Distinguished artist-teachers from the world renowned Curtis Institute of Music, located in Philadelphia, were at the American Academy in Berlin from June 8 to 12, offering master classes to students at Berlin's Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler on the 8th and 10th of June at the Neuer Marstall at Hanns Eisler. Mikael Eliasen, artistic director of the Curtis Opera Theatre, led classes for voice students. Curtis violin professor and Avery Fisher Prize winner Pamela Frank, a Curtis alumna, led violin classes. Viola students were coached by Curtis alumnus and President Roberto Díaz, former principal violist of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Two Curtis concerts took place as part of the extensive program during the Curtis residency: On Friday, June 11 at the American Academy in Berlin, and Saturday, June 12 at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler. 

In Jürgen Osterhammel's book Globalization: A Short History (with Niels P. Petersson; Princeton, 2005), the University of Constance historian disagrees with many contemporaries about the "long" nineteenth century, which many see as actually having ended at the outbreak of the First World War, in 1914. Instead, Osterhammel, a specialist in Chinese and British history and colonialism, sees the end of the Long Century as having ended exactly during the winter of 1916-17, during the First World War. This time, he says, marks the entry of the United States' decision to get involved a European conflict, the onset of the Russian Revolution, and thus the real beginning of Zeitgeschichte, or contemporary history. The year 1917, he says, is "the true beginning of a new age" -- and the end of one that began with the American Revolution, in 1775.

Columbia University international trade economist Jagdish Bhagwati returned to the American Academy for a month in mid-May as a Kurt Viermetz Distinguished Visitor. Over his long career Professor Bhagwati has combined seminal scientific contributions to theories of commercial policy and international trade, strongly forwarding the case for increased globalization as the best means to alleviate worldwide poverty, advance gender equality, and integrate world markets. An economic policy architect of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), former advisor to the and UN and World Trade Organization, Bhagwati gave a talk on June 2 at the Hans Arnhold Center entitled “Capitalism after the Crisis: Myths and Fallacies,” which addressed what he sees as misleading and increasingly widespread opinions about the problems inherent in capitalism following the recent financial crisis.

Three hundred invited guests attended a gala evening celebration for the 2010 Henry A. Kissinger Prize on May 11, awarded to Mayor of New York City, philanthropist, and businessman Michael R. Bloomberg. The event, which took place in the garden of the Hans Arnhold Center, was preceded by a formal dinner of 100 invited guests in the Academy villa. Among the evening's attendees was Mayor Bloomberg's Berlin counterpart, Mayor Klaus Wowereit, the entire American Academy Board of Trustees and spring 2010 Fellows, ambassadors, top diplomats, and leaders from German business, members of Parliament, and dozens of journalists.

"This President dominates foreign policy in Washington," said Martin Indyk at this year's Richard C. Holbrooke Lecture, on May 5. "You have to go as far back to Richard Nixon to find a President who was so directly involved in determining the course of American foreign affairs." Indyk, Vice President and Director of Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, has seen his share of Washington's varied configurations determining foreign policy: former Director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Indyk served twice as the United States Ambassador to Israel (1995-97 and 2000-01), as Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs (1997-2000), and prior to that as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs on the National Security Council (1993-95). Indyk's lecture tonight looked back on Obama's ambitious first year -- and reasoned how the second promises to be both more challenging and, one hopes, given a host of multifaceted threats, successful. 

We are all multiculturalists now, goes the adage. But who exactly belongs to the national, cultural, and political unity of the "we," -- who are "we" the people? And, moreover, what kinds of rights and obligations are entailed be being a member of this "we"? These questions have long fascinated Bosch Public Policy Fellow David Abraham, a professor Immigration and Citizenship Law at the University of Miami School of Law. On May 4 he addressed these and other thorny issues, all of which he will address at greater length in a book he is writing about comparative immigration and citizenship policy in the age of neoliberalism.

Camilo Jose Vergara has been photographing America's ghettos and broken cities for over three decades. At the American Academy this spring as a Berlin Fellow in the Visual Arts, Vergara, recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in 2002, has meandered into Berlin's open streets and hidden corners in search of comparisons, contrasts, and the personality of the German capital as seen through its faces and facades, through its train-riders, shop windows, subway stations, and open spaces. The following is a personal account of what the Chilean-born, American-educated documentary photographer and writer has found inside Berlin.

Nahum N. Glatzer was born in Lemberg in 1903 and moved to Frankfurt-am-Main in 1920, where he encountered the philosophers Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber. Glatzer taught at the Juedisches Lehrhaus and then succeeded Buber in the lectureship on Jewish philosophy and ethics at the University of Frankfurt. Art historian Judith Wechsler, Glatzer's daughter and the spring 2010 Berthold Leibinger Fellow at the American Academy, delivered a wide-ranging multi-media presentation on her father's life and work on April 27. 

Morton Subotnick started out playing clarinet with the San Francisco Symphony orchestra in the early 1960s. He was simultaneously experimenting with new forms of electronic music-making. This tension demanded resolution, causing him to question what exactly music was. Through experimentation and some anthropological considerations of how humans have dealt with music, Subotnick came to the conclusion that musical expression was something fundamental in the animal world, wrought as it is by basic information composed of pitch, duration, and accent. Through examples as varied as Beethoven, apes singing to their children, national folk songs, piano concertos, and Western pop songs, Subotnick came to hear the basic formula of all musical expression: a dialectic between solitude and joining together in song. "This is something basic to all musical expression," he says, "and it is the same in all cultures and all times." Based on this realization Subotnick set out to discover, over the last fifty years and through scores of groundbreaking compositions, songs, experimental tracks and entirely new sounds, how new music might diverge from its ancient formulas and assumptions -- an impulse that has led to a singular, pioneering life in new musical expression through electronic media.

Click here to watch the video of Subotnick's talk.

For some artists, such as William Wordsworth -- observes spring 2010 Siemens Fellow Janet Gezari, a literary historian at Connecticut College -- aesthetic quality diminishes over time. But for others, such as Bach or the Rolling Stones, she says, late work confirms mastery and differs little from earlier productions. Given this, is there a "late style" for artists generally speaking, a style that challenges aesthetic assumptions the artist made about his or her own work earlier? Or that we have made about these works? If so, what are the characteristics of this style? What kinds of influences shape artistic vision as the producers age? What influence does the shrinking of ego in the face of death have on aesthetic style?