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<\/a><\/p>\n\u201c[Bomberger] is truly a Renaissance man,\u201d said David Kenley, professor of history and chair of the College\u2019s History Department. He introduced Bomberger to the audience as a colleague and as a friend. Kenley described him as \u201csoft-spoken and unpretentious\u201d but a \u201cfierce advocate for his students, his profession, and the college as a whole.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/strong>The Professional Development Committee, which selects the award\u2019s recipient from a list of faculty peer nominations, agreed. \u201cYou won\u2019t find somebody more invested in the students,\u201d said Anne Gross, a member of the committee and assistant professor of voice at E-town. She said Bomberger\u2019s nomination stood out because of his recent book, \u201cMaking Music American: 1917 and the Transformation of Culture.\u201d She called the publication \u201ca little more groundbreaking in our field.\u201d<\/p>\n In his lecture, Bomberger emphasized this connection between music and American culture. He opened with a question he commonly received: \u201cWhat does music have to do with history?\u201d He responded, \u201cFor me, the answer is practically everything<\/em>.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Bomberger structured his lecture around live piano performances of three songs by the American composer Edward MacDowell: \u201cTo A Wild Rose,\u201d \u201cA Deserted Farm,\u201d and \u201cFrom an Indian Lodge.\u201d Each performance concluded with an anecdote on the historical context buffering the piece and with audience applause. John P. Ranck \u201958, professor of chemistry emeritus and the eponym of the award, sat amid the clapping spectators.<\/p>\n Bomberger described \u201cTo A Wild Rose\u201d as a \u201cdeceptively simple\u201d melody, and he connected this simplicity with the rise of mass piano production. He claimed the piece was written to be performed on \u201can upright piano by an amateur,\u201d reflecting the shift in piano advertising from a luxury to a middle-class household necessity. Such advertising techniques, he argued, are used by modern companies; for example, he compared this to Steve Jobs\u2019s campaign to transform iPhones from extravagance to an essential item.<\/p>\n Bomberger\u2019s next piece, \u201cA Deserted Farm,\u201d touched on the melancholy of abandoned agricultural buildings. While there are no population statistics nor economic figures to quantify the exodus of American farmers in the 1850s, Bomberger believes music can tell us \u201chow this historical [migration] feels.\u201d He traced the nostalgia for a vanished past to contemporary American music and played a clip of the toe-tapping 1985 song \u201cGrandpa\u201d by The Judds.<\/p>\n His final performance of \u201cFrom an Indian Lodge\u201d prompted a discussion on cultural appropriation. His lesson included more sound clips from diverse artists: from the cellist Yo-Yo Ma to the rap group Run DMC. Bomberger called this \u201cblending of diverse ethnic traditions\u201d a type of \u201chybrid music.\u201d He celebrated this hybridization as part of the goal of musicology.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the humanities, our goal is to connect the arts and literature to people,\u201d said Bomberger. \u201cAnd so we approach all of our work from that standpoint. It\u2019s very much centered on human beings, their accomplishments, their attempts, their failures, all those things that go into the human condition … Our subject really is human culture.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The lecture ended with a question and answer session, in which one audience member asked what\u2019s next for music. \u201cThe one thing historians are really bad at is predicting the future,\u201d said Bomberger to audience laughter. But he believes that making music will continue to be a social activity, citing the \u201cirreplaceable thrill of making music with others.\u201d And he believes that the humanities will continue to have a presence in higher education. \u201cThe humanities,\u201d he said, \u201care what make us human.\u201d<\/p>\n About the writer:<\/strong><\/p>\n Marissa Kopp is a senior at Elizabethtown College dual majoring in Environmental Science and Professional Writing. She works as an In-Class Tutor of English at Harrisburg Area Community College and plans to attend the Pennsylvania State University for a Ph.D. in Ecology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On April 3, Elizabethtown community members and College faculty filled the pew-style benches of Zug Recital Hall. The eager assembly faced a stage where E. Douglas Bomberger, professor of music in the Fine and Performing Arts Division, stood before a Steinway grand piano to present the Ranck Lecture entitled \u2018Listening to History.’ \u201c[Bomberger] is truly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":126,"featured_media":7750,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[178],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-achievements","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/126"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7748"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7751,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7748\/revisions\/7751"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}