|
Archives: Newsletters
Vol. 1, no. 1 WINTER 2000
Vol. 1, no. 2 SUMMER 2001
Vol. 2, no. 1 WINTER 2002
Vol. 2, no. 2 SUMMER 2002
Vol. 3, no. 1 WINTER 2003
Vol. 3, no. 2 SUMMER 2003
Vol. 4., no. 1 WINTER 2004
Vol. 4, no. 2, SUMMER 2004
Vol. 5, no. 1, WINTER 2005
Vol. 5, no. 2 SUMMER 2005
Vol. 6, no. 1 WINTER 2006
Vol. 6, no. 2 SUMMER 2006
Vol. 7, no. 1 WINTER 2007
Vol. 7, no. 2
SUMMER 2007
Vol. 8, no. 1 WINTER 2008
Vol. 8. no. 2 SUMMER 2008
Vol. 9. no. 1 WINTER 2009
Vol. 9. no.2 SUMMER 2009
|
Articles on music at Harvard:
Improvisational Prodigy
Music Activity at a Fever Pitch
A Different Tone
Undergraduates Stroll Down Great White Way
Global Tintinnabulation
The Cantoria Code
Copland: Cold War Ambassador
Gamelon-a-thon!
Changing Lives with Music and Science
|
| |
Music Department in the News
|
| |
|
MUSIC NEWS
Contact: Lesley Bannatyne
bannatyn@fas.harvard.edu
1/18/08: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Composer Helmut Lachenmann Named 2008 Fromm Foundation Visiting Professor
Art without the experience of transcendence might be nice or ‘interesting’ or intellectual entertainment but doesn’t deserve to be called ‘art’ --interview with Lachenmann in New Notes, SPNM, November 2006
The Harvard University Department of Music is delighted to announce the appointment of Helmet Lachenmann as Fromm Foundation Visiting Professor for spring, 2008. Lachenmann is the esteemed German composer of mostly orchestral, chamber and piano works that have been performed throughout the world.
Lachenmann refers to his works as musique concrète instrumentale. This is music, he says, “in which the sound events are chosen and organized so that the manner in which they are generated is at least as important as the resultant acoustic qualities themselves.”
Boston area audiences will be able to hear Lachenmann’s music at two Harvard concerts this spring: His Pression will be performed at the Fromm Players of Harvard’s 60 Years of Electronic Music (March 7-8 at 8pm in Paine Hall); and a concert of the composer’s Allegro Sostenuto and String Quartet No. 3 “Grido” will take place April 9th at 8pm, also in Paine Hall. Both events are free and open to the public.
HELMUT LACHENMANN
Born in Stuttgart in 1935, Professor Lachenmann was the first private student of the serialist composer Luigi Nono. He worked briefly at the electronic music studio at the University of Ghent, but then focused on purely instrumental music. Lachenmann received an honorary doctorate from the Musikhochschule Hannover in 2001.
His teaching background includes regular lectures at Darmstadt since 1978 and a professorship of composition at the Stuttgarter Musikhochschule (1981 to 1999). Lachenmann is also noted for his numerous articles, essays and lectures, many of which appear in Musik als existentielle Erfahrung (Music as Existential Experience).
Lachenmann’s honors include the Kulturpreis für Musik from the city of Munich, the Kompositionpreis from the city of Stuttgart, the Bach-Preis Hamburg, and the Ernst von Siemens Musikpreis. Most recently, he received the Royal Philharmonic Society Music Award for Chamber-Scale Composition (2004, for String Quartet No. 3, “Grido,”). He is a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, Hamburg, Leipzig, Mannheim, and Munich and the Academie voor Wetenschapen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België. His music has been featured at festivals throughout the world, including numerous occasions at Darmstadt, the Venice Biennale, the Wien Modern, and the Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik, as well as five portrait concerts and a symposium at the Salzburg Festival. Breitkopf & Härtel publishes his music.
THE FROMM FOUNDATION VISITING PROFESSORSHIP
The Fromm Foundation Visiting Professorship was established by Paul Fromm in 1983 in order to appoint to the Harvard music department faculty a composer of international reputation for one semester. It has been held by Peter Maxwell Davies (1985), Milton Babbit (spring, 1988), Gunther Schuller (fall, 1991) Betsy Jolas (fall, 1994) Andrew Imbrie (fall, 1997), Judith Weir (2004), Magnus Lindberg (2006), and Gunther Schuller (2007).
The Professorship fits into the Fromm Foundation’s mission as defined by the late Paul Fromm in 1972: “The central purpose of the Fromm Music Foundation has been to restore to the composer his rightful position at the center of musical life. Rather than subsidizing institutions or supporting other, even more anonymous aspects of culture, the Fromm Foundation has chosen to focus its programs on individual artists, individual works, and individual musical situations.”
For further information, call 617-495-2791
www.music.fas.harvard.edu/ |
November 2007:
FROMM MUSIC FOUNDATION AT HARVARD ANNOUNCES 2007 COMMISSIONS
The Board of Directors of the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University is pleased to announce the names of twelve composers selected to receive 2007 Fromm commissions. There were 224 applicants this year.
(continued)
The composers who received commissions are: Steve Antosca (Rosemont, MD),
Tamar Diesendruck (Los Angeles, CA),
Mark Engebretson (Greensboro, NC),
Joel Feigin (Goleta, CA),
David Glaser (New York, NY),
Shirish Korde (Cambridge, MA),
Paul Lansky (Princeton, NJ),
Lei Liang (San Diego, CA),
Philippe Manoury (San Diego, CA),
Tamar Muskal (New York, NY),
Allan Schindler (Fairport, NY),
Suzanne Sorkin (Wynnewood, PA), and
Du Yun (New York, NY).
