Eastman Faculty
More than 130 highly regarded performers, composers, conductors, scholars, and educators make up the Eastman faculty: Pulitzer Prize-winners, Grammy winners, Guggenheim Fellows, ASCAP Award recipients, published authors, recording artists, and acclaimed musicians who have performed in the world's greatest concert halls. Eastman's full-time, resident faculty members know their students personally, becoming mentors to them and forging lifelong friendships:
Recent Faculty Highlights
August 2008 — Honey Meconi, Professor of Musicology, is the very happy recipient of a $50,400 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, which will allow her to spend a year in Europe and in the United States, studying the manuscripts of chansonniers -- one-of-a- kind illuminated manuscripts of songs, each one done by an independent artist --with a book to follow: A Cultural History of the Chansonnier. Honey is completing a book about the famous 12th-century nun and composer Hildegard of Bingen.
August 2008 — Brad Lubman, Associate Professor of Conducting & Ensembles and conductor of Musica Nova, has another new-music band on his hands: Signal, a 22-piece chamber orchestra that made its New York debut on May 31 during the Bang on a Can Marathon, playing Steve Reich’s Daniel Variations. Signal, whose executive director is cellist Lauren Radnofsky (BM ’03, MM ‘07), fills a need for new-music ensembles with 20-30 members, in the manner of London Sinfonietta or Ensemble Intercontemporain.
January 2008 — If you want to hear Brahms’ Op. 120 sonatas in their original form by an Eastman artist, we also have a CD for you: Harmonia Mundi 907430, with clarinetist Jon Manasse joined by a Rochester favorite, pianist Jon Nakamatsu. James Oestrich’s recent review in the New York Times praised Jon M’s “deft technique, exquisite sensitivity, and smooth, flowing tone,” and described Jon N’s accompaniment as “meltingly beautiful.”
January 2008 — In our last issue, we mentioned the first volume of a series of the organ music of Dieterich Buxtehude, performed by Eastman professor Hans Davidsson on a mean-tone tuned organ in Gothenburg, Sweden. Volume 2, titled The Bach Perspective, has just been released on the Loft label (71117). The website Classical Lost and Found reports that Hans uses “every trick at his disposal to come up with some of the most colorful Baroque music that ever emanated from an organ pipe, “ and calls the Gothenburg organ “a fabulous sounding piece of work.”
January 2008 — Violist and longtime Eastman professor John Graham recently released a fourth CD to join the others in his Music for the Viola series. John is joined by another Eastman favorite, pianist Barry Snyder, in cornerstones of the viola repertory: the two Brahms sonatas Op. 120 (originally for clarinet), and the Sonata Op. 11, No. 4 by Paul Hindemith. For information on this CD and John’s earlier CDs of 20th-century viola music, visit www.grahamviola.com.
