Could not complete log in. Possible causes and solutions are:
Cookies are not set, which might happen if you've never visited this website before.
Please open https://avalon.lib.virginia.edu/ in a new window, then come back and refresh this page.
An ad blocker is preventing successful login.
Please disable ad blockers for this site then refresh this page.
Health information technology (health IT), including electronic health records (but much, much more), enables health care providers--from individual clinicians to widely networked health care organizations--to better manage patient care through streamlined sharing of health information. Since 2004, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology has led U.S. efforts to deploy advanced health IT in order to improve clinical service delivery and support patient engagement. As a result, nearly every hospitalization and most doctor visits now have a digital footprint, and an extraordinary amount of health data exists that simply didn't a decade ago. The health IT goal now is to foster seamless and secure data sharing to improve the health and care of individuals and populations alike.
In this special Medical Center Hour, Dr. Vindell Washington, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, introduces this key national initiative and cites the promise and chief challenges for this increasingly central component of our nation's health care system.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Southern Appalachia often provides a folksy backstory to our national mythology—a tale of coal miners, moonshining, bluegrass, and ballads. But Appalachia is a real place that figures fundamentally in this country's heritage and destiny.
Its rugged mountains are rich in natural resources while its remote communities are home to some of the nation's most fiercely proud people and most persistent poverty. This region has endowed American culture—and the University of Virginia—with a wealth of gifts and innovations but itself faces staggering difficulties. Embracing Appalachia is challenging, especially now, as the coal industry disappears and crises of poor health, environmental degradation, and poverty deepen.
This Medical Center Hour with West Virginia coalfields native David Gordon probes our particular connections to Appalachia and how the enduring tragedy of this place is a “canary in the coalmine” for the rest of our nation.
Is "healthy Appalachia" possible? What will it take? What must we do?
Co-presented with the Center for Global Health, Institute for the Humanities and Global Cultures (Global South Initiative), Department of Public Health Sciences, and Healthy Appalachia Institute
"Give a [wo]man a mask and [s]he will tell you the truth." –Oscar Wilde
Since 2010, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center's therapeutic arts program has engaged brain-injured and traumatized military veterans in hands-on mask making. Even as they conceal the face, these soldiers' masks vividly reveal secret suffering, declare deeply felt identity and patriotism, signal spiritual wounds and moral strengths, externalize guilt or grief. Making a mask can help its creator to (re)claim identity, and to heal. In this AOA Lecture, physician-educator Mark Stephens and art therapist Melissa Walker discuss the construction of masks as an artful means of recognizing oneself and reflecting on identity, not just for wounded warriors but also for healthcare professionals.
Co-presented with Alpha Omega Alpha national medical honor society, UVA Chapter
What happens when an extroverted six-year-old dog and her introverted human partner enter the local public nursing home as a therapy dog team? This was the question writer Sue Halpern (nervously) asked herself when she and her dog Pransky began their work at the Helen Porter Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Middlebury VT. In this Medical Center Hour, Halpern revisits the remarkable experiences she and Pransky had over six years with the nursing home residents, experiences that continued even after Pransky's health declined. She also speaks to the increasingly recognized value of introducing therapy animals into medical settings and the significant physical and emotional benefits that follow—for patients, staff, and therapy teams.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Thirty-five years after the discovery of AIDS, the story of this disease and the momentous scientific, medical, political, and social changes it occasioned is rich and complicated, even sensational. In 1981, Dr. Michael Gottlieb, a young UCLA immunologist, saw--and published a New England Journal of Medicine article about--a cluster of five cases of immune dysfunction and unusual opportunistic infections in gay men. Not long after, as personal physician to Hollywood actor and AIDS patient Rock Hudson, Dr. Gottlieb became the medical face of this terrifying epidemic.
In this Medical Grand Rounds/Medical Center Hour, Dr. Bruce Hillman, a medical school classmate of Michael Gottlieb, probes the war of egos, money, academic power, and Hollywood clout that advanced AIDS research in its first decade even as it compromised the medical scientist who discovered the disease. Dr. Hillman draws on interviews with Dr. Gottlieb and others to chronicle one of the most important and contentious medical discoveries of our time.
Medical Grand Rounds/History of the Health Sciences Lecture
Co-presented with the Department of Medicine and the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series of Historical Collections, Claude Moore Health Sciences Library
Deborah Salem Smith's acclaimed play Love alone is the story of what happens after a routine medical procedure goes tragically wrong. A medical malpractice lawsuit ensues, and the lives of both the patient's family and the doctor charged with her care are transformed. The play tracks the fallout in both homes. It is a portrait of how each family grieves and heals. These questions were central in the construction of the plot: Is forgiveness a single act or a daily act? Is it unconditional? Who has the right to forgive? Does forgiveness require remorse or an apology by the offender? Do lawsuits empower victims and thus aid the grieving process, or do they disrupt grieving? Does proving negligence make a victim more prepared to forgive? What does a lawsuit mean for the doctor sued, and for his or her personal journey of recovering from the unexpected death of a patient? George Bernard Shaw famously quipped, "We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession." What are the implications and burdens of such faith? This Medical Center Hour explores Love Alone with the playwright and local actors but also with a physician who has written on doctors' efforts to deal with their own mistakes.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
In this Medical Center Hour, award-winning journalist Meera Subramanian explores the human and global health implications of India’s ravaged environmental landscape. Her new book, A River Runs Again: India's Natural World in Crisis, investigates five environmental crises by profiling ordinary people and micro-enterprises determined to guide India and its burgeoning population into a healthier future. An organic farmer revives dead land; villagers resuscitate a river run dry; cook-stove designers seek a smokeless fire; biologists bring vultures back from the brink of extinction; and, in one of India’s poorest states, a bold young woman teaches adolescent girls the fundamentals of sexual health. In these individual stories resides hope for a nation and its people and the potential for a sustainable and more prosperous world.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture/Exploring the Global South
Co-presented with the Center for Global Health, Institute for the Humanities and Global Cultures (Global South Initiative), Department of Public Health Sciences, and Virginia Quarterly Review
Where you live in a particular U.S. city determines your predicted life expectancy. Neighborhood is destiny, in a way. For example, in New Orleans, there is a twenty-five-year difference in life expectancy from one parish to another only three miles away. This pattern of great gaps in health status, even over short distances, repeats itself in New York, Chicago, the Bay Area, and many other American cities, with harsh consequences.
