Cristina Pato, together with fellow Silkroad member Shane Shanahan, will teach this semester at the Harvard University Department of Music, as Blodgett Distinguished Artists in Residence. The Blodgett Artist-in-Residence program has been at Harvard for 22 years and provides for distinguished artists and ensembles to spend time at the Department of Music and also invites artists to lecture and perform in a variety of musical disciplines.
Cristina will be teaching at the Department of Ethnomusicology in the new course “Performing Musical Difference: Case Studies from the Silk Road Project,” directed by Kay Kaufman Shelemay, in cooperation with musicians from the Silk Road Ensemble. It will explore the social processes and ethical challenges of intercultural musical exchange, composition, and performance, with the humanistic goal of creating “unexpected connections, collaborations, and communities in pursuit of meaningful change,”
This is one more step in Cristina’s collaboration with Harvard University, as she has been teaching classes in the summers and at different courses throughout the academic year at the Department of Education (Harvard Graduate School of Education) on the power of the arts in education and society (Arts and Passion Driven Summer Institute, or the latest one on Arts and Healing), in collaboration with the Silk Road project, which has a residency at the University and for which Cristina serves as educational advisor.
You can find more information here → and you can watch the presentation video → featuring Cristina Pato herself.