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News Release

February 13, 2008

Contact:

Cynthia Haven, News Service: (650) 724-6184, cynthia.haven@stanford.edu


Stanford celebrates 40th anniversary of 'The White Album'

Forty years have passed since the Beatles released The White Album, introducing "Blackbird," "Rocky Raccoon," "Sexy Sadie," "Helter Skelter" and "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" into the cultural lexicon.

At 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 21, in Kresge Auditorium, a public conversation will explore the innovations that made the Beatles a powerful cultural force and inquire whether they will remain so in the future. "Beatles on the Brain" is sponsored by Stanford's Aurora Forum in conjunction with the Stanford Humanities Center.

The event is free and open to the public. Seating is limited.

Panelists are:

  • Jonathan Berger, who will act as moderator. A Stanford associate professor of music and co-director of the Stanford Initiative on Creativity and the Arts, Berger has composed symphonic works, concerti, works for all varieties of chamber ensemble and electro-acoustic music. His most recent CD, Miracles and Mud, was released last year. His sonification research was featured last month on NPR.
  • Daniel Levitin, the Bell Chair in Psychology at McGill University. Levitin is a psychologist and record producer. For a decade, he worked as a session musician, commercial recording engineer and record producer for countless rock groups, including Santana and the Grateful Dead. He is the author of the bestselling book, This Is Your Brain on Music.
  • Nick Bromell, professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Bromell is the author of By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum American Culture and Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s. He is currently writing a book on U.S. literature and democracy.

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    Comment:

    Mark Gonnerman, Director, Aurora Forum: (650) 723-5774, markg@stanford.edu

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