re kicking off a week on ‘The Future of History,’ we need to reexamine how and why we have learned these assumptions about these people. Not for their sake, but really for our sake. Because, history rhymes.”

Delightful, compassionate, visionary, humorous, practical, direct, kind, patient, robust. The English language does not have enough words to describe Richard “Dick” Miller. 

“One word could never describe Dick Miller,” said Geof Follansbee, senior vice president and chief advancement officer.

Miller, former board of trustees chair and president of the Chautauqua Foundation, described by President Michael E. Hill as “one of the most valued leaders in Chautauqua’s history,” passed away Sept. 18, 2021. He was 88. A memorial service in his honor is set for 11 a.m. Saturday, July 16, in the Hall of Philosophy, followed by a reception at the Athenaeum Hotel Parlor.

“He was smarter than most. He was serious, yet delightfully humorous. He was visionary and awesomely practical,” said Follansbee, who considered Miller a mentor. “He was one of the most important people I ever met.”

Miller, a lifelong Chautauquan and the great-grandson of Chautauqua co-founder Lewis Miller, became actively involved with the Institution’s affairs starting in 1966, when he was appointed to the board of trustees. Four years later, he was elected chairman, and he served in that capacity until summer 1978 before leaving the board in 1981. He remained an honorary trustee until his death. He became the president of the Chautauqua Foundation, which oversees the management of the Institution’s endowments, in 1971. He served in that capacity for 25 years, retiring in 1996 after 30 years of leadership at Chautauqua.

“I know that he spoke of his work at Chautauqua as being the most rewarding aspect,” said Cindi Smith, Miller’s daughter. “He was a corporate lawyer, and he really enjoyed that. He was a partner in the Milwaukee law firm of Foley & Lardner and was very successful. He really thrived in his volunteer work at Chautauqua, and it gave him great personal satisfaction and joy to be able to participate in that work.” 

When Miller first joined the board, The Chautauquan Daily reported that the Institution “had virtually no private assets, and dilapidated structures … were literally falling apart.” Upon his retirement, the Daily noted, “It’s no wonder people maintain that Miller and his colleagues saved Chautauqua.”

“He’d look at situations, or at people, or at events, and would be able to see the surface and the depth of things. He could see how things were connected, and he could also see how things were not connected. He saw gaps,” said Tom Becker, the 17th president of Chautauqua Institution. “From 1985 forward, I worked with him intensely — and the thing about him was that he was constantly looking at those gaps. What was done and what was yet to be done. He drove toward improvements, but at the same time he was looking upward and onward for the next set of things we needed to accomplish.”

Miller is credited with revolutionizing the Institution’s financial planning and spurring a renaissance at Chautauqua.

“Whether we were laying foundations that were strong enough to hold up the things that we were then doing, he had almost an architect’s sense of how to construct the development of the Institution,” Becker said. “Not physically, but structurally, in the sense of its organization, its management, its intelligence and its foundations.”

In the 1970s, Chautauqua was operating at a deficit and accruing debt. Programming was in flux, and attendance was low. Miller led the charge to revive the Institution. He established new budgetary practices and spearheaded work with the Gebbie Foundation to right Chautauqua’s ship. With their support, he created the Gebbie Challenge, which required the Institution to balance its budget for five consecutive years in return for a $1 million grant to eliminate the debt. That challenge was a success.

“There is no one as important in the life of this institution. There’s Vincent, there’s Miller, there’s Arthur Bestor, and there’s Dick Miller,” Follansbee said, referencing Chautauqua’s co-founders John Heyl Vincent and Lewis Miller, as well as Arthur E. Bestor, who served as president for nearly 30 years. Bestor shepherded the Institution into a new era, and then oversaw both its entry into receivership in 1933, and the clearing of that debt in 1936 — a move that the Institution avoided in the early 1970s thanks to Miller’s efforts.

“There’s reason to believe that if Dick hadn’t come along when he came along that this Institution might have continued on a path that would lead us back into receivership,” Follansbee said. “I’m not sure that we would have recovered after a second receivership within 40 years. Dick realized what we needed … to recapture the mission.”

While Miller revolutionized Chautauqua — during his time at the Chautauqua Foundation, it grew 25-fold, and the Chautauqua Fund was transformed into a major source of revenue — his effect on people stood out as much as his efforts.

