The Warren Reports The conservatory paid tribute to Warren Darcy and his 41 years of service with a May 10 symposium and reception. Four guests with close ties to Darcy offered presentations in Clonick Hall (pictured from left, with Darcy, center):
psychology. “But when you think more about large-scale form, you think more about that and what you’re trying to deliver in performance.” Another fourth-year student, Zoe Sorrell, says she has benefited from Darcy’s class in both of her majors, flute performance and English. “Sometimes he uses allegories or metaphors about why a dissonance might exist in the piece or why the music is struggling to get back to its tonic key,” says Sorrell, who has taken all of her theory courses with Darcy and tutored many of his students. “I find myself trying to do that in the music I’m preparing, maybe not by doing chord analysis, but finding the overall picture of that narrative.”
William Kinderman
Matthew Patrick Bribitzer-Stull ’95 McCreless
James Hepokoski
Professor of Music at the University of Illinois “Rotations and FantasyProjections in Wagner and Mahler”
Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Minnesota “The Diaspora of the Wagnerian Leitmotiv”
Chair and Professor of Music at Yale University “Gottheit, Silence, Life, and Death in Beethoven’s Heiliger Dankgesang”
Darcy, circa 1990.
The Oberlin Butcher
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“Stephen King is the same age. He went that way, and I went this way. He’s made a lot more money than me.”
of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) and writes lurid novels. The villain is the serial killer known as the Edinburgh Butcher. Darcy’s second novel, The Master Class, takes place in Rome, where an Oberlin piano major studying with an internationally renowned teacher becomes mired in the case of a serial killer called the Mutilator. Neither novel is likely to be cracked open by the writer’s wife. “It’s not so much that she wouldn’t read things if they were written by someone else. She read the Dragon Tattoo books and loved them,” Darcy says of Marsha. “But with her husband writing about these horrible things, she wouldn’t want to do it. My sister also doesn’t want to read about sex and violent ideas written by her brother.” Even so, Darcy intends to step up the challenging process of finding an agent, and then a publisher, for his novels as he spends time reading, writing, watching (horror) films, traveling with his wife, and frolicking with Zoe, their nine-pound Coton de Tuléar. He has no plans to leave the college town he’s called home for nearly 45 years. “I think the Oberlin Conservatory is the best undergraduate music school in the world,” he says. “This has been a dream job. I get to work with really talented musicians. Now I want to do other things.” donald rosenberg is former music critic of the plain dealer , author of the cleveland orchestra: second to none , immediate past president of the music critics association of north america , and a visiting faculty member at the oberlin conservatory. he becomes editor of early music america magazine in july.
T O P : W A LT E R N O VA K ; B O T T O M : C O U R T E S Y O B E R L I N A R C H I V E S
The topic of narrative applies not only to Darcy’s work as a music theorist, but to his hobby, which he hopes will become his second vocation. “My original career goal was to be a novelist and write horror fiction,” he says. “Stephen King is the same age. He went that way, and I went this way. He’s made a lot more money than me.” So far. The doctor’s transformation to Mr. Darcy already has yielded two novels— both with Oberlin connections—ready for publication. The first, begun in 2005 and revised several years later, is What Rough Beast, the title from a line in a Yeats poem. The novel’s hero is an Oberlin English professor and expert on Robert Louis Stevenson who did his dissertation on “Moral Determinism in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (the actual original title of Stevenson’s popular novella is Strange Case
Professor of Music at Yale University “Drama and Musical Form in Late Wagner: Siegfried and the Rhinemaidens”