In 2005, Tulsa, Oklahoma was one of the first cities to recognize such dramatic neighborhood variations in life expectancy, with a fourteen-year difference in life expectancy between north Tulsa and midtown—and to take action. In this presentation, Dr. Gerard Clancy describes specific initiatives and lessons learned on the ten-year journey, from 2005 to 2015, to reverse these health disparities and improve the health of the people in north Tulsa. The successes of the past decade have inspired a new ten-year initiative in Tulsa focused on mental health system improvements.
Co-presented with the Brodie Medical Education Award Committee, the Academy of Distinguished Educators, and the Department of Medicine
Many personal, social, organizational, and regulatory factors in health care today contribute to clinicians experiencing burnout, a chronic stress syndrome characterized by exhaustion, depersonalization, and feelings of inadequacy. When severe, these symptoms are often accompanied and exacerbated by depression—and sometimes lead to suicide. In this combined Medical Center Hour and Medical Grand Rounds, Dean Gianakos MD FACP will not teach techniques to fortify personal resilience in the face of incipient burnout or offer strategies to reduce the inefficiencies of practice. Rather, using poems and stories, he will open a dialogue on how health professionals can emotionally support one another, initiate crucial conversations, and reduce the isolation that too often characterizes medical practice.
Co-presented with the Department of Medicine, UVA
In the spotlight for years now, health care that is truly equitable and patient-centered and delivered by a diverse, well-integrated team remains a goal—in most sites, it's not yet everyday reality. Individuals and institutions—including health professional schools as well as centers of clinical practice—continue to work toward this goal. But this effort cannot depend just on recruiting more diverse learners, reorganizing clinical environments, or deploying didactics aimed at eliminating biased attitudes and behaviors. Rather, it’s a matter of redesigning health professional education—curriculum, assessment strategies, learning environments—to prepare a thoroughly diverse workforce ready to counter health disparities. To actually realize diversity’s benefits, we must eschew a colorblind philosophy and embrace principles of equity pedagogy.
In this Medical Center Hour, Dr. Catherine Lucey explores equity pedagogy and how it may help to counter the structural racism and inequitable learning environments of traditional medical school. Such a fundamental change in our pedagogy may be necessary to improve health outcomes for patients of all cultures, colors, creeds, and means and, along the way, establish work environments where clinicians, teachers, and scientists of many backgrounds and professional preparations can all flourish.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture / Medical Education Grand Rounds
Co-presented with the Office of Medical Education
Lucy Kalanithi is many things. Physician. Professor. Writer, and speaker. Mother. Widow. She was married for nine years to Dr. Paul Kalanithi, a young neurosurgeon diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, the illness that claimed his life in 2015 at age thirty-seven. As he struggled, suffered, and worried, Paul wrote. His memoir—When Breath Becomes Air, for which Lucy wrote the epilogue—became a bestseller after it was published in 2016.
In this Medical Center Hour, which is also the School of Nursing's annual Bice Memorial Lecture, Dr. Lucy Kalanithi talks with UVA Nursing Professor Ken White about the Kalanithis' challenging journey to the end of Paul's life and how Paul and Lucy did not avoid suffering but, rather, leaned into it and created meaning from it.
The Zula Mae Baber Bice Memorial Lecture
Co-presented with the School of Nursing
Nalini Nadkarni is known as "The Queen of the Rainforest Canopy," being a pioneer in the field of forest canopy research and in public engagement about the plants and animals that live in the treetops. Her interest in rainforest dynamics and in the response of rainforests to disturbances such as harvesting, fire, and climate change has led her to invite input from experts in diverse other fields that also study disruption and recovery--economics, neuroscience, refugee studies, human development, and traffic engineering, to name a few. Exchanges with these experts have given Professor Nadkarni novel insights into theory and models that foster better understanding of disturbance, recovery, and resilience.
Unexpectedly, in 2015, this work also proved personally useful as Professor Nadkarni recovered from extensive trauma sustained when she fell 50 feet from the top of a tree while doing forest canopy fieldwork. In this Medical Center Hour/Medical Grand Rounds, she shares her insights and offers applications for medicine--especially, to the specifics of critical care, and, more generally, to healing.