“Everybody talks about how smart he was. He also was delightful. He had a very quick wit, a robust and engaging laugh,” Becker said. “He was the most demanding man I knew who was also accompanied by a depth of kindness. Those aren’t always things that go together.”

Becker described this depth of kindness as soulful. 

“He cared not just about the appropriateness of his behavior, he cared about what was really going on in your life,” Becker said. “The depth meant that he was willing and, indeed, interested in something more than the surface of your feelings. His expressions of kindness … were something you could count on.”

Miller made significant impacts on the lives of the people he knew.

“He was a hero of mine,” Follansbee said. “I don’t know how you could respect anyone more than I respected Dick Miller.”

Miller fostered the growth of the Institution along with the growth of those he worked with and served. 

“He was the closest thing to a father figure in my life since my dad’s death, and I don’t mean that in the sense that he took responsibility for me, but rather that we started with a mutual engagement about work and a passionate commitment to trying to do it really well,” Becker said. “We went from that kind of partnership to a friendship, and then to a genuine sense of love between us. He made me a better man.”

Miller, much like his great-grandfather, was dedicated to Chautauqua and its excellence.

“Those founders were remarkable for the differences between them, but also for their courage and the radical nature of what it is they were trying to do,” Becker said “I think about Dick having absorbed that legacy, … as a professional and as a man, and the way he devoted himself to the Institution, the difference he made in the place during the time he actually worked for it — and with it had every bit the kind of impact that his great-grandfather had.”

Miller himself was “Grandpa Dick” to numerous grandchildren. He’s survived by his wife, Miriam Reading; his children, Richard H. Miller Jr. and his wife, Pam, and Cynthia Miller Smith and her husband, Paul; and his grandchildren Sydney, Cameron, Rachel, Lindsey, and Maggie. A daughter, Sarah Miller Caldicott, preceded him in death; her children, Connor Caldicott and Nicholas Caldicott, wife Alexa, and his great-granddaughter Charlotte, survive him. He is further survived by five stepdaughters, many nieces, nephews, cousins, great-grandchildren, and his ex-wife, Sylvia Lucas Miller.

Smith, Miller’s daughter, said that he loved walking the grounds with his dogs and his wife, Reading.

“They maintained their interest and love for Chautauqua and he, I think, just instilled a lot of that valor in us,” she said.

Miller continues to live on in legacy, memory and love. 

“He was compassionate. He was careful. He was insistent and uncompromising in ways about integrity and advancement. But he was also understanding about the human condition. He was so much smarter than I am. He was so patient with me,” Becker said “… It was an unlikely partnership, to be sure, but one that fed both of us. I loved him very much. I still do. He’s one of the most remarkable men in my life.”

After weeks of training and rehearsals, students from Chautauqua’s School of Dance take the stage to showcase their talents and hard work.

“It gives the opportunity to students to perform on stage and learn the choreography, work with the great choreographers, and be able to express onstage what they are learning in the class,” said Sarkis Kaltakhtchian, School of Dance guest faculty and artistic and education director at the University of Hartford’s Hartt School of Music. “It’s that balance of keeping your technique in the classwork and being able to perform it. That’s what makes you professional dancers.”

At 2:30 p.m. Sunday, July 17, in the Amphitheater, the young dancers will present Student Gala I; the second gala is set for Aug. 14.

The gala will feature both the Festival Division students, ages 13 to 16, and the Pre-Professional Division students, ages 16 to 21. 

Kaltakhtchian said the gala is a chance for Chautauquans to see “how much (the students) learn, how much they improve, and in such a short time,” noting that Festival dancers train at the School of Dance for six weeks, and Pre-Professional dancers train for seven.

“It gives an opportunity to students to perform on stage and learn the choreography work with the great choreographers,”  Kaltakhtchian said.

The performance will include work by Kaltakhtchian, as well as new work by guest choreographer My’Kal Stromile of Boston Ballet. 

“I’ve definitely been trying to push myself choreographically and then, in turn, pushing the dancers in a way that stretches their own limits. It kind of makes all of us question: ‘Is this ballet?’ ” Stromile said. “I find that to be one of the most interesting things about the art form in general because it’s a living, breathing, art form. Dance isn’t an art piece where you put it up on a wall and it’s there and exists. This art form exists because living, breathing bodies do it. It’s up to us to kind of stretch the idea of what dance and what ballet is.” 

Stromile choreographed “Baile de la Gente,” which is set to Spanish Renaissance music from the 14th and 15th centuries; Sunday’s performance is the piece’s premiere.

