Between the Lines: Outsider reading list

New Zealand String Quartet
2 days ago
3 min read

Between the Lines is our musical book club series created with Te Matapihi ki te Ao Nui Wellington Central Library, Orchestra Wellington and New Zealand School of Music - Te Kōkī. We're bringing music and literature into conversation across seven free, monthly concerts.

The history of literature and music is full of artists who have stood apart from society. For the fifth in the Between the Lines series, curated and performed by the NZSQ, we’re exploring the lives, experiences and art of some of these 'Outsiders.' We’ll present music by four composers who, through religion, gender, politics, race or artistic identity, were considered outsiders during their lifetimes.

Explore our music and reading lists below.

See you there: Thursday 27 August, 5:30pm on the Bleachers, Ground Floor of Te Matapihi Wellington Central Library. Its free to attend, but we recommend you book a spot.

BOOK YOUR FREE SPOT

MUSIC

John Dowland | Flow My Tears

Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel | String Quartet in E flat major

Erwin Schulhoff | Five Pieces for String Quartet

II. Alla Serenata

III. Alla Czeca

IV. Alla Tango milonga

Florence Price | Five Folksongs in Counterpoint

II. My Darling Clementine

III. Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes

IV. Shortnin' Bread

John Dowland, a composer renowned for his ability to express the most profound melancholy through music, occupied a sometimes-precarious position as a Catholic convert in Elizabethan England. Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, a woman composing in nineteenth-century Germany, struggled to find the confidence to publish her music under her own name; in the United States in the twentieth century, the Black composer Florence Price relocated her family from Arkansas to Chicago to escape the relentless and often violent discrimination of the South, but still struggled to find recognition and acceptance. Erwin Schulhoff, a composer who wove together the modernism of the Second Viennese School with the aesthetics of Dada, jazz, and the enduring legacy of nineteenth-century Romanticism, had his music condemned during the Third Reich. A victim of Nazi persecution, Schulhoff would perish from tuberculosis in the Wülzburg concentration camp in August 1942.

LITERATURE

The suggested reading to accompany ‘Outsiders’ explores the experiences of exiles and outsiders in fiction and non-fiction, the struggle of artists from minority groups to find recognition, and the role of music within systems of political power.

	*I know Why the Caged Bird Sings* by Maya Angelou Find it in WCC's catalogue Autobiography
	*Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany* edited by Stephanie Barron Find it in WCC's catalogue Non-fiction
	*Go Tell It on the Mountain* by James Baldwin Find it in WCC's catalogue Fiction
	*Alone! Alone! Lives of Some Outsider Women* by Rosemary Dinnage Find it in WCC's catalogue Biography
	*Jane Eyre* by Charlotte Brontë Find it in WCC's catalogue Fiction
	*The Letters of Fanny Hensel to Felix Mendelssohn* edited by Marcia J. Citron Find it in WCC's catalogue Correspondence
	*Steppenwolf* (eBook) by Hermann Hesse Find it in WCC's catalogue Fiction
	*The Sympathizer* by Viet Thanh Nguyen Find it in WCC's catalogue Fiction
	*1984 - The Graphic Novel* by George Orwell \| Fido Nesti Find it in WCC's catalogue Graphic novel
	*Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments* by Saidiya V. Hartman Find it in WCC's catalogue Non-fiction
	*The Satanic Verses* by Salman Rushdie Find it in WCC's catalogue Fiction
	*Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches* by Audre Lorde Find it in WCC's catalogue Non-fiction
	*Invisible Man* by Ralph Ellison Find it in WCC's catalogue Fiction
	*Sounds and Sweet Airs: the Forgotten Women of Classical Music* by Anna R. Beer Find it in WCC's catalogue Non-fiction
	*Heretic Queen: Queen Elizabeth I and the Wars of Religion* by Susan Ronald Find it in WCC's catalogue Non-fiction
	*The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives* edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen Find it in WCC's catalogue Non-fiction