Medical Grand Rounds / A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Co-presented with the Department of Medicine
In this Bice Memorial Lecture, Rebecca Rimel looks back on a life in leadership—in her case, serving 26 years as president and CEO of The Pew Charitable Trusts, an innovative and influential public charity involved in health and human services, the arts, public opinion research, and environmental, public health, and national economic policy. Ms. Rimel's service at Pew was anchored in nursing, built upon an exemplary career in healthcare and on what she learned and practiced as a nurse at UVA—management under pressure, clear communication, purpose and motivation, empathy and caring.
Zula Mae Baber Bice Memorial Lecture co-presented with the School of Nursing
How should we imagine the history of distraction? Is it true that the internet has made us distracted in a way that we never have been before? And, if it has, is that necessarily bad? What is distraction, anyway? In this Medical center hour, East Asian cultural historian Shigehisa Kuriyama suggests that comparative reflection on images of skulls and skeletons can offer us illuminating insight into these questions, and into the entwining of distraction with art, anatomy, curiosity, and early modern global trade.
Co-presented with the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series, Claude Moore Health Sciences Library
This video is from the final presentation of ARH5600 : 3D Cultural Heritage Informatics, Fall 2022. Students featured in this video include Junyi Wu, Yunong Li, Kelly O'Meara, Dustin Thomas and Elena Wrobel. Their final projects can be accessed at https://wordpress.its.virginia.edu/Cultural_Heritage_Data/arh5600-fall-2022.
This video is from the final presentation of ARH5600 : 3D Cultural Heritage Informatics, Fall 2021. Students featured in this video include Zhang Jie, Natalie Chavez, Matthew Schneider, Chris MacDonnell. Their final projects can be accessed at https://wordpress.its.virginia.edu/Cultural_Heritage_Data/pedagogy/cultural-heritage-informatics-internship/arh-5600-fall-2021/.
This video contains the 2023 Spring semester final presentation for ARH5600/5612 3D Cultural Heritage Informatics, a class taught by Will Rourk as a collaboration between the UVA Library and the Historic Preservation Program in Architectural History. The class is sponsored by Andy Johnston, director of the ARH Historic Preservation Program. Students featured in this video include ARH5600 students Ari Calos, Austin Riggins, Boyang Li, Thomas Wyatt, Yara Mortada and Yizhuo Chen and ARH5612 advanced students Kelly O'Meara and MaryCate Azelborn. Featured team projects include the Long Meadow Farm Barn, Upper Bremo Barn and the Palmyra Old Stone Jail. Student final projects can be accessed from https://wordpress.its.virginia.edu/Cultural_Heritage_Data/arh-5600-5612-spring-2023/.
On 13 September 2017, the University of Virginia proudly dedicates as Pinn Hall the medical education and research building formerly known as Jordan Hall. The building’s new name recognizes UVA medical graduate Vivian W. Pinn MD, Class of 1967, founding director of the Office of Research on Women’s Health at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Pinn was the second African American woman to graduate from the School of Medicine and went on to a distinguished career in pathology and in medical leadership. One of the medical school’s four colleges bears Dr. Pinn’s name, and she is an active presence in Pinn College student life.
This Medical Center Hour celebrates Dr. Pinn and her accomplishments and calls attention to critical current issues of fair and full access for underrepresented minorities, especially African American women, as students, practitioners, and leaders in medicine but also as beneficiaries of health care. Individually and institutionally, what can we learn from Dr. Pinn to ensure that her legacy matters?
Co-presented with the Department of Medicine and the Generalist Scholars Program, in conjunction with UVA's dedication of Pinn Hall and the UVA medical students' celebration of Primary Care Week
As part of the annual Southeast Regional Seminar in African Studies (SERSAS) at the University of Virginia, Librarian for African American & African Studies Katrina Spencer gathered three panelists who represent diverse stakeholding positions in the publication of African writers, particularly within “Western” markets. While Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart has received countless, deserved accolades and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s profile continues to rise, what other names should we know and what trends should we be looking out for in terms of African writing? Nigerian writer Kenechi Uzor has established Iskanchi Press & Magazine to recruit quality works from African creators. Nigerian author Ukamaka Olisakwe’s success has led her to become a screenwriter. And Northwestern University’s Herskovits Library worker Gene Kanneberg, Jr. is keeping his finger on the pulse of pop culture with his writing, “Wakanda as the Window to the Study of Africa,” in the collection Integrating Pop Culture into the Academic Library (Melissa Edmiston Johnson, editor). Each of these players is creating a pathway for the representation of Africa and Africans, and together the four discuss the points at which their missions converge and diverge. The recorded session is sourced from the original virtual Zoom meeting.
