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Julian
Anderson Joins Faculty
Julian
Anderson will be teaching a graduate
composition seminar and undergraduate
advanced composition seminar in the fall.
He also will begin an appointment as the
Cleveland Orchestra's Daniel Lewis Young
Composer Fellow for 2005-7. Before coming
to Harvard he was Head of Composition at
the Royal College of Music and continues
as Artistic Director of the Philharmonia
Orchestra's "Music of Today" concert
series in London.
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"I'm
a great worshipper of Western tradition, I
have no apologies for loving the Western
canon...but I also need music and poetry
from other traditions."
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"I see my role as fusing academia with the
practical world of music-making," says composer
Julian Anderson, as he tries to capsulize his focus
for his work at Harvard. Anderson has just finished
an inaugural year as Fanny P. Mason Professor of
Music. The first several months he took as
sabbatical to devote himself to composition, he
then spent time in the spring working with
students.
"They are a very lively
bunch, open, very stimulating. My main wish is
always to connect the personal/private activity
with practical activity of the world outside. I
want to make sure composers are getting played, and
that the outside world knows what's going on at
Harvard."
Anderson is very much a part
of the outside world. For the past five years he
was composer in association with the City of
Birmingham Orchestra (A CD of the music he composed
while there will be released mid-year, 2006, on the
NMC label). In December 2004, his Symphony was
voted Best Orchestral Work at the 2004 British
Composer Awards. One month later, Oliver Knussen
conducted Birmingham Contemporary Music Group in
the world premiere of Anderson's Book of Hours.
This past spring he was at work on his largest ever
piece--a work for chorus and orchestra commissioned
by the BBC. It's a mixture of Emily Dickinson poems
and fragments of Latin mass, and Anderson has been
doing research at Harvard. "Half her poetic legacy
is right around the corner!" he
enthuses.
Anderson's compositions often
display his interest in the music of traditional
cultures from outside the Western concert
tradition--the folk music of Eastern Europe, for
example, or the modality of Indian ragas. "I'm a
great worshipper of Western tradition, I have no
apologies for loving the Western canon," says
Anderson, "but I equally need music and poetry and
art from other traditions."
There is also an affinity
with Stravinsky, whose early Russian works affected
Anderson's own folk-influenced pieces such as
Tiramisù (1994) and Khorovod (1989-94), one
of his most widely played pieces. The Stations of
the Sun (1998), a commission for the BBC Promenade
Concerts, is one of Anderson's most well--known
pieces, and has been played by several British
orchestras, at the ISCM in Luxembourg, and by both
the Cleveland Orchestra and the Boston Symphony
Orchestra.
Although he doesn't describe
himself as prolific --"I do roughly one piece a
year"--it's recently sped up a bit. "I was able to
concentrate on composing thanks to my Harvard
sabbatical and able to really work eighteen hours a
day, seven days a week."
Anderson, now 38 years old,
began composing at eleven. He studied with John
Lambert, Alexander Goehr and Tristan Murail. His
first acknowledged work, Diptych (1990) for
orchestra, won the 1992 Royal Philharmonic Society
Prize for Young Composers. He has come to see his
writing process as part improvisatory, part
systematic. "I try to recapture something that's
raw and immediate. A solid training is essential;
but excessive training can kill a
composer."
And improvisation is key.
"Often I improvise at the piano and see what comes
up. Then I analyze it as if someone else wrote it.
If you get one good chord in two-to-three hours you
might have the germ of a new piece.
"Where I get my sources is
really from gut instinct; I think I'm very
instinctual. I know a lot about theory and do
organize my music. The first stage [of a
piece] is, in fact, very organized. In the
second version I run riot over the first version. I
improvise with the strict version. The final result
is a hybrid of very systematic and very
instinctive."
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Price
Appointed Honorary Knight Commander
The Royal Academy of
Music recently announced that HM The Queen
appointed Curtis Price (PhD '74) an honorary Knight
Commander of the British Empire (KBE) in
recognition of his services to music.
Price moved to the U.K. in
1981 to teach at King's College London, where he
has most recently served as Head of Department. He
has been Principal of the Academy since 1995, and
was made a University of London Professor in 2000.
Price is a Trustee of Musica Britannica, the Handel
House Museum and the National Sound Archive, and is
a Governor of the Purcell School.
Under Professor Price's
leadership, the Academy has almost doubled the size
of it's space; become the only conservatoire to be
made a member of the University of London;
introduced innovative new BMus, MMus and PhD
programs; introduced Media Music, Musical Theatre,
Jazz and a new Opera course; and created "Open
Academy," which expands access into the widest
community.
The KBE was introduced in
1917 to recognize overseas citizens who helped the
British war effort. It has developed into a general
award which is presented for "services rendered to
the United Kingdom and its peoples." Other
Americans who have received the KBE include film
director Steven Spielberg, former president George
Bush Sr., former Mayor of New York Rudolph
Giuliani, and Microsoft chairman Bill
Gates.
