Margot Fassler is Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Music History and Liturgy at the University of Notre Dame. Her works include The Virgin of Chartres: Making History through Liturgy and the Arts, Gothic Song: Victorine Sequences and Augustinian Reform in Twelfth-Century Paris, and a series of films on sacred music. Fassler is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Musicological Society's Otto Kinkeldey Prize.
Jean Beaufret (1907--1982) was an important reader and translator of Martin Heidegger's work and played a key role in Heidegger's reception in France. The four volumes of Dialogues avec Heidegger were published between 1974 and 1985.Martin Heidegger (1889--1975), who became famous for his theories of being and human nature, is considered one of the most original and influential philosophers of the 20th century.Mark Sinclair teaches at Manchester Metropolitan University.An American of Austrian birth, Arnold Schoenberg composed initially in a highly developed romantic style but eventually turned to painting and expressionism. At first he was influenced by Richard Wagner and tried to write in… a Wagnerian style. He attracted the attention of Alban Berg and Anton von Webern, with whom he created a new compositional method based on using all 12 half-steps in each octave as an organizing principle, the so-called 12-tone technique. His importance to the development of twentieth-century music is incredible, but the music he composed using this new method is not easily accessible to most concertgoers.