“This piece is more classical, but it starts in one place, and as the piece shifts, you start to see more and more extreme uses of the body,” Stromile said. “It starts off in this very placed, held, elegant (way) … and then as the piece keeps going, it deviates from it a little bit. We kind of turn ballet on its side for moments … where it shifts and (the dancers are) pushing themselves in their own physicality.”

Along with the premiere of “Baile de la Gente,” Kaltakhtchian choreographed two pieces: one for Festival dancers and one for the Pre-Professional dancers. The character piece, choreographed for the Festival dancers, is set to Hungarian dance music by Johannes Brahms. The ballet piece, choreographed for the Pre-Professional dancers, is set to music from Masquerade Suite by Aram Khachaturian.

Stromile said the performance is unique to Chautauqua and features something for everyone.

“What excites me the most about the programming? Honestly, it’s going to be the variation. The variety that you’re going to get in the performance,” Stromile said. “… I think that as a viewer, especially for people who either it’s their first time at Chautauqua or first time really seeing dance, you are getting this buffet of exciting things to watch people do with their bodies.”

Stromile hopes with this variety, the audience will walk away reflecting on the pieces and their meanings.

“I feel like in the work that I make, there is a sense of social commentary or political commentary, but it’s never overt. It’s never literal. But it’s enough to where people can walk away from it and just at least have something to think about,” Stromile said. “… I really hope that at the end of this program as a whole, people will be able to do that for all the pieces and be able to have a conversation about it, and not just passively watch it, but actively watch it with a sense of curiosity.”

To Kaltakhtchian, the Chautauqua School of Dance summer intensive is unlike any other in the industry.

“​​In Chautauqua, it’s amazing — they see some of the best dancers in the world,” Kaltakhtchian said. “That changes your perspective about dance, that can change your lifestyle completely. (To go from), ‘Oh, I’m just doing this for fun,’ to ‘Oh, I really want to do this, and I want to become professional.’ ” 

Students get to perform work that would not be available to them if they were not at Chautauqua, said Kaltakhtchian, as he listed faculty such as Patricia McBride, director of ballet studies and master teacher, and Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux, principal resident coach. 

“Those are living legends in the dance world, and the students are so fortunate to be able to learn from them,” Kaltakhtchian said. “… It’s a very unique atmosphere in that sense. … And they make friends with different students that are here for different things, like musicians, actors in the theater. I think to become a complete artist, it’s the whole environment that’s extremely important.”

For Stromile, the environment at Chautauqua breeds creativity.

“I love creating when I’m surrounded by so much nature, because it just kind of gives me a different sense of inspiration,” Stromile said. “It gives you just another layer of humanity.”

Kaltakhtchian and Stromile said Sunday’s performance will be a showcase of talent and hardwork.

“You’ll see that they learn these ballets and they perform, and sometimes they look like a professional company (even though) they’re students,” Kaltakhtchian said.

Cancer is so prevalent in the United States that most adults know of at least one person, and often several, who have been diagnosed with one of more types. 

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it is the second-leading cause of death among Americans.

Head and neck cancer, which does not include brain or eye cancers, accounts for 4% of all of the cancers in the United States. Cell growth that gets out of control can start in the sinuses, within and behind the nose, throughout the mouth, within the salivary glands, in the throat (pharynx), in the voice box (larynx), and on the lips. 

While the treatments for this type of cancer cure many patients, their toxicity causes individual, patient-specific side effects, which means that being disease-free does not liberate head and neck cancer survivors from continued reliance on their health care system.

In nearby Pittsburgh, cancer patients’ suffering after treatment is being carefully monitored, and comprehensive efforts are being taken to address it.

Jonas T. Johnson, MD, Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, will give a talk — titled “Survivorship: Helping People Adjust to Cancer Treatment” — at 2 p.m. on Saturday, July 16, in the Hall of Philosophy for the Chautauqua Women’s Club’s Contemporary Issues Forum. He replaces previously announced speaker Wendy Leonard.

Johnson is the Dr. Eugene N. Myers Professor and Chairman of Otolaryngology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

He is also a professor in the university’s Department of Radiation Oncology in the School of Medicine, its Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery in the School of Dental Medicine, and its Department of Communication Science and Disorders in the School of Health and Rehabilitative Services.

Being a fellow of the American College of Surgeons means that Johnson, a board-certified surgeon, passed an evaluation of both his professional competence and ethical fitness.