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Rands
Honored After 16 Years at
Harvard
Through more than a
hundred published works and many
recordings, Bernard Rands has established
himself as a major figure in contemporary
music. His work Canti del Sole, premiered
by Paul Sperry, Zubin Mehta and the New
York Philharmonic, won the 1984 Pulitzer
Prize in Music. Le Tambourin won the 1986
Kennedy Center Freidheim Award and Canti
D'Amor, recorded by Chanticleer, won a
2000 Grammy. Conductors including
Barenboim, Boulez, Berio, Maderna,
Marriner, Mehta, Muti, Ozawa, Rilling,
Salonen, Sawallisch, Schiff, Schuller,
Schwarz, Silverstein, Sinopoli, Slatkin,
von Dohnanyi, and Zinman have programmed
his music. He has been honored by B.M.I.,
the Guggenheim Foundation, the National
Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer,
and the Barlow, Fromm and Koussevitzky
Foundations. This past year, Rands was
inducted into the American Academy of Arts
and Letters.
Rands came to
Harvard University in 1989 as Walter
Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music and
taught both graduate and undergraduate
courses including Special Topics in
Composition, Analysis of 20th Century
Music, and Text and Orchestration. He also
created the Core course Literature and the
Arts B-75, "Composing Music since 1950,"
and gave the inaugural "Group for New
Music" course in 1993.
He composed
prolifically while a professor at Harvard.
Recent commissions have come from the
Suntory Concert Hall in Tokyo, the New
York Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, the
Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Cincinnati
Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic,
the Philadelphia Orchestra, the B.B.C
Symphony, the National Symphony Orchestra,
the Internationale Bach Akademie, the
Eastman Wind Ensemble, and the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra. Rands has also
composed many chamber works for major
festivals, worldwide, including his
Chamber Opera Belladonna, premiered by the
Aspen Festival for its fiftieth
anniversary in 1999 and performed as part
of VOX 2003 of the New York City
Opera.
On April 13, 2005,
friends, colleagues and students of Rands
gathered in John Knowles Paine Concert
Hall to honor the composer's life and
work. The Ying Quartet played two pieces:
Eagle at Sunrise by Augusta Read Thomas;
and Rands' own Quartet No.
3--Commentaire.
Rands' upcoming
projects include a commission from The
Institute for American Music to write a
string quartet for the Ying Quartet; a
Meet the Composer consortium commission to
compose a guitar concerto for Eliot Fisk
and three chamber orchestras; and a solo
piano work for Robert Levin. He continues
his long term project of composing a full
scale opera, entitled Vincent, based on
the life and work of Van Gogh.
"Rands' ability to find clarity within
complexity is perhaps the most remarkable
thing about the three-movement
concerto"
--John von Rhein,
Chicago Tribune, about First Cello
Concerto, written as a 70th birthday gift
for Mstislav Rostropovich
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Yo-Yo
Ma's Silk Road Project Comes to
Soundscapes, First Nights
The Silk Road
Project and Harvard University will
collaborate in a unique interdisciplinary
educational venture beginning in
2005.
The Silk Road
Project, founded by cellist and Harvard
alumnus Yo-Yo Ma, strives to bring new
ideas, talent, and energy into the world
of classical music, and at the same time
nurture musical and artistic creativity
drawing on diverse sources of cultural
heritage around the world.
"The Silk Road
Project serves as a common resource for a
number of artistic, cultural and
educational programs reflecting the
heritages of the countries once connected
by the ancient four-thousand-mile network
of trading routes that spanned three
continents from Europe to Asia," said
Laura Freid, Silk Road Project CEO and
executive director. "By sharing music and
art across divides we hope to enrich our
understanding of each other and of the
three and a half billion people who live
along the Silk Road."
Kay Kaufman
Shelemay, G. Gordon Watts Professor of
Music and Professor of African and African
American Studies, said she will begin her
course "Soundscapes: Exploring Music in a
Changing World" with a Silk Road Project
case study, and that her class will track
the progress of the Silk Road Project
throughout the fall. Further, she said,
Silk Road musicians will participate in
Harvard College Professor Thomas Kelly's
"First Nights" Core course. Students from
both courses will attend Project open
rehearsals when the musicians are in
residence at Harvard.
Says Shelemay: "This
is an unusual collaboration. The Silk Road
Project is a truly transnational musical
venture. Working with them will give our
students the opportunity to participate in
a wonderful cross-cultural experience."
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Fromm Players
at Harvard Presents Multiple Voices
Festival
--Excerpts from a
review by Lloyd Schwartz, Boston Phoenix
(3/15/05)
The Harvard Music Department's Elliott
Gyger was guest curator for two
imaginative and memorable
contemporary-music concerts by the Fromm
Players: "Multiple Voices," which focused
on a wide spectrum of work by
distinguished composers -- vocal music
rarely heard because each one involves
more than one vocalist. One concert
consisted largely of works for two voices,
though not the usual duets or dialogues;
the second was for larger groups. Almost
everything was in the skillful hands of
New York conductor Jeffrey Milarsky and a
group of stellar musicians, with Hans
Tutschku in charge of the electronics . .
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The big hit was
Berio's delirious 1975 A-ronne ("from A to
Z"), in the version for eight amplified
voices and live electronics he made for
the Swingle Singers. Berio was the one
composer in the series who dared to be
amusing (even plugging in the singers'
mikes became a comic bit). . .
