One means to reassert wholeness to the fractured state of the land and people, one path to reintegrate the past and the future is through the restorative power of culture ... Musical expression is one of the primary forces for cohesion in this community. It is through music that shared work experience, legends, beliefs, morals, philosophies, rituals, and recreational activities have been preserved and disseminated. Music is the stitchery binding the Appalachian quilt of daily life... — Dr. Pen
Our
Purpose
While
the Bingham Seminars have traditionally explored the global with
visits to London, Paris, Vienna, Spain, China, Japan, and Sicily, this
seminar seeks to understand the global by investigating the
local—the hills and hollers of Eastern Kentucky. Music that
arises from the soil closest to home has the greatest power to move us.
Music that springs from a sense of place has the power to bind people
in community. A Bingham Seminar that focuses on home and community has
the power to instruct us in the means for creating a new future at home
while also teaching us about our relationship to the larger world.