The panelists made reference to a variety of opportunities, publishers, and publications in this recording. Below we provide a list of references for viewers’ convenience:
Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies Research Grant (https://www.library.northwestern.edu/libraries-collections/herskovits-library/herskovits-travel-grant.html)
Iskanchi Press & Magazine (https://www.iskanchi.com/)
Isele Magazine (https://iselemagazine.com/)
Olongo Africa (https://olongoafrica.com/)
The Enkare Review
Pidgin English
The Middle Daughter by Chika Unigwe
In Such Tremendous Heat by Kehinde Fadipe
An African Abroad by Olabisi Ajala
After God is Dibia by John Anenechukwu Umeh
Nsibidi (a writing system)
africanpoetics.unl.edu
Nnadozie Onyekuru
Ajami manuscripts
Chris Abani
Bakassi Boys
“Nigerian police detain goat over armed robbery” (https://www.reuters.com/article/oukoe-uk-nigeria-robbery-goat/nigerian-police-detain-goat-over-armed-robbery-idUKTRE50M4BM20090123)
We've long known about books' ability to comfort, but can they have the power to heal? At a time when burnout is rife among practicing physicians and other clinicians, health care organizations are introducing systemic changes, including wellness programs. Beyond this, though, what might individual clinicians do to stave off burnout and fuel emotional resilience? New research suggests burnout relief may be as close at hand as a good novel. Reading for pleasure--especially, reading literary fiction--seems to enhance empathy and combat emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, thereby improving doctors' abilities to connect with the persons who are their patients and find joy in their work. Indeed, if reading for relaxation makes such a difference, should reading literature be a prescribed part of physician education and training? In this Medical Center Hour, Drs. Daniel Marchalik and Hunter Groninger examine emerging research on books' benefits for doctors and trace their own experience with the Literature and Medicine track at the Georgetown University School of Medicine.
How might the creative arts, as a symbolic and emotional language, help improve well-being in late life? Anne Basting is an acclaimed practitioner and advocate of using the arts to address issues in aging. In this Medical Center Hour, she explores her own creative research and the most promising new practices for improving the lives of elders and caregivers alike.
The Koppaka Family Foundation Lecture in the Medical Humanities
Co-presented with the Southern Gerontological Society Annual Meeting
Dr. Jennifer Wolch, Dean of the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley speaks about the tensions of implementing urban nature projects. Wolch challenges us to think carefully about the many different and often marginalized interests (people and animals) that must be taken into account, and the potential “collisions” she sees in the movement.
Flythrough animation of 3D data collected at the Birdwood Mansion, east of Charlottesville; the data was collected with FARO Focus X130 3D lasers scanners; data was processed with FARO Scene v.2023.0.1 and edited with Autodesk ReCap 2024; the animation shows features uncovered in the basement during the renovation of the building including:
- a brick entry platform, original to the early 19th c. phase of Birdwood
- a masonry feature found in the late 19th c. coal room addition
- examples of hand riven lathe in the hallway of the original early 18th c. portion of the house
Dr. Stephen Kellert spoke to participants at the Biophilic Cities Launch about the ethical and value changes that need to occur to achieve biophilic design in cities. He argued for a theory of cities (using his own city of New Haven as an example) that explains location, livability and future thriving based on natural features and conditions.
UVA Architectural History ARH 5600 - 3D Cultural Heritage Informatics (Spring 2021) invited class speakers, Bryan Clark Green and Patrick Thompson, discuss the process of using 3D laser scan data collected by ARH 5600 students in the Fall 2020 semester to create a historcically accurate 3D architectural model of the Barboursville Plantation House ca. 1820s in Barboursville, VA. Recorded via Zoom web video communications interface in the presence of a live audience of 60+ attendees.
will rourk, wmr5a@virginia.edu, ORCID : 0000-0001-8622-5080
Summary:
Flythrough animation of 3D data collected on site at the Cabell Log House located in the Gospel Hill historic district of Staunton, Va, on 2024-03-21; in collaboration with the Historic Staunton Foundation (https://www.historicstaunton.org/) who own and manage this site; data collected with FARO Focus 3D lasers scanners, models X130, S70, S150; data processed with FARO Scene v. 2023.0.1;
A diverse population of caregivers working in clients' homes constitutes a vital link in our health care “system,” their services filling a gap between institutional care and what families are able to manage on their own. Who are these caregivers, what is their work, and what does their work mean—to them, to the clients and families they serve, to our larger society? Prompted by the recent documentary film, CARE, by Deirdre Fishel, which profiles five caregivers and their elderly clients, this Medical Center Hour inquires into the nature and lived experience of home-based caregiving for elders. What role will such home care play as our society ages and people seek to stay at home with complex, care-intensive medical conditions? How can we better value and compensate care workers and better support families who need their services? What about the sustainability of the home health caregiving economy and its workforce?
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Co-presented with the Department of Chaplaincy Services, UVA Health System
Neurologist Oliver Sacks (1933-2016) was a legend in his own time—as a physician but also as a writer whose work probed medicine, science, and the arts and as a tireless explorer of both the natural world and the human condition. His clinical tales, published in the medical literature and mass media alike, found a wide audience across medicine and society. Behind these tales, which stretched the case history to illuminate and celebrate the person who was marked, and often rendered remarkable, by neuropsychological illness, flared Sacks's own curiosity, an insatiable urge to question and a generous capacity for paying meticulous attention.
In this inaugural Hook Lecture in Medicine and the Arts, writer and photographer Bill Hayes, who was Sacks's late-life partner, offers insights into Oliver Sacks as a person and a physician whose creative nature and prodigious output enriched medicine and culture across a long and productive life. A writer and photographic artist in his own right, Hayes addresses the place of curiosity and creativity in Sacks's practice and his own, especially how, for both, interest in and radical openness to a fellow human being are paramount.