Peter Maxwell
Davies's 1961 Leopardi Fragments,
beautiful and sinister, intricately
despairing, was a real discovery . .
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The most difficult
undertaking was Elliott Carter's knotty
Syringa (1978) -- a setting of a John
Ashbery poem about Orpheus, with Ashbery's
colloquial language ("But it isn't enough
to just go on singing") in constant
opposition to fragments of ancient Greek
"spoken" by Orpheus himself to a bardic
guitar (Oren Fader). Syringa deals with
the way music, constantly passing through
time, reflects the way life itself passes.
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Copland's
Cold War
Ambassadorship
"Today it's
hard for us to have a sense of culture--to
get a snapshot--our culture is so diverse.
Who are our most important cultural
representatives? From the 1950s onwards
the USIA's staff had to make that
decision."
Emily Abrams was
fact-checking Aaron Copland's tenure as
Norton
Professor at Harvard
as part of her research on a forthcoming
book on the composer edited by her
professor, Carol Oja. The official
lectures from his visit (there were six)
were published in the volume, Music and
Imagination in 1952. But Abrams, a
second-year musicology graduate student,
came upon something very few people knew
about.
"I found a letter in
the Library of Congress, from Copland to
Harvard, where he said, 'Here are the
tapes for the series I made that was based
on my class at Harvard.' I discovered he
did an additional seminar for
undergraduates called "Music in the
Twenties." What's more, Copland had turned
that class into the bones of a television
series with the same name, produced by
WGBH TV in Boston in 1965. The tapes he
referred to in his letter were unedited
copies of the shows.
Abrams tracked the
tapes to Houghton Library, where they
could not be located.
"But there were
transcripts," she smiles. (She was
eventually able to view another copy of
the tapes at the Library of Congress.)
Twelve months and many hours of research
later, Abrams has come to know Copland in
a role not often conjured anymore --that
of TV personality and Cold War cultural
ambassador.
"Music in the
Twenties" was Copland's first big TV
project, and his only series.
"It was very much of
its time," says Abrams. "This was the
heyday of educational television, a time
when artistic and intellectual topics were
popular. Half the program is Copland
talking to the camera and half is a live
performance of music from the
twenties.
"He makes some quite
eclectic choices, like Paul Hindemith's
There and Back--an amazing opera that goes
forward in time and then rewinds. To
achieve this the producers used a mix of
live sounds and special effects. He also
programmed other music the general public
probably hadn't heard much before;
Stravinsky, Schoenberg. Even in the 1960s
these seemed very modern. To think even
now of a work of Schoenberg's being heard
for fifteen minutes on television is
incredible!"
The series was very
popular, and it was repeated a number of
times. But the transcripts of the unedited
tapes gave even more
information.
"After they finished
shooting the scripted part the producers
would chat with Copland and he'd give his
honest opinion--'What did you think of so
and so or such and such'--and this you
obviously didn't see in the
program."
Abrams found the
composer's candor illuminating. "Copland
was usually very nice and professional, so
it's interesting to hear his honest
opinions on some of his contemporaries."
He described Satie and Cage, for example,
as "Much more amusing to talk about than
to really listen to." He found the
harmonic progressions in jazz "rather
corny," described Webern's serial method
as "cold-blooded," and Hindemith as "a
true academician, deep-dyed."
"His personality was
the thing," Abrams believes. "He had a
good personality for TV. He was very
straightforward, like Bernstein. Not the
extravagant personality or glitter and
glamour of Bernstein, but he was an
affable, honest kind of guy. People wanted
to interview him because they knew he
could be relied on to repeat his favorite
anecdotes and that he'd speak as if he
were telling them for the first time. In
the later years of his life, I think he
loved telling these stories of his
youth."
And the camera liked
him as well: Abrams has now found about 35
television documentaries and interviews in
addition to recordings of live
performances conducted by
Copland.
"Copland became like
a father figure for American music. For
many people, of the American composers of
his generation, Copland's was the music in
their minds. Aspects of his music were
even associated with American
landscapes--Rodeo, the American West;
Quiet City; Appalachian Spring. Copland
was the U.S. from a musical point of
view."
But more than that,
Copland epitomized the idea of the
American dream that was so key in the Cold
War. On American television, "People
needed to be shown that honest,
straightforward guys from humble
beginnings can rise up and succeed without
the need for communism," says
Abrams.
Abrams became
intrigued with how Copland's image was
used by the U.S. government for propaganda
purposes overseas. She discovered that
Copland, who was once employed by the
State Department to represent America
during an exchange of composers, was
featured on a U.S. Information Agency
(USIA) television program produced for
foreign audiences. "The way he's portrayed
to foreign audiences reveals a lot about
what the American government respected in
the culture," notes Abrams. "In the same
way that the CIA secretly funded concerts
in Europe as cultural propaganda, there
were government agencies that selected
certain American artists to represent the
U.S. overseas. Copland's USIA television
appearance was used to help combat an
anti-American sentiment that had started
to grow in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s.
It was like saying, 'Look, we're not the
bad guys--we have culture too! We have an
exciting and diverse musical scene--with
brilliant composers and jazz musicians!'
