In today’s episode from the Vault, we revisit a 1982 lecture by the composer Lukas Foss, a leader of the American musical avant garde of the 1960s and 70s. In this lecture, a part of the “New American Music Series” of Gallatin Lectures at NYU, Foss discusses the state of American contemporary music, musical minimalism, and his own approach of combining serial elements with spontaneous composition.

Foss was born Lukas Fuchs in Berlin, on August 15, 1922, the son of a lawyer and a painter. He began studying piano and music theory when he was 7, and sketched out an opera when he was 11. His family fled to Paris in 1933, and arrived in the U.S. in 1937. He attended the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and studied composition with Paul Hindemith at Yale.

In 1953, Foss succeeded Arnold Schoenberg as the head of the composition department at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1962, “Time Cycle,” a four-movement vocal setting of texts by Auden, Housman, Kafka and Nietzsche, premiered with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. From 1971 to 1988 Foss was music director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic. After he left the Brooklyn Philharmonic, in 1990, Foss appeared as a guest conductor and pianist with orchestras around the world. He died in New York City on February 1, 2009.

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In this episode from the Institute’s vault, we revisit an October 2007 presentation by theoretical physicist and Institute Fellow Jeremy Bernstein on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the atomic bomb, and the nuclear arms race that followed.

As a physicist, Bernstein made contributions to elementary particle physics and cosmology, working at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New York University, and Stevens Institute of Technology, where he became Professor Emeritus in 1967. He held visiting positions at CERN, Oxford, and the École Polytechnique, among others, and was the last surviving senior member of Project Orion, which studied the potential of nuclear pulse propulsion for space travel.

Bernstein was a staff writer for The New Yorker for over three decades. He wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, and Scientific American, and authored over two dozen books, including Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma (2004).

He passed away on April 20th, 2025 at the age of 95. Here he is in 2007, discussing the topics on which he made a great contribution and helped illuminate.

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In 2010, Isabel Wilkerson spoke to the Institute about the fifteen years she spent reporting and writing her book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (Knopf, 2010). The book won the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction,

In 1994, Wilkerson was the New York Times Chicago Bureau Chief when she won the Pulitzer Prize for her profile of a fourth-grader from Chicago's South Side, and for two stories on the Midwestern floods of 1993. She was the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.

Her 2020 book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents argues that racial stratification in the United States is best understood as a caste system, akin to those in India and in Nazi Germany

She has taught at Princeton, Emory and Boston universities.

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Robert Coover spoke at the Institute in the spring of 2006. Coover is the author of over a dozen postmodern novels, including The Public Burning and Pinochio in Venice. He was one of the early supporters of electronic fiction, which he defended in “The End of Books,” a 1992 New York Times essay. Coover established Brown University’s MFA program in Digital Language Arts, and teaches courses on experimental narrative and literary hypermedia.

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In this week’s episode from the Institute’s Vault, we hear a lecture on the revival of narrative in history by Laurence Stone. Professor Stone taught at Princeton from 1963 to 1990. He died in 1991. He is best known for his books The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529-1642, and Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800.

Since 1977, the New York Institute for the Humanities has brought together distinguished scholars, writers, artists, and publishing professionals to foster crucial discussions around the public humanities. For more information and to support the NYIH, visit nyihumanities.org.

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In the episode of Conversations from the Institute, we hear from Eyal Press, who is the author of Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict that Divided America (2006), Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times (2012), and Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America, which won the Hillman Prize.

In the fall of 2002 he spoke about his book with Eliza Griswold, author of The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (2010), and Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize.

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Myself With Others, the podcast created by Adam Shatz and Richard Sears, contains conversations with writers, musicians, and critics. In this episode, the NYIH is pleased to run Adam's discussion with the comic book artist and journalist, Joe Sacco.

Institute fellow Ben Ratliff talks with Kelefa Sanneh about his new book, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres, which tells the story of popular music during the past fifty years.

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Myself With Others, the podcast created by Adam Shatz and Richard Sears, contains conversations with writers, musicians, and critics. In this episode, the NYIH is pleased to run the second half of Adam's discussion with the musician, writer and professor, George Lewis.

Myself With Others, the podcast created by Adam Shatz and Richard Sears, contains conversations with writers, musicians, and critics. In this episode, the NYIH is pleased to run Adam's discussion with the musician, writer and professor, George Lewis.