The Edward W. Hook Lecture in Medicine and the Arts / Medical Grand Rounds
Co-presented with the Department of Medicine, with which the Medical Center Hour shares a fund established by the late Edward W. Hook MD MACP whereby the arts can generously enrich medical education and training.
Andreas Vesalius, long hailed as "the father of modern anatomy," is slipping into oblivion. The likes of Gray's Anatomy (the book), Netter's Atlas, plasticized dissected bodies, and online visible human specimens having eclipsed his splendidly illustrated book, On the Fabric of the Human Body (1543), as our definitive anatomy text. Vesalius's recent 500th birthday anniversary gives us a chance not only to celebrate this Renaissance genius, but also to consider how his accomplishments in the study of human anatomy helped medicine to become "modern."
Co-presented with the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series
Smith, Charles (Charles William), 1893-, Helms, James Strother, 1926-1959
Summary:
One of several films produced about prominent University of Virginia faculty, written and directed by James S. Helms. This film summarizes the career of Augusta County-born artist Charles W. Smith, covering his early print-making career as well as his stylistic shift to non-representational art. Smith is depicted working in his studio, showing his unique methodology of "block painting".
Chocolate has been special to human beings for millennia. In our time and culture as in earlier centuries and other cultures, claims abound regarding chocolate's health effects, positive and otherwise. What is it about chocolate—chemically and culturally—that makes it so distinctive in our diets, our emotional lives, our celebrations? Why do we love it so, and what does it do to/for us? In this Medical Center Hour, local chocolatier Tim Gearhart offers insights into chocolate's appeal and effects and gives a glimpse of the craft of artisan chocolate-making.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Part one. Journalist John Norton describes the education situation in Clarendon County, South Carolina. At 7:18, footage of Clarendon County, South Carolina, including rural roads, Liberty Hill Church, cotton gin. Part two. Footage of Clarendon County, South Carolina, including cotton picking. Part three. Footage of Clarendon County, South Carolina, including cotton picking, cemetery and church, sunset.
The stethoscope, an extension of the clinician's ear, is perhaps modern medicine's most characteristic symbol. Through it, doctors listen for the body to disclose its secrets. Doctors must also listen to their patients' stories. In fact, as Oliver Sacks said, "The first act of medicine is listening to a personal story." But hasn't the clinician's ear lost much of its importance now that procedures and machines can give us more direct access to pathology?
In this Richardson Lecture, physician and poet John Coulehan affirms the importance of the clinician's aural attention in the clinical encounter and considers three aspects of the metaphorical clinical ear. First, listening to patients, an active process with vertical (deep listening) and horizontal (narrative) dimensions. Second, listening to the heart, the reflective core of clinical practice. And, finally, hearing the resonance of our own healing words. In medicine, the word can be an instrument of healing.
Co-presented with the Office of Quality and Performance Improvement, UVA Health System
Blue Desert (video installation presented in the OCH Lobby)
Peter Swendsen, music; Rian Brown Orso and Geoff Pingree, video
Migration Patterns (part 1)
Leah Barclay
Eroding
Fjóla Evans, composer
Eighth Blackbird
>19980
Lemon Guo and Mengtai Zhang
Festival of Whispers -
Matthew Burtner, composer
Eighth Blackbird
~Intermission~
Migration Patterns (part 2)
Leah Barclay
The Clarity of Cold Air
Jonathan Bailey Holland, composer
Eighth Blackbird
Migration Patterns (part 3)
Leah Barclay
Under the Sea Ice
Christopher Luna, composer
Rivanna String Quartet
Inlets
John Cage, composer
group performance
Program Notes
Blue Desert (2012)
Peter Swendsen, music; Rian Brown Orso, and Geoff Pingree video
A multi-channel video installation (seen here in triptych) shot with high- resolution cameras, BLUE DESERT was created during a two-week expedition to Antarctica in November of 2009 aboard the National Geographic Explorer by Geoff Pingree and Rian Brown-Orso. The team worked with Peter Swendsen to create the installation’s soundscape using field recordings from Antarctica as well as Swendsen’s library of sounds from Arctic Norway. The three first installed the work, for three-channel video and four-channel sound, at the Laconia Gallery in Boston in November of 2011. Antarctica is a uniquely vast and haunting panorama of ice, water, and sky. To visit this place is to glimpse a world without human beings, to observe a planet in its most primitive and elemental state, to witness the mysteriously beautiful and fearsome power of the earth. Although any attempt to represent the Antarctic is, in some sense, futile – an exercise in framing the unframeable—BLUE DESERT provides a provisional window onto a wondrous landscape that embodies, paradoxically, the ancient permanence and never-ending flux of our physical environment.
Migration Patterns: Saltwater (Queensland Coastline) (2019) Leah Barclay
Aquatic ecosystems are complex acoustic environments, where species are reliant on sound to communicate and survive. Sound propagates underwater at different speeds, affected by temperature, pressure, and salinity. The impacts of climate change are often visible in terrestrial environments, yet dramatic changes in aquatic ecosystems go unnoticed simply due to visibility. Increased anthropogenic noise and rising temperatures cause ecological disruptions that are dramatically transforming the acoustic ecologies of our oceans, rivers, and wetlands. This work explores the fragility and complexity of life in a world of sound and vibration. Drawing on a large database of hydrophone recordings from the Queensland coastline, this work traces sonic migration patterns and shifting ecologies from the smallest micro crustaceans to the largest marine mammals on the planet. The recordings focus around the Great Barrier Reef and K’Gari (Fraser Island), a major transitory point for humpbacks. The whale song adapts in response to changing environments and the recordings contribute to ongoing scientific research on the value of aquatic acoustic ecology in climate action. This sound work immerses listeners in the depths of aquatic ecosystems alongside the coastline of Queensland and transposes infrasonic and ultrasonic recordings into perceptible ranges for humans.