I'm interested in this idea that
government organizations believe music can
change a country's ideological outlook.
This is the sort of concept one usually
associates with totalitarianism, not with
America."
Emily Abrams is
in her second year of graduate work in
historical musicology. She is pursuing the
role of music in Cold War relations as a
potential thesis topic.
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White
Rabbit in Residence
2005
The Harvard Group
for New Music (HGNM) announces the
inauguration of a new musical
experiment--the construction and
contracting of a local ensemble to be
in-residence for the entire year. During
the 2005-2006 concert season, the HGNM
will work intensively with "White Rabbit,"
a group composed of eight professional
Boston-area musicians led by conductor
Eric Hewitt. Hewitt has worked with HGNM
composers in the past in his role as guest
conductor on many of their previous
concerts.
"Instead of HGNM
hiring different piecemeal groups for each
show and getting maybe two or three
rehearsals before a performance, White
Rabbit will rehearse here once a week for
eight weeks before each of our three
acoustic concerts," says Chris Honett,
HGNM director. "Among other things, it
will help the composers build
relationships with the performers, give
them a better opportunity to become
familiar with each others working styles
and language, and of course just allow far
more time for the preparation of the
works--all of which will dramatically
improve the performance of our music and
the concert experience as a whole. There
may also be opportunities for the group to
perform some of our music in non-Harvard
related events, which would help get our
music out in the community."
2005-2006 HGNM Concert
Schedule
All concerts begin
at 8:00 pm in John Knowles Paine Concert
Hall
Saturday, November
12: White Rabbit
Saturday, February
11: White Rabbit
Sunday, April 2:
Fromm Residency Concert, Arditti String
Quartet
Saturday, April 22:
the Goldberg Concert, White
Rabbit
Also to note
(locations to be determined)
Friday &
Saturday, January 13 & 14: Hydra
electroacoustic concerts
Friday &
Saturday, May 12 & 13: Hydra
electroacoustic concerts
(http://huseac.fas.harvard.edu/
for more information on these
events)
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Keyboards
Donated
Ms. Merle
Chamberlain has donated her 1950
Hubbard/Dowd Flemish style harpsichord to
the Music Department. Veneered in
satinwood with rosewood crossband, it is a
single manual instrument with three
registers, two 8' stops and a 4'. After
being overhauled at the Harvard Piano
Shop, it will be moved to Professor
Kelly's office.
Two years ago, Piano
Technical Services purchased an 1883,
85-note Steinway A from the estate of the
late Mason Hammond. It has a rosewood case
with straight fluted legs and a carved
lyre and music desk. It has undergone a
complete restoration including a new ivory
keyboard. The instrument will be used for
special events.
David Lewin's wife,
June, has given the College David's 1969,
6'1" Yamaha C3 grand piano. It is
presently in the Harvard Piano Shop being
overhauled. Ms. Lewin requested that it be
offered to Lowell House where David had
lived and been involved in the annual
opera as an undergraduate. Master Diana
Eck was delighted to learn of the gift,
and suggested it be placed in the Library,
so the House will be able to have small
recitals.
--Lewis
Surdam
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Library
Adds Midi to Aldrich Room
The Eda Kuhn Loeb
Library has recently acquired a MIDI
keyboard for use at the Music Research
Workstations in the Aldrich Room. This
digital keyboard enables notes to be input
directly in to the Finale score-writing
software application. It is a full 88-key
unit with weighted action as well as a
host of controllable features like
transposition and multi-track recording.
Using headphones, composers may hear their
work as they write, and review completed
works through Finale's built-in
synthesizer.
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A
Letter from Asia
Dear Members of the Music
Department,
I hope this letter
finds all of you well! It's hard to
believe that nearly a year has passed
since I returned from my Paine Fellowship
to East Asia, but I wanted to take a
moment to write to you, to thank you, and
to let you know how truly unforgettable
the experience was.
For those of you I
have not yet met, let me begin by
explaining that I traveled for nearly four
months through Taiwan, Japan, and China
with the aim of expanding my understanding
of Taiwan's popular music and culture
(subjects that I began to explore during
the research and writing of my senior
thesis). I hoped to verify further the
connections I had made between certain
vocal styles in Taiwan, shidaiqu on the
Mainland, and Japanese enka by seeking out
performances and recordings in these
countries. I also wanted to interview
Samingad, a singer whose work I had
addressed in my final thesis chapter, so
as to gain a firsthand understanding of
how she views herself as a singer, a
member of the Puyuma tribe on Taiwan, and
as a "Taiwanese" person. Moreover, I hoped
to speak with her producers so as to
confirm my instincts about the marketing
strategy that has shaped her public image.
The article I am refining from my thesis
deals with this example, among others, of
what different aboriginal singers signify
within the social milieu of contemporary
Taiwan.
