Here are some select recent clippings showing the variety of hits/mentions identifying musicians and scholars as Eastman School of Music alumni, faculty or students. (Note: Some links may have expired.)
WORLD OF MUSIC
(Chicago Crusader © 07/30/2015)
Paul Freeman, founder and conductor emeritus of the Chicago Sinfonietta and a widely known guest conductor, died Wednesday, July 22 in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada at the age of 79. At his side when death overtook him were his wife, Cornelia and son, Douglas.
Born in Richmond, Va., Paul Freeman received his Ph D. from The Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY and studied in Berlin, Germany on a Fulbright Award.
Mass, reception honors Notre Dame’s Sister Edwina, 100
(Elmira Star-Gazette 08/07/2015)
Sister Mary Edwina Butler has spent a lifetime teaching music and French. At age 100, the native Elmiran is still at it. She is one of the founding sisters of Notre Dame High School and spent 43 years teaching there. On Saturday, she will be honored with a special Mass at 11 a.m. at St. Patrick’s Church in Elmira and a reception will follow from 1-3 p.m. at Notre Dame.
Sister Edwina, who attended the Eastman School of Music and played the flute, oversaw music at Notre Dame and at one time oversaw the school plays and musicals. (Also reported by Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, 13 WHAM)
Lakes Area Music Festival hosts upcoming concerts
(Brainerd Daily Dispatch 08/06/2015)
The Lakes Area Music Festival will feature “La Boheme” opera by Giacomo Puccini in two performances and a classic symphony concert inspired by Franz Joseph Haydn in the coming week.
Musetta, Marcello’s vivacious and fickle girlfriend, sings a waltz during the festive Christmas Eve scene that is one of many melodies that will linger in audience members’ minds. She will be played by Abigail Dueppen, who was last year’s Gretel. Dueppen, who has done a wide array of opera and concert performances, has degrees from the Eastman School of Music and the University of Houston School Of Music. Currently, she studies with world-renowned soprano Ruth Ann Swenson.
The violinist, Chloe Fedor, in her fifth season at the festival, has degrees from the Eastman and Juilliard schools of music. The violist, Samantha Rodriguez, in her seventh season, also holds degrees from the Eastman School. She is a member of the Rochester (NY) Philharmonic Orchestra and an adjunct professor of viola at SUNY Geneseo, where she plays with the Tremont Quartet.
Conducting Electricity: Peter Wright looks back on 40 years playing clarinet with Jacksonville Symphony
(Florida Times Union 08/02/2015)
Editor’s note: Courtney Lewis, music director of the Jacksonville Symphony, is on vacation. Peter Wright, principal clarinetist with the symphony, is filling in for him this month.
The Jacksonville Symphony was completely part time when I started; today we have 53 full-time musicians. It offered only the “subscription” series with eight single concerts per season on Tuesday nights. The only other performances were Young People’s concerts, which consisted of excerpts from the evening concert programs. What a difference we have today. Now there are 10 Masterworks concerts, 10 Pops concerts, a tremendous educational outreach program and numerous special concerts, such as “The Nutcracker” and “Messiah.”
When the rumors started about hiring a small core of full-time musicians, I decided to stay in the job rather than leave to pursue a graduate degree. I found a four-summer master’s degree program at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., which was perfect for me. As a Southerner, I’m not sure if I could have handled a Northern winter — I had never seen snow before.
New York Philharmonic Set for Residency in Santa Barbara This Summer
(Broadway World 08/01/2015)
Alan Gilbert will conduct the New York Philharmonic in its debut at the Santa Barbara Bowl on August 3, 2015, featuring an all-American program of works by Barber, Copland, Gershwin, and Sousa, as well as Bernstein’s West Side Story Concert Suite No. 1 featuring soprano Julia Bullock and tenor Ben Bliss; the latter is a 2012 alumnus of the Music Academy of the West.
Equally at home with opera and concert repertoire, soprano Julia Bullock won first prizes in the 2012 Young Concert Artists International Auditions and the 2014 Naumburg International Vocal Competition. This season, she gives recitals at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston; National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.; and San Francisco Performances; and she appears in the New York Festival of Song’s Harlem Renaissance program, the Mondavi Center’s Rising Stars of Opera, and as soloist with the New World Symphony. She sang the title role in Purcell’s The Indian Queen, directed by Peter Sellars, at the Teatro Real in Madrid and the Perm Opera House in Russia, and reprises the role at English National Opera this season . . . Ms. Bullock earned her bachelor’s degree from the Eastman School of Music, and her master’s degree from Bard College’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program. She is currently pursuing her artist diploma with Edith Bers at The Juilliard School.