>19980 - Into Silence They Appear (2017-2019) Lemon Guo, music; Mengtai Zhang, video “Ten thousand things are heard when born, But the highest heaven’s always still.
Yet everything must begin in silence, And into silence it vanishes.”
-Wei Yingwu, On Sound
In Taoist macroscopic ideology, the richest sound cannot be heard, but felt. Human hearing is limited to a narrow frequency range between 20Hz and 20kHz, which split the sound not only from the maker but also from its nature. The sound exceeding this range would not be heard by the ear, but felt by the body. In this universe, infinite things are producing ultrasonic and subsonic waves around us all the time. While it has been an ancient source of poetic inspiration, the inaudible world is far from being innocent, having been exploited for its physical potential as weaponry and for surveillance since World War I. Then, what is this inaudible world really like? Driven by this question, “>19980” is an ongoing series of audiovisual exploration following the idea of the inaudible soundscape. As the first piece that started this project, “Into Silence They Appear” explores the inaudible world underwater through the call of the orca, while incorporating computer-generated imagery as an imagination of such sound world.
During the EcoSono Institute in Alaska in 2013, we collectively recorded the orca vocalization, which is much wider than the human hearing range, with hydrophones and portable recorders. While listening to bird calls in New York one day in 2017, out of curiosity, I time-stretched the inaudible frequencies from the orca recording. Incredible things happened quickly. Chords and melodies emerged. I felt like I had stumbled into an entire sound world in those perceived silence. So I simply layered the sounds, hoping to convey the sense of wonder that struck me at that moment. The visual projection employs algorithmically generated imagery, utilizing techniques such as fractal noise, geometric distortion, and particle systems. The work extends the Taoist ideas on music, reimagining sound unheard, that transcends the human experience, transforming with time and space.
Fjóla Evans: Eroding (2017)
Over thousands of years the glacial river Hvítá in Iceland has carved a deep gorge into the surrounding landscape. At one particular twist in the river, the erosion has left several huge pillars of hyaloclastite rock, which look as they were flung haphazardly into the riverbed. In fact they were revealed slowly over time from the process of the river carving away their surroundings. In Eroding, the players create a dense mass that gets worn down over time in order to reveal the spiky formations beneath the surface.
Festival of Whispers (2017) Matthew Burtner, composer
performed by Eighth Blackbird
Festival of Whispers was commissioned by the Athenaeum Library of Art and Music in La Jolla, CA as a sound installation for the SoundON Festival of Modern Music. The piece is about coastal erosion as cultural erosion. It includes a chamber ensemble work (expanded in 2019), a multichannel sound installation, and a series of headphone listening stations, any part of which can be presented independently. Listeners hear the sound of the coast through the walls and floor, as if the ocean is pushing up under the building, pulling it out into the sea stone by stone. Whispered texts drawn from the music library stacks (the writings of composers) wash off the shelves and drift out to sea. As the ocean erodes the performance space, the musicians and audience members spread whisper chains around the hall, creating a festival of whispers. The ensemble music, while evoking the collapse of culture through coastal erosion, also develops its own musical content and community, contributing to that culture even as it too is washed away. Festival of Whispers explores the quiet loss of rare cultural artifacts, an outcome of climate change often overlooked in the face of the humanitarian and economic devastation global warming brings.
Note to the audience: The musicians will cue you to whisper to your neighbor, according to the individual audience-member scores included in your program. The audience will create “whisper chains” that they pass around the hall by whispering to their neighbors. These whispers mix with the oceanic sounds projected through the speakers, a sea of water and whispers.
The Clarity of Cold Air (2013)
Jonathan Bailey Holland, composer performed by Eighth Blackbird
Jonathan Bailey Holland’s works have been commissioned and performed by numerous orchestras, including the Atlanta, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dallas, Detroit, Minnesota, and Philadelphia Symphony Orchestras, as well as numerous chamber groups and soloists. A recipient of a 2015 Fromm Foundation Commission, he has received honors from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, American Music Center, ASCAP, the Presser Foundation, and more. He has served as Composer-in-Residence for the Plymouth Music Series of Minnesota, Ritz Chamber Players, Detroit and South Bend Symphony Orchestras, and the Radius Ensemble. Recent highlights include the premiere of Equality for narrator and orchestra for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and the premiere of Forged Sanctuaries by Curtis on Tour, commissioned to commemorate the centennial of National Park Service. Holland is Chair of Composition, Theory and History at Boston Conservatory at Berklee, and Faculty Chair of the Music Composition Low Residency MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Previously he served as Professor of Composition at the Berklee College of Music. About The Clarity of Cold Air, Jonathan writes:
Inspired by many a cold, Northern Midwest or New England day, this work is primarily atmospheric, focusing on the sonorities achieved by blending the instruments of the ensemble in various ways. There are many stark sounds - high, glassy harmonics from the strings, bowed metallic percussion instruments, harsh multi-phonics from the winds, airy cymbal rolls.