Well, to make a long
story short, I did all of these things and
much more. In Japan, I traveled from Tokyo
to Osaka to Takayam and then into the
beautiful rural countryside, seeking out
as many enka performances and performers
(professional and amateur) as I possibly
could. In China, I attended concerts and
scoured markets to uncover old shidaiqu
recordings. Somewhat serendipitously, I
happened to be in Beijing for China's
first-ever electronic music festival, held
in a converted warehouse space near
Sanlitun. In Taiwan, I spent the majority
of my time studying voice (primarily
various theatrical styles) at the National
Fu Hsing Dramatic Arts Academy, collecting
new samples of contemporary works by
aboriginal artists, and conducting
interviews. My conversations with Samingad
were undoubtedly the highlight of my
experience--I will never forget the hours
I spend talking with her and learning from
her.
--Meredith
Schweig
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Ying
Premieres Winning Blodgett String
Quartet
"As a child, I was
shocked to hear from my grandmother that
she couldn't remember her mother's face
anymore,"recalls Eliyahu Shoot, sixth-year
graduate composition student. "All that
remained was an image of her covering her
face while lighting Sabbath candles. After
the war, my grandmother returned to her
native Bialystok in Poland, but found
neither her house nor her parents' graves.
In Memoriam is a musical memorial to my
grandparents and their
memories."
Shoot's composition
was selected as the winner of the 2005
Blodgett Composition Competition, and In
Memoriam was premiered by the Ying Quartet
on March 18th in John Knowles Paine
Concert Hall.
Shoot describes the
piece as a way to look at different
shadings of memory: "In a way, I was both
interested in the memory of reality that
could only be remembered, and the memory
of dreams that never materialized. The
piece grows out of a lament figure (G - F#
- Eb - D) which appears as a ground bass
and functions as the basis for both
harmonic and melodic development. At
first, the mood is that of a funeral
procession, being gradually metamorphosed
into a grotesque dance, and proceeding
further towards ecstatic oblivion, rage,
angst,
and--finally--resignation."
Violist Phillip Ying
recalls a memorable rehearsal moment
between his sister, violinist Janet Ying,
and Shoot, where "…he was trying to
get Janet to produce the most anguished,
hair-raising scream possible out of a
violin." The Quartet, says Phillip, really
enjoyed working on Shoot's piece: "His
quartet movement is emotionally powerful
and satisfying, well crafted for the
quartet, and organically developed. It was
a particular pleasure to work directly
with Eli and to discover that he
has a wonderful imagination and very
specific and strong ideas about his
music."
Shoot also relished
the collaboration: "They were extremely
attentive to every minute detail...giving
a marvellous performance, true to the
essence of the work, but also personal,
rich, and transparent."
In Memoriam was
played in a Blodgett Chamber Music Series
program that also included Mendelssohn and
Brahms, with guest clarinetist Todd
Palmer.
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Huseac Renovated,
Sound Studio Added
The Harvard
University Studio for Electroacoustic
Composition (HUSEAC)recently received FAS
funding for a $1 million renovation of its
studios. Main goals are noise reduction;
updated heating and cooling systems; and
creating a high- quality live recording
facility. Renovations are currently
underway and are slated to be completed by
the late fall of 2005.
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Carolyn Abbate, among
the world's foremost authorities on opera, has been
appointed professor of music in Harvard
University's Faculty of Arts
and Sciences, effective Sept. 1, 2005. Abbate has
also been named the first Radcliffe Alumnae
Professor at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for
Advanced Study, a post that will allow her to spend
four semesters at the Radcliffe Institute during
her first five years at Harvard.
Abbate comes from Princeton
University, where she was professor of music and
has taught interdisciplinary courses in the
Department of German, the Program in European
Cultural Studies, and the Program in Media and
Modernity.
Spanning operas from
Monteverdi to Ravel as well as film music and sound
technology, Abbate's work crosses disciplinary
boundaries from music into literature and
philosophy. Her writing has addressed the
importance of the virtuoso voice in opera, the
history of mechanical music, and the perception of
opera by the listener. Her most recent writings
have advanced the argument that analysis of musical
works in the abstract--common in traditional
scholarship--bypasses music in its ephemeral,
phenomenal form as a performance. Her interest in
philosophies of presence reflects her practical
experiences as a pianist, and in live
theater.
Abbate is author of In Search
of Opera (2001) and Unsung Voices (1991) and
co-author of the forthcoming The Penguin History of
Opera. She is also a translator of French scholarly
works, most recently rendering Vladimir
Jankelevitch's La Musique et L'Ineffable (1960) as
Music and the Ineffable, published in 2003.
Abbate's own writings have been translated into
French, Italian, and Hebrew.
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Faculty
News
Together
with Jonathan Harvey, Fanny P. Mason
Professor Julian Anderson was featured
composer at this year's "Musica Nova"
Festival in Helsinki in March.
Performances of The Book of Hours are
planned with the New World Symphony
Orchestra in November 2005and the Asko
Ensemble in Holland in February 2006.
The Athelas Ensemble in Copenhagen gave
the Danish premiere of Poetry nearing
Silence in Tivoli in April. The same
piece was featured in the 40th
anniversary concert of the Nash
Ensemble of Great Britain (for whom it
was composed) conducted by Lionel
Friend in March 2005. Alhambra Fantasy
was played by the Los Angeles
Philharmonic New Music Group conducted
by Peter Lieberson in May, 2005 in Walt
Disney Concert Hall as part of the
Group's "Green Umbrella" Series.
