Musicologist Paul Laird to lecture on Baroque cello Feb. 2

Jan. 23, 2007 -- Paul Laird, Ph.D., director of the Division of Musicology at the University of Kansas, will speak on "What Was — And Is — The Baroque Cello?" at 4 p.m. Friday, Feb. 2.

The lecture is free and open to the public and is sponsored by the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences. It takes place in Room 102 of the Music Classrooms Building, 6500 Forsyth Blvd. For more information, call (314) 935-4841 or email staylor@wustl.edu.

Paul Laird

Laird is the author of Towards a History of the Spanish Villancico (1997), Leonard Bernstein: A Guide to Research (2002) and The Baroque Cello Revival: An Oral History (2004). He is co-editor of Res musicae: Essays in Honor of James W. Pruett (2001) and The Cambridge Companion to the Musical (2002). His articles and reviews have appeared in more than a dozen journals.

In 1989, Laird co-founded the International Inventory of Villancico Texts, an online database that includes information on about 22,000 villancicos, which he continues to direct. Current projects include a book on Bernstein's Chichester Psalms for the College Music Society Sourcebooks on American Music series, as well as an historical dictionary of the Broadway musical, which he is writing with William A. Everett.

An active Baroque cellist, Laird performs with the Spencer Consort and also directs the Instrumental Collegium Musicum at KU, where he has taught since 1994. He previously taught at Binghamton University in New York and University of Denver. He holds a doctorate in music from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.