Under the Sea Ice (2015)
Christopher Luna-Mega, composer performed by Rivanna String Quartet
Few sounds I have found to be as fascinating as those of the bearded seals from the Chukchi sea in the Arctic Ocean. My first encounter with them was a recording by Ray, Watkins and Burns. It came to me that the sounds of the bearded seals would be ideal material for strings – the constant glissandi and the high resolution microtonal nuances characteristic of seal songs can be performed by no other acoustic instruments as idiomatically. All the music performed by the string quartet derives from transcriptions of several bearded seal songs, which were generously provided to me by Joshua Jones, researcher at the Scripps Whale Acoustic Lab, University of California, San Diego. Variations of the transcriptions (mainly in pitch and duration) were based on statistics of the bearded seal repertoire from 2008-2009, included in the Jones et al. article: Ringed, Bearded, and Ribbon Seal Vocalizations North of Barrow, Alaska: Seasonal Presence and Relationship with Sea Ice. The electronics for this piece consist of a hydrophone recording of sea ice from the Chuckhi sea, also a contribution of the Scripps Whale Acoustic Lab.
John Cage, Inlets (1977)
John Cage’s Inlets for water-filled conch shells is a listening meditation to consider your personal relationship with your environment. Cage instructs that the sound of burning pine cones be played as an interlude, a sound with renewed meaning in the context of our climate crisis.
Notes on Ensembles
The Rivanna String Quartet brings vibrant concerts to Central Virginia on the grounds of the historic University of Virginia. Quartet members are dedicated to promoting collaboration, quality performances, and education throughout the community. The Rivanna String Quartet looks to find the balance between the old and new, bringing a fresh look to the string quartet’s robust and varied repertoire through collaborations with living composers and guest artists. Rivanna is the resident quartet for the McIntire Department of Music at the University of Virginia, where the members serve as faculty and as principal musicians of the Charlottesville Symphony at the University of Virginia. Individually each musician maintains an active teaching and performing schedule within the community collaborating with such organizations such as the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, Ash Lawn Opera, Monticello, Charlottesville and Albemarle school systems, and the Richmond Symphony. Members of the quartet include Daniel Sender (violin), David Sariti (violin), Ayn Balija (viola), Adam Carter (cello).
Eighth Blackbird’s mission is to move music forward through innovative performance, advocate for new music by living composers, and create a legacy of guiding an emerging generation of musicians. Eighth Blackbird, hailed as “one of the smartest, most dynamic contemporary classical ensembles on the planet” (Chicago Tribune), began in 1996 as a group of six entrepreneurial Oberlin Conservatory students and quickly became “a brand-name defined by adventure, vibrancy and quality” (Detroit Free Press). Over the course of more than two decades, Eighth Blackbird has continually pushed at the edges of what it means to be a contemporary chamber ensemble, presenting distinct programs in Chicago, nationally, and internationally, reaching audiences totaling tens of thousands.
The sextet has commissioned and premiered hundreds of works by composers both established and emerging, and have perpetuated the creation of music with profound impact, such as Steve Reich’s Double Sextet, which went on to win the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. The ensemble’s extensive recording history, primarily with Chicago’s Cedille Records, has produced more than a dozen acclaimed albums and four Grammy Awards for Best Small Ensemble/Chamber Music Performance, most recently in 2016 for Filament. Longstanding collaborative relationships have led to performances with some of the most well- regarded classical artists of today from heralded performers like Dawn Upshaw and Jeremy Denk, to seminal composers including Philip Glass and Nico Muhly. In recent projects, Eighth Blackbird has joined forces with genre-fluid composers and performers including The National’s Bryce Dessner, Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Perry, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, My Brightest Diamond frontwoman Shara Nova, Will Oldham aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Iarla Ó Lionáird of The Gloaming, among others. Eighth Blackbird’s most recent album, When We Are Inhuman, a collaboration with Oldham and Dessner, was released on August 30, 2019 on 37d03d/Secretly Canadian. Singing in the Dead of Night, written for the ensemble by Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe, will be released on Cedille Records in spring, 2020.
Eighth Blackbird first gained wide recognition in 1998 as winners of the Concert Artists Guild Competition. Since 2000, the ensemble has called Chicago home, and has been committed to serving as both importer and exporter of world class artistic experiences to and from Chicago. A year- long pioneering residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art-Chicago in 2016, during which the ensemble served as a living installation with open rehearsals, performances, guest artists, and public talks, exemplified their stature as community influencers. Receiving the prestigious MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions, Chamber Music America’s inaugural Visionary Award, and being named Musical America’s 2017 Ensemble of the Year have supported Eighth Blackbird’s position as a catalyst for innovation in the new music ecosystem of Chicago and beyond.
Eighth Blackbird’s impact extends beyond recording and touring to curation and education. The ensemble served as Music Director of the 2009 Ojai Music Festival, has held residencies at the Curtis Institute of Music and at the University of Chicago, and holds an ongoing Ensemble-in-Residence position at the University of Richmond. In 2017, Eighth Blackbird launched its boldest initiative yet with the creation of Blackbird Creative Laboratory, an inclusive, two-week summer workshop and performance festival for performers and composers in Ojai, CA.
