The composer and performer Laurie Anderson was so taken with Moby-Dick, she composed a strange, cool, modern opera called Songs and Stories from Moby-Dick. Anderson tells us how Melville hooked her in the first few pages.
Music historian Stanley Crouch includes Moby-Dick in his lectures about jazz history at Juilliard, even though the novel was written over five decades before jazz developed. According to Crouch, Melville was an expert at improvisation. Produced by Ave Carrillo.
Studio 360 presents "Moby-Dude" from David Ives, the master of the short play. Mark Price plays a contemporary teenager who summarizes the great American novel for his English teacher...in two minutes flat. Produced by Jonathan Mitchell.
Former University of Kansas Professor Elizabeth Schultz has been consumed both personally and professionally with her passion for Moby-Dick. According to Schultz, Melville would have appreciated David Ives's short play Moby-Dude -- Melville was something of a prankster himself.
Playwright Tony Kushner ("Angels in America") tells us that Moby-Dick had the single greatest impact on his own writing.
Special Guest
Tony and Emmy Award-winning actor Edward Herrmann is our voice of Ishmael. Herrmann boasts an impressive career that spans more than 30 years in theater, film and television.
In 1986, legendary sculptor and painter Frank Stella defied Melville's instruction not to paint the White Whale, and then spent the next twelve years chasing an artistic obsession that Stella says nearly destroyed him. Produced by Studio 360's Leital Molad and Edward Lifson.
The great fantasy and science fiction master Ray Bradbury was still relatively unknown when the director John Huston tapped him to adapt Moby-Dick for the big screen. He tells Kurt how he channeled Melville while writing the screenplay for the film, which starred Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab. Produced by Jonathan Mitchell.
Professor Elizabeth Schultz discusses her favorite passage from Moby-Dick, from the chapter titled "The Grand Armada." In it, Ishmael and his companions are dragged into the center of a huge pod of whales, and find peace in the midst of the bloody terror of whale-hunting.
Studio 360's American Icons is made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: great ideas brought to life.
Studio 360 is a co-production of
Public
Radio International and
WNYC New York Public Radio, and is funded in part by
Ken and Lucy Lehman, the
National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lily Auchincloss Foundation. Studio 360's American Icons series is supported in part by the
National Endowment for the Humanities. Our series on creativity and science is supported in part by the
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Our series on Underground Heroes is supported in part by the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. 
Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