“I turned 70 in 2016, and I decided to reengineer my career,” Johnson said. “It was obvious that I was not going to be 25 forever, so I decided to step away from the operating room … to focus on survivorship … and do it better than we’ve ever done it before.”

Partnering with Marci Lee Nilsen, an oncology nurse scientist and clinician at the University of Pittsburg, Johnson co-founded UPMC Head & Neck Cancer Survivorship Clinic, the world’s first of its kind.

“There was already one for breast cancer, but those survivors suffer in a completely different way,” he said.

According to Johnson, survivorship care encompasses patients’ “individual physical, psychosocial and economic issues that can arise after cancer treatment has ended.”

The program that he and Nilsen established “seeks to understand better what treatment-related side effects develop and to help people better navigate a sometimes tricky health care system.”

The UPMC Head & Neck Cancer Survivorship Clinic has grown quickly.

“We have had over 4,000 patients since 2016,” Johnson said. “We study them. We ask the question, ‘How are you doing?’ We use Patient-Reported Outcome Measures, … and we can tell the difference between who’s suffering and who’s not.”

As a child growing up in Jamestown, New York, Johnson was very interested in biology. He said that his first thought was to be a veterinarian, but he realized early on that in addition to good grades, vet schools were looking for experience working with farm animals, and he had none.

Because he cared about helping people, Johnson aimed for medicine after receiving his Jamestown High School diploma in June 1965 in a graduation ceremony held in Chautauqua’s Amphitheater.

At Dartmouth College, he chose the pre-med track. For medical school, he attended the State University of New York Upstate Medical University (now Center) in Syracuse.

“As a relatively wet-behind-the-ears young person, I didn’t have a strong opinion (about what to focus on),” Johnson said. “… I kind of liked everything. It was hard not to.”

Because Syracuse asked its medical students to have a mentor, he chose one, George Reed.

“Growing up, the only doctor I ever saw was an ENT (ear, nose and throat), so I signed up with an ENT,” Johnson said. “He was a superstar. I wanted to be just like him. I was heavily influenced by George Reed.”

Required to focus on general surgery for two years following medical school, Johnson went south to the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond.

“That was at the height of the Vietnam War,” he said. “The government was giving out draft numbers to 100% of male doctors. George Reed said that if I came back to SUNY I’d need a deferment (from obligatory military service) through the Berry Plan. It deferred people through their residency on the premise that they would come into the military afterwards.”

Returning to SUNY Upstate in 1974, Johnson completed his three-year otolaryngology residency. In 1977, he joined the U.S. Air Force for two years.

“By then, the war was over,” Johnson said. “I was in Wilford Hall (Medical Center) in San Antonio and I was teaching.”

In 1979, he said, he put his “three babies in the car and went to Pittsburgh. As a young surgeon, I was very anxious that I was needed. The situation in Pittsburgh was growing, and I thought they needed me.”

Since he had grown up in Jamestown and married his high school sweetheart, Janis, joining the University of Pittsburgh medical faculty put Johnson and his family in closer proximity to his parents and in-laws.

A recipient of many outstanding teaching awards, Johnson has presented over 500 lectures and seminars nationally and internationally. He has served the American Head and Neck Society (including its predecessor societies), as well as other otolaryngology and surgeon related organizations, in several leadership positions.

“What’s amazing is the velocity of change (through the years),” Johnson said. “What they taught me in the 1970s was almost obsolete by the 1990s. … When I started, there were no PET scans, MRIs, Prilosec or robots.”

He included in this medical evolution: the understanding of the physiology of disease, different perspectives on what causes disease (“that tobacco causes disease is way too simplistic”), the instruments (“there are so many new, fancy, exotic instruments that allow us to do things in a minimally invasive way”), and the interventions.

“Everything changes,” Johnson said. “So, riding on this change for the last 40 years has been amazing. The challenge is to keep up with it.”

Helping others by teaching in an academic environment, studying what his students are doing so that they can learn, and conducting research that “allows us to advocate for change” is what Johnson said he has most enjoyed.

“The way I see it is that I’ve spent my entire life changing, because first, the world was changing — biomedicine and surgery,” Johnson said. “During this time, I’ve been trying to educate and to advocate for change. … I’m interested in engineering change.”

The change in his job description six years ago  “to help people who have been treated for throat cancer and recover” is what most energizes Johnson now.