Finally, the world premiere of
Anderson's new orchestral piece Eden
was given at the opening concert of
this year's Cheltenham International
Festival in July by the City of
Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.
Five of Professor
Emeritus Reinhold Brinkmann's doctoral
students have recently received tenure
at American universities. They are:
Naomi André (University of
Michigan at Ann Arbor), Daniel
Beller-McKenna (University of New
Hampshire), Mary Davis (Case Western
Reserve University), Carl Leafstadt
(Trinity University, San Antonio), and
Charles McGuire (Oberlin).
Several of
Professor Emeritus Mario Davidovsky's
serial works were performed in January
by International Contemporary Ensemble
at Columbia College. Pieces included
Synchronism No. 10, Synchronism No. 9,
Flashbacks, Romancero, and
Festino.
Both Sean
Gallagher and Alexander Rehding were
promoted to Associate Professors of
Music this past spring. In addition,
Rehding was awarded a Humboldt
Foundation Fellowship.
Assistant
Professor Elliott Gyger was in Sydney
in August supervising recordings for a
CD of his ensemble music, as well as
curating a weekend festival in
celebration of Australian composer
Nigel Butterley's 70th birthday. A CD
on the Arsis label, featuring the
Seraphim Singers performing six of
Gyger's sacred choral works will be
released later this year. Gyger also
recently received commission grants
from the Fromm Foundation and the
Australia Council for the
Arts.
Morton B. Knafel
Professor Thomas Forrest Kelly
organized a conference entitled "The
Composition of Chant in the Later
Middle Ages" at the Fondazione Ugo and
Olga Levi in Venice in March 2005; he
also gave a series of lectures in Caen
(France) for the "Jardin des Voix"
project of William Christie and Les
Arts Florissants, and delivered a
keynote address at the annual meeting
of Chorus America in Chicago in June
2005.
Dwight P.
Robinson, Jr. Professor Robert Levin's
new completion of the Mozart c-minor
Mass, K.427, commissioned by Carnegie
Hall, was premiered there under the
direction of Helmuth Rilling this past
January. Levin also gave the world
premiere performances of a new Yehudi
Wyner piano concerto, Chiavi in mano
(commissioned by the Boston Symphony
Orchestra and dedicated to Professor
Levin), with the BSO, conducted by
Robert Spano, in February
2005.
Research
Professor Lewis Lockwood's biography
Beethoven: The Music and the Life
recently came out in paperback (New
York: Norton, 2005), and two
translations have appeared: one in
Portuguese, issued by the firm of Codex
(San Paulo, Brazil); the other in
Czech, issued by Kosmas
(Prague).
Robert Mealy
(Department Associate & Director,
Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra)
served as concertmaster for the Boston
Early Music Festival Orchestra in June,
with opera and orchestral performances
in Boston and Tanglewood.
At the Society of
American Music's annual conference in
Eugene, Oregon, William Powell Mason
Professor Carol Oja convened a
Presidential Forum on contemporary
music criticism and the music business
featuring several speakers from the
West Coast: David Schiff (Reed
College), Ann Powers and Eric Weisbard
(both from Experience Music in
Seattle), and Susan Key (San Francisco
Symphony). Oja gave the keynote lecture
at a student conference at the Graduate
School of the City University of New
York, as well as lectures at UNC-Chapel
Hill and the American Academy in Rome.
Her "Diverse Musical Traditions,
Diverse Students" was just published in
Echo (UCLA) as part of an online
roundtable on "Teaching Controversial
Topics in American Music." She has been
working on her forthcoming book,
Leonard Bernstein and the Theater,
under an NEH Fellowship.
The Chicago
Symphony recently performed Walter
Bigelow Rosen Professor Emeritus
Bernard Rands' Cello Concerto with
German cellist Johannes Moser, Pierre
Boulez conducting. Rands was in
residence at Middlebury College,
Vermont for a program of his music in
April. His works were also played at
University of Southern Illinois,
Carbondale, and the Purcell Room,
Festival Hall, London. He was
composer-in-residence at the
Conductors' Institute at Bard College
and had pieces performed at the
Tanglewood Festival in July 2005. Rands
continues to work on a large-scale work
for solo piano commissioned by Robert
Levin.
Associate
Professor Hans Tutschku received the
2005 Weimar prize. According to an
announcement from the prize committee,
"The city honours one of the most
renowned representatives of the
electroacoustic music on the
international scene with this prize.
Professor Tutschku opens his listeners
and the musical avant-garde to new
perspectives...His work in Weimar with
the 'Ensemble for intuitive music,' the
'Sound Projects Weimar e.V.' and the
festival 'Days of new music in Weimar'
[makes him a] world-wide
Ambassador of the culture
city."
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Barenboim
Named 2006 Charles Eliot Norton Professor
of Poetry
World-renowned
conductor, pianist and recording artist
Daniel Barenboim has been appointed the
2006 Charles Eliot Norton Professor of
Poetry at Harvard University. Barenboim
will deliver the Charles Eliot Norton
Lectures beginning in May of
2006.
