Insight: Discussion On Whitman And Tchaikovsky

Inspired by Wells’ The Time Machine, we travel back in time in this year's Strange Concords: Words and Music Time Machine Events to alight on seminal artistic creations that once shaped our cultural future.

Join Mark Ford and Daniel Elphick for an insight discussion on Walt Whitman and Petyr Ilych Tchaikovsky, and what inspired the Book Festival curators to bring together their words and music in surprising, but exciting, conjunctions.

Mark Ford is a Professor at University College London. He has written four collections of poetry: Landlocked, Soft Sift, Six Children, and Enter, Fleeing. His other publications include the anthology London: A History in Verse, Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner, and three collections of essays: A Driftwood Altar, Mr and Mrs Stevens and Other Essays and This Dialogue of One: Essays on Poets from John Donne to Joan Murray, which was awarded the Poetry Foundation’s 2015 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books.

Dr Daniel Elphick is a musicologist and researcher. His teaching and research focus on the history, analysis, and theory of music, and especially on Russian and East-European music from the nineteenth century to the present. Daniel teaches on a variety of academic and creative topics including historical musicology, music analysis, critical theory, and popular music. He is a Teaching Fellow in Music, Royal Holloway, University of London and a Research Fellow of the Centre for Russian Music at Goldsmiths. His book, Music Behind the Iron Curtain, has recently been published.

Event chaired by Steven Gale.