Before the UMD Symphony Orchestra's performance, musicology doctoral student Eric Hermann offers insight into the themes -- specifically, darkness, light, and illusion -- that influenced Mahler's Seventh Symphony and Britten's Les Illuminations.

Eric Hermann specializes in American popular and folk music from the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, with a focus on pre-war country music, blues, and American ballad singing. He has presented at conferences and meetings of the Society for American Music, the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology, and the AMS Capital Chapter. His paper “Songs from Dixie: Buell Kazee and the Reinvention of the Mountain Ballad” was a finalist for the 2012 Lowens Award.