Currently
music director of the Chicago Symphony
Orchestra and general music director of
the Deutsche Staatsoper, Berlin,
Barenboim's career has spanned more than
50 years. He is best known as a musical
"bridge builder," and has been honored
both for his virtuosity as a musician and
for his work towards peace in the Middle
East.
"It
is a great honor," Barenboim said. "I look
forward with joy and not without
trepidation to exchanging views with
Harvard students, speaking about the
phenomenon of sound, its relation to
silence, and the very nature of music as
human expression. A central theme in my
musical life has been and continues to be
the idea that music is at the nexus of
cultural and humanistic disciplines. In my
lectures I look forward to exploring the
intimate relationship between music, other
arts, and the humanities."
Barenboim,
an Israeli Jew, worked closely over many
years with Palestinian-born writer and
Columbia University professor Edward
Saïd, who died in 2003. Sharing a
vision of Israeli/Palestinian peaceful
co-existence in the Middle East, they
collaborated on several musical events,
such as Barenboim's first concert on the
West Bank, and the creation of the
West-Eastern Divan Workshop, where
talented young musicians from Egypt,
Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Tunisia and Israel
came together to make music on neutral
ground. Barenboim and Saïd received
Spain's prestigious 2002 Prince of
Asturias Concord Prize for this work.
Barenboim was awarded the Tolerance Prize
by the Protestant Academy of Tutzing for
his efforts to bring Palestinians and
Israelis together through music. The same
month, the president of Germany awarded
him the Grosses Bundesverdienstkreuz, the
highest honor given to someone who is not
a head of state.
The
Charles Eliot Norton Professorship of
Poetry was established in 1925 and is
awarded to prominent figures in poetry in
the broadest sense. Past chairs have
included T.S. Eliot, Harold Bloom, Frank
Stella, Linda Nochlin, Igor Stravinsky,
John Cage and Luciano Berio, Aaron
Copland, and Leonard Bernstein, among
others.
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Leonard
Bernstein's Boston
Professors Carol J. Oja and
Kay Kaufman Shelemay have been awarded a Teaching
Innovation Grant from FAS for their seminar "Before
West Side Story: Leonard Bernstein's Boston,"
scheduled for spring semester 2006. Students will
do hands-on research exploring the educational
institutions, ethnic and religious communities, and
musical experiences that shaped the childhood and
early adulthood of one of America's most
illustrious musicians.
Bernstein's ties to Boston
were deep and varied: child of Jewish immigrants,
member of Congregation Mishkan Tefila (formerly in
Roxbury--see photo--and now located in Chestnut
Hill), graduate of Boston Latin and Harvard (class
of '39), and resident of Mattapan, Newton, Roxbury,
and Sharon.
The seminar will serve as a
warm-up for a major Bernstein festival at Harvard,
scheduled for October 12-14, 2006. (Save the
dates!) The festival will include concerts, a
conference, and an exhibition, and bring together
student performers, scholars, and major Broadway
luminaries. It is directed by Oja and Judith
Clurman of New York's Juilliard School, together
with musical-theater specialist Geoffrey Block (AM
'73 PhD '79). Harvard's Office for the Arts will
join with the Department of Music in producing the
event.
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Library
News
Jazz
Panarama
The new exhibition Jazz
Panorama: Primary Sources for Jazz Research,
conceived by William Bares and Sarah Adams, Keeper
of the Isham Memorial Library, features archival
materials from the Loeb Music Library showcasing
the library's expanding collections in jazz
studies. Items on display include manuscript scores
by Eubie Blake, legal correspondence from Jelly
Roll Morton, Charles Mingus, and Duke Ellington,
and selected jazz periodicals. Rare mid-century
Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong recordings from
the collections of Joseph Jeffers Dodge and Daniel
Aaron, recorded interviews from the African
American Spoken Word Collection, and compact discs
released on the Verve and ECM labels represent a
sample of the library's recorded sound
collections.
Doctoral candidate William
Bares, the exhibit's designer, writes, "Harvard's
jazz collection remains a valuable, largely
untapped resource for scholars….a
comprehensive mix of old and new recordings and
periodicals puts a sizeable portion of jazz's
recorded history at the researcher's fingertips. On
the other hand, individual archival collections and
rare interviews also allow scholars to pursue
questions related to early recordings,
compositional methods, [and] business
practices."
The Loeb Music Library
continues to supplement its collections in jazz
studies, in order to provide significant historical
materials as well as new publications on the
subject. This February's historic jazz auction at
Guernsey's gave the library the marvelous
opportunity to acquire manuscript scores of pieces
by John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and Gerry Mulligan.
Purchases from the Swann auction of
African-Americana include manuscript scores by Duke
Ellington and letters from Eubie Blake and W. C.
Handy. Finally, the library has acquired the entire
catalogues of the Verve and ECM record labels, as
well as two collections of recorded interviews,
sermons, and comedy sketches by prominent African
Americans.
"We welcome the scholars from
many disciplines that jazz and African-American
research bring to the library," says Virginia
Danielson, the Richard F. French Librarian. "Our
growing collection is designed to support their
multifaceted research with both standard
collections and rare and unique materials. Jazz is
a new collecting enterprise for us and we are
grateful to the donors who assisted in supporting
these acquisitions, particularly, in this case, the
Bloom family."