The name Eighth Blackbird derives from the eighth stanza of Wallace Stevens’s evocative, imagistic poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird: “I know noble accents / And lucid, inescapable rhythms; / But I know, too, / That the blackbird is involved / In what I know.”
Nathalie Joachim is a Burkart Flutes & Piccolos artist. Matthew Duvall proudly endorses Pearl Drums and Adams Musical Instruments, Vic Firth Sticks and Mallets, Zildjian Cymbals, and Black Swamp Percussion Accessories. Lisa Kaplan is a Steinway Artist.
Eighth Blackbird is managed by David Lieberman Artists’ Representatives.
During the enlightenment, from 1765, the Habsburg Empire capital of Vienna underwent massive transformations in urban design and appearance, from the introduction of sewer systems and streetlights to urbanization of suburbs and construction of public facilities, including parks, all guided by principles we now consider fundamental to creating healthy, green, livable cities. Habsburg Emperor Joseph II (1780-1790), a reformer with almost utopian (and quite Jeffersonian) ideas about architecture and health, extended these massive changes by contructing Vienna's medical district, including the general hospital, the military hospital, an institute for the mentally ill, and the medical-surgical military academy Josephinum. What does it mean to "construct for health" in designing cities and landscapes, public and private spaces, and health care facilities? This Medical center hour examines the Vienna Project as an important design-and-health precedent. How might we in the twenty-first century enlist design professionals and health professionals together in more deliberate, collaborative efforts to improve public and personal health and well being?
Co-presented with the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series, the Center for Design + Health (School of Architecture), the Eleanor Crowder Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry (School of Nursing), and the Department of Public Health Sciences and the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Humanities (School of Medicine), as part of the interprofessional symposium “Constructing for Health: A Global Nod to Nightingale,” funded by the Buckner W. Clay Endowment for the Humanities (College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences)
When academic medicine in the U.S. begins to reflect the remarkable diversity of the population it serves, we can potentially start narrowing critical gaps in cultural knowledge, the provision of health care, and the education and advancement of future physicians. Invoking the time-honored art of quilt-making as a metaphor, Dr. Wendi Wills El-Amin will engage the audience at this Medical Center Hour in exploring the urgent issue of minority diversity in academic medicine, including the opportunities that currently exist to craft new patterns and other opportunities we need to create in order to increase minority presence and engagement throughout academic medicine. UVA School of Medicine Associate Dean for Diversity Dr. Greg Townsend will offer a response.
Co-presented with the Office for Diversity, School of Medicine
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Early in her own training in psychology a decade ago, Casey Schwartz discovered that contemporary neuroscience and psychoanalysis are entangled in a conflict almost as old as the disciplines themselves. Many neuroscientists, if they think about psychoanalysis at all, view it as outdated, arbitrary, and subjective, while many psychoanalysts decry neuroscience as lacking the true texture of human experience. Yet some are now fighting passionately to bring the two fields together, including Mark Solms, a South African psychoanalyst, neuropsychologist, dream researcher, and towering presence in the effort to grow the hybrid discipline that he himself calls neuropsychoanalysis. Ms. Schwartz has written this story in her new book, In the Mind Fields: Exploring the New Science of Neuropsychoanalysis. In this Medical Center Hour, she tracks and interprets the ongoing struggle to define what we mean by the mind, the brain, and everything in between.
History of the Health Sciences Lecture
Co-presented with History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series and the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences
Dr. Romero shares insights regarding the increasingly important partnership of public health and primary care and the critical need for a strong, patient-centered primary care framework to improve health outcomes.
Co-presented with the Generalist Scholars Program and the Department of Public Health Sciences, UVA, in observance at UVA of Primary Care Week
With availability of medical interventions like cochlear implants to treat deafness, health professionals caring for deaf persons or helping families make reproductive choices about deafness (as in prenatal genetic screening) tend to work from biomedical rather than cultural understandings of deafness. Deaf Americans have produced a fascinating literary corpus over the last 200 years, both writing in English and creating stories and poems in American Sign Language. Similarly, the work of deaf visual artists illustrates powerfully how deafness may be construed as visual and conceptual gain rather than as hearing loss. These expressions of deaf culture also respond to the pathologization and medicalization of deafness in our society, resist the majority's assumptions and norms, and argue for the value of the deaf community and sign.
This Medical center hour explores deaf literature and visual art to suggest that a deeper understanding of deaf culture can help health professionals to provide better care and counsel, medically and ethically speaking, to deaf patients and their families.
Co-presented with the Department of English and the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series, UVA
One of medicine’s open secrets is that some patients request reassignment, or degrade, belittle, or harass health care professionals based on those professionals' race or ethnicity. Such patient conduct can raise thorny ethical, legal, and clinical challenges, and can be painful, confusing, and scarring for the physicians and other clinicians involved. This widely practiced, yet scarcely acknowledged, phenomenon poses a fundamental dilemma for law, medicine, and ethics. It also raises hard questions about how we should think about identity, health, and individual autonomy in the healthcare context and how we manage communication around representations of racial and ethnic bias. In this Koppaka Lecture, Drs. Lo and Paul-Emile will discuss their framework for considering and addressing this phenomenon.
The Koppaka Family Foundation Lecture in Medical Humanities
