Nassau Notes

'Sweet Honey in the Rock' at McCarter

“Sweet Honey in the Rock,” the Grammy Award-winning African-American female a cappella ensemble, will perform at the McCarter Theatre Center at 8 p.m. Friday, March 11. The group finds its inspiration in the sacred music of the black church — spirituals, hymns and gospel — as well as in jazz and blues. For ticket information, call 258-2787 or visit <www.mccarter.org>.

Inside view of Iraq offered

A lecture titled “Iraq: A View from the Inside — What Does the Future Hold?” is planned for 4:30 p.m. Monday, March 7, in 16 Robertson Hall.

Speaking will be Wayne White, who was deputy director of the Office of Analysis for the Near East and South Asia in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the U.S. State Department until the end of February. In 2003, during the Iraq war, he was the bureau’s principal Iraq analyst and headed its Iraq team.

A member of the foreign service since 1973, White has served in Niger, Haiti and the Middle East. His lecture is sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Production issues topic of talk by Toyota executive

Hideaki Otaka, president and chief executive officer of Toyota Motor North America, will speak at 3 p.m. Monday, March 7, in 307 Frist Campus Center.

Otaka, who was named to his present post in May 2004, will discuss “Toyota and the United States: Is the Japanese Production System Welcomed by American Workers?”

Otaka has spent nearly his entire career in international operations for Toyota. He joined the company in 1965 and has taken on sales, marketing and manufacturing planning assignments for its activities in the United States, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Southwest Asia and Oceania.

His lecture is sponsored by the Program in East Asian Studies.

Former U.N. Weapons Inspector Hans Blix to discuss WMD

Former U.N. Weapons Inspector Hans Blix will discuss “Weapons of Mass Destruction, Terrorism and Security” at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 8, in Dodds Auditorium, Robertson Hall.

A valid Princeton ID will be required for admission to Dodds. The lecture will be simulcast in 1, 2 and 16 Robertson for others.

A veteran Swedish diplomat, Blix served as director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1981 to 1997 and was charged with overseeing inspection of Iraq’s nuclear program. He became head of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission in 2000, running the commission during the contentious period when the existence and verification of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was hotly debated by Security Council members as reason to justify waging war on that country.

Blix retired from that position in 2003, and currently is the honorary chair of the International Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction, which began work in January 2004. In his most recent book, “Disarming Iraq: The Search for Weapons of Mass Destruction,” he provides an appraisal of the U.N. Iraq weapons inspection debate that led to the country’s 2003 invasion.

The lecture is sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Program on Science and Global Security.

Concert to feature work by Tymoczko

A Tuesday, March 8, concert of contemporary vocal music by the world-renowned Gregg Smith Singers will feature a piece by Princeton composer Dmitri Tymoczko.

The performance, which begins at 8 p.m. in Richardson Auditorium, Alexander Hall, will include “The Agony of Modern Music,” Tymoczko’s work for chorus, soloists, two pianos, synthesizer and two percussion.

“The texts are largely taken from contemporary composers talking about contemporary music; these range from the polemical (Henry Pleasants, Arnold Schoenberg) to the utopian (Milton Babbitt, Karlheinz Stockhausen), to the despairing (Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Honegger),” said Tymoczko, an assistant professor of music who joined the faculty in 2002. “There’s also a poem by Shelley, and an excerpt from Kundera’s ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being.’

“It’s an unusual and colorful piece that uses music to reflect on the controversy surrounding 20th-century music,” he said. “[The] work, which is itself tonal and accessible, investigates the emotions and attitudes that led musicians to compose so much inaccessible music over the last hundred years.”

The concert also will include works by Franz Schubert, Charles Ives, Elliott Carter, Charles Kulis, Nils Vigeland and Gregg Smith. The free event is sponsored by Princeton Composers’ Ensemble and the music department. For more information, contact the Richardson box office at 258-5000.

Cyril Black Memorial Lecture focuses on the promotion of democracy

The United States and Democracy Promotion: Learning From Postcommunist Eurasia” is the title of a lecture to be presented at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 8, in 16 Robertson Hall.

Speaking will be Valerie Bunce, the Aaron Binenkorb Professor of International Studies and chair of the Department of Government at Cornell University.

Bunce’s research and teaching address comparative democratization, the origins and consequences of imperial decline, inter-ethnic cooperation and conflict, peace-making after internal wars, and the diffusion of capitalism from the West to the “rest.” She is the author of the book, “Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the State” (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Bunce’s talk, sponsored by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, is the ninth in a series of Cyril Black Memorial Lectures.

Events to celebrate 400 years of ‘knight errant’

A series of events celebrating the 400th anniversary of the great literary work “Don Quixote” is set for Tuesday through Thursday, March 8-10.

A public reading, a film screening and an academic colloquium — all under the title “Book Errant: 400 Years Reading ‘Don Quixote’” —

are planned by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures and the Humanities Council.

The first part of Miguel de Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” was published in 1604 and has been a bestseller since day one. The most published and translated book after the Bible, it has been described as the first great European novel, the first work of modern literature and the foundation of Latin American fiction. In 2002, the novel was voted the best book of all time by a group of 100 distinguished writers.

“‘Don Quixote’ is synonymous with the invention of the novel,” said Marina Brownlee, the Robert Schirmer Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures and comparative literature. “This beguiling book, which Faulkner read once a year and which Malraux saw as the most meaningful book for survivors of concentration camps, explores the meaning of history, the arts and technology — of human nature itself — in ways that speak to the 21st century as powerfully as they do to the 17th.”

The book describes the journeys and adventures — including the proverbial “tilting at windmills” — of Don Quixote, a knight errant, and his sidekick, Sancho Panza. “‘Book Errant’” considers ‘Don Quixote’ and its intriguing legacy in verbal, visual and filmic expressions from the first 400 years,” Brownlee said.

The reading will begin at 5 p.m. Tuesday in the Chancellor Green rotunda and will feature a multilingual “galaxy of quixotic texts” read by University faculty and students. A reception will follow.

The 1957 film, “Don Kikhot,” directed by Grigori Kozintsev, will be shown at 8 p.m. Wednesday in 106 McCormick. This Russian film is considered the definitive cinematic version of Cervantes’ masterpiece, featuring the great star Nikolai Cherkasov in the lead role.

The academic colloquium will run from 4:30 to 6 p.m. Thursday and from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday in 101 East Pyne. Participants will include Princeton faculty members Marina Brownlee, Paul Firbas, Francisco Prado Vilar, Nigel Smith and Michael Wood, as well as scholars from other institutions.

For more information, contact the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures at 258-7180 or visit <spo.princeton.edu>.

Polish envoy to speak March 10

The ambassador of Poland to the United States will speak on “The Future of the Transatlantic Partnership” at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, March 10, in 1 Robertson Hall.

Przemyslaw Grudzinski, who was active in Poland’s Solidarity Movement in the 1980s, has been ambassador since 2000. From 1978 to 1980, he was a visiting fellow at Princeton and returned here in 1988 as a Fulbright fellow.

The lecture, part of a series of Ambassador’s Forums, is sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.