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Staff
News
Assistant to the Chair Mary
Gerbi will be married to David Liquori on September
3. Professor Thomas Forrest Kelly will preside over
the ceremony, which will take place in Belmont,
MA.
The department welcomes new
staff members Ben Abrams (staff assistant) and
Marie Von Kampen (part-time production
coordinator), both of whom began work this
summer.
Ean White, collaborating with
Michael Gandolfi of NEC, premiered As Above for
chamber orchestra and video, commissioned by
Collage New Music, in April.
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Alumni
News
Caprice Corona (AB '97) made
her Carnegie Hall recital debut in a recital
sponsored by the Center for Contemporary Opera in
April. She sang excerpts from Jonathan Holland's
(PhD '01) Naomi in the Living Room as well as the
world premiere of his song cycle Songs of
Experience, among other pieces.
The American Academy of Arts
and Letters announced recently that Aaron Einbond
(AB '00) won a Charles Ives Scholarship, awarded to
"composition students of great promise."
Scott Carleton Gregg (AB
'88) is celebrating his 10th season as Music
Director with the Jacksonville Symphony Youth
Orchestra. Under Maestro Gregg the JSYO has grown
from 80 to over 240. He was recognized at the
Major/Minor concert at Jacoby Symphony Hall in
Jacksonville, Florida.
The March issue of Classical
Singer includes April James' (PhD '02) article,
"Insurance for Singers." James continues work on
her Maria Antonio Project. Recent performances
include "Lift Every Voice and Sing" for the 25th
Anniversary Marion Thompson Wright Lecture series
(a New Jersey conference in observance of Black
History Month) at Rutgers University in
February.
Lansing McLoskey (PhD '02)
has several commissions for the upcoming season
including a piece for The Radnofsky Sax Quartet as
part of a Fromm Foundation group commission/grant
for Composers in Red Sneakers. The Pittsburgh New
Music Ensemble performed two works this past
summer. This year also saw the publication of
McLoskey's corner grid in the "Mormoniana" project:
16 composers were commissioned to write pieces in
collaboration with 16 visual artists, and the
result was a coffee-table book including the
artwork, score, and CD.
Brooke Lieberman (AB '05)
will be enrolling at Peabody Conservatory this fall
to pursue a Masters degree in vocal performance,
and has several Boston-area performances scheduled
for the summer.
Kiri Miller (PhD '05) will
start a two-year Killam postdoc at the University
of Alberta in the fall.
Julia Randel (PhD '05) will
join the faculty at Hope College in Holland,
Michigan this fall as Assistant Professor of Music.
In June she gave a paper at the national meeting of
the Society of Dance History Scholars: "Shapes of
the ballet blanc in Stravinsky-Balanchine's
'Movements for Piano and Orchestra.'"
Berenika Zakrzewski ('05) has
moved back to New York with her Steinway B. Recent
performances include Robert Sherman's Beethoven
Festival (New York). She would be excited to see
everyone at her performance in Jordan Hall with the
Boston Civic Symphony in March 2006. This October,
Berenika is going to Oxford University (Christ
Church College) for graduate studies in Performance
and Musicology.
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Graduate
Student News
CUE teaching awards for fall
2004 went to William Bares, Richard Giarusso and
Robert Hasegawa and Jesse Rodin.
Michael Scott Cuthbert has
accepted the position of Visiting Assistant
Professor in Music jointly held by Smith and Mt.
Holyoke Colleges.
Jonathan Kregor has received
a Stiftung Weimarer Klassik Stipendium
for
summer research in
Weimar.
Adam Roberts' piece for
bassoon and flute, Fragment, was performed in Texas
on a Wind conference concert in July. He was
married to Joyce Panganamala in Columbus, Ohio, on
July 30th, with both Hindu and Jewish ceremonies on
the same day!
Jesse Rodin's article
"Finishing Josquin's 'Unfinished' Mass: A Case of
Stylistic Imitation in the Cappella Sistina"
appears in the Journal of Musicology in
August.
David Trippett married Paula
Downes on July 30 in Trinity Chapel, Trinity
College, Cambridge, UK. Paula will be moving to
Cambridge in September as they both take up
positions as resident tutors in Adams
House.
Bettina Varwig is happy to
report that she received a three-year Junior
Research Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford,
starting October 2005.
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Undergraduate
News
Michael Givey '06
received a 2005 Office for the Arts grant to
produce a concert based on 18th-century French
programming, The Concert Spirituel. Laura Manion
'05 won an OFA grant for performances by the
Harvard University Saxophone Quartet this past
spring. Emily Zazula '06 received the OFA's Timothy
S. Mayer Grant for an April staging of
student-composed operas entitled, First Night:
Three Performance Premieres.
Two graduates of the
Undergraduate Five-Year Performance Program
presented recitals this May: Lara Hirner '05,
soprano, performed Blond(e?): A Senior Recital, in
Paine Hall. Frank Napolitano, tenor, performed the
world premiere of Rossini in the Kitchen by Carson
Cooman (AB '04) and works by Tosti, Handel, and
Mendelssohn in the Pusey Room of Memorial
Church.
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