Oswego Faculty Bassist Scores New Multimedia Publication
(Oswego County Today © 08/04/2015)
When Danny Ziemann, who teaches bass in SUNY Oswego’s music department, could not find a book or other resources to supplement his lessons, he wrote one with the encouragement of his students. The resulting work, The Low Down: A Guide to Creating Supportive Jazz Bass Lines, also features 50 audio files to complement instruction.
The 25-year-old has played bass for nearly 15 years, started giving lessons at 16 and, after graduating from the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music, began teaching at SUNY Oswego at 22.
Opening the gates
(Rochester City Newspaper © 08/05/2015)
The Gateways Music Festival started in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, as the idea of Armenta Adams Hummings, a prominent African-American pianist and music educator. It included orchestra and chamber music performances, an organ recital, and performances by young musicians. When Hummings joined the Eastman School of Music faculty in 1995, Gateways moved with her and has continued in Rochester every other year, even after Hummings’s retirement from Eastman in 2009.
All languages have evolved to have this in common
(Science /AAAS © 08/03/2015)
Have you ever wondered why you say “The boy is playing Frisbee with his dog” instead of “The boy dog his is Frisbee playing with”? You may be trying to give your brain a break, according to a new study. An analysis of 37 widely varying tongues finds that, despite the apparent great differences among them, they share what might be a universal feature of human language: All of them have evolved to make communication as efficient as possible.
These observations had led some linguists to hypothesize that all of the world’s languages reduce the distance between dependent words, something called dependency length minimization (DLM). Yet the most comprehensive previous studies of this trend only covered seven languages.
The new work is a “major advance” because “it shows that DLM is a property of languages in general,” says David Temperley, a cognitive scientist at the University of Rochester (U of R) in New York. Nevertheless, he stops short of concluding that it is a “universal” or “hard-wired” feature of language, rather than a strategy that humans have developed over time to make themselves better understood. Florian Jaeger, a psycholinguist also at U of R, agrees. (Also reported by The Hullabaloo Online, ScienceBlog.com, Bioscience Technology)
Note: David Temperley is Professor of Music Theory at Eastman School of Music.
Lalumia Gives Orchestra to New Generation
(TAPinto.net 07/29/2015)
His first love has always been orchestral music, and Bridgewater-Raritan High School orchestra teacher Joseph Lalumia has brought that to his students over 35 years in the district. Now, Lalumia said he is ready to turn the baton over to a younger generation.
“It comes down to a feeling about retiring,” he said. “I have seen too many careers where there are diminishing results, and I wanted to leave when the group is at a high level.”
A graduate from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, Lalumia worked at Bound Brook High School before moving to BRHS, where he traveled between the East and West schools for 11 years.
‘The Thrill of Joy, The Agony of Defeat’ in Concert Aug. 2
(Portsmouth Patch 08/02/2015)
Organist Brian Glikes will perform “The Thrill of Joy, The Agony of Defeat: Music from 1700 to the Present” this Sunday, Aug. 2 as part of the Concerts on the Hill series, according to a press statement.
Brian Glikes, a doctoral student of David Higgs at the Eastman School of Music, began his classical music training as an undergraduate at a liberal arts college in New England and received a master’s degree from Emory University in Atlanta. In 2014, Brian won first prize at the West Chester University Organ Competition and second prize at the Albert Schweitzer Organ Festival. As a church musician, Brian is Director of Music at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Fairport, N.Y., having previously been Organist at Holy Cross Anglican Church in Loganville, Ga., and Organ Scholar at Christ Church in Hamilton, Mass
RUN TIME ERROR with Simon Steen-Andersen & JACK Quartet to Launch Miller Theatre’s 2015-16 Season
(Broadway World 08/04/2015)
Miller Theatre at Columbia University School of the Arts presents the 2015-16 opening night: “RUN TIME ERROR”, a composed program for strings, prepared bows, joysticks, whammy pedal and video, featuring Simon Steen-Andersen, composer & performer, and the JACK Quartet. This marks the premiere of a new version of Steen-Anderson’s Run Time Error, a site-specific video work created during a three-week residency at Miller Theatre.
JACK Quartet electrifies audiences worldwide with “explosive virtuosity” (Boston Globe) and “viscerally exciting performances” (New York Times). Alex Ross (New Yorker) hailed their performance of Iannis Xenakis’ complete string quartets as “exceptional” and “beautifully harsh,” and Mark Swed (Los Angeles Times) called their sold-out performances of Georg Friedrich Haas’ String Quartet No. 3 In iij. Noct. “mind-blowingly good.
JACK operates as a nonprofit organization dedicated to the performance, commissioning, and spread of new string quartet music. The members of the quartet met while attending the Eastman School of Music and studied closely with the Arditti Quartet, Kronos Quartet, Muir String Quartet, and members of the Ensemble Intercontemporain.