These commissions represent one of the principal ways that the Fromm Music Foundation seeks to strengthen composition and to bring contemporary concert music closer to the public. In addition to the commissioning fee of $10,000, a subsidy is available for the ensemble performing the premiere of the commissioned work.
Founded by the patron of contemporary music, the late Paul Fromm, the Fromm Foundation is now in its fifty-second year, having been located at Harvard University for the past several decades. Since the 1950s, it has commissioned well over 300 new compositions and their performances, and has sponsored hundreds of new music concerts and concert series. “I want to know you,” Igor Stravinsky once said to Fromm, “because contemporary music has many friends but only a few lovers.”
Among a number of other projects, the Fromm Music Foundation sponsors the annual Fromm Contemporary Music Series at Harvard.
Applications for commissions are reviewed on an annual basis. The annual deadline for proposals is June 1. Requests for guidelines should be sent to The Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard, Department of Music, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138. website: www.fas.harvard.edu/musicdpt/fromm.html/
#####
|
| Oct 2006: Professor Christoph Wolff wins first Royal Academy of Music Bach Prize
The inaugural £10,000 annual prize, established by the Kohn Foundation and presented by the Royal Academy of Music, has been awarded to Professor Christoph Wolff.
The Royal Academy of Music Bach Prize, sponsored by the Kohn Foundation, is awarded to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the performance and/or scholarly study of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. The selectors for the inaugural prize were Professor Curtis Price KBE (chair), Professor John Butt (Glasgow University), Professor Laurence Dreyfus FBA (Oxford University) and Dr Ralph Kohn FRS (Kohn Foundation).
The prize will be presented to Professor Wolff in the Academy's David Josefowitz Recital Hall on Monday 16th October 2006. The presentation will include performances by Laurence Dreyfus and John Butt of Bach's Sonatas for viola da gamba and harpsichord in G, BWV1027 and D, BWV1028. Professor Wolff will also give an illustrated talk on some exciting recent discoveries about Bach.
Born and educated in Germany, Professor Wolff taught at the University of Erlangen, the University of Toronto and Columbia University before joining the Harvard faculty in 1976, where he is currently Adams University Professor. He has been elected to membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Saxon Academy of Sciences at Leipzig, and the Akademie für Mozart-Forschung in Salzburg, and he is Director of the Bach-Archiv Leipzig, President of the Commission mixte of the Rèpertoire International des Sources Musicales, and on the Board of the Packard Humanities Institute. _Professor Wolff's primary research interests extend to the music from the 17th to the early 19th centuries, especially to Bach and Mozart studies. He won the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society for Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (2000), which has been translated into eight languages.
|
| |
February, 2005: Barenboim Named 2006 Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard
Cambridge, Mass.--World-renowned conductor, pianist and recording artist Daniel Barenboim has been appointed the 2006 Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University. He joins a list of distinguished arts scholars and professionals who have received the Norton honor since its establishment in 1925. Barenboim will deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures beginning in the fall 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."
"I am doubly pleased that Maestro Barenboim will deliver the Norton Lectures in 2006. As a world-renowned musician he will bring to the Harvard community a wealth of knowledge that only he, one of the most accomplished in his field, could have. And, as a passionate and thoughtful ambassador of goodwill and peace, having forged alliances between long-time enemies through music, he will be a welcome messenger here where audiences will be eager to hear about his triumphs in bringing disparate groups together," said William C. Kirby, Edith and Benjamin Geisinger Professor of History, and Dean of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Barenboim made his debut as a pianist in Vienna and Rome in 1952, in Paris in 1955, in London in 1956, and in New York in 1957 with Leopold Stokowski conducting the Symphony of the Air. From then on, he made annual concert tours of the United States and Europe and soon became known as one of the most versatile pianists of his generation. He recorded the most important works in the piano repertory, including complete cycles of the piano sonatas of Mozart and Beethoven and concertos by Mozart, Beethoven (with Otto Klemperer), Brahms (with Sir John Barbirolli) and Bartok (with Pierre Boulez).
Following his début as a conductor with the New Philharmonia Orchestra in London in 1967, Barenboim went on to become music director of the Orchestre de Paris, and then to the posts he currently holds. In 2000, the Staatskapelle Berlin appointed him chief conductor for life. He has also had a long and distinguished association with the Berlin Philharmonic and maintains a close relationship with the Vienna Philharmonic.
"We are delighted at the prospect of having Daniel Barenboim among us," said Thomas Kelly, chair of the Department of Music. "This versatile and thoughtful musician brings his high art and his intellect to an intellectual community that practices and values the arts: we expect great things."
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 in memory of Harvard's first fine arts professor, who taught the subject from 1874 to 1898. Under the original terms of the gift from Charles Chauncey Stillman, Harvard College class of 1898, the chair is awarded to prominent figures in poetry in the broadest sense. Past chairs have included literary figures such as T.S. Eliot and scholar Harold Bloom; those in the fine arts such as minimalist painter and sculptor Frank Stella, and last year's feminist art theorist Linda Nochlin; and musicians such as Igor Stravinsky (1939-1940), John Cage (1988-1989) and Luciano Berio (1993-1994).
|
| |
June, 2004: NEC, FAS announce joint degree program
New England Conservatory (NEC) and Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) have agreed to establish a new degree program allowing exceptional students to earn both a bachelor of arts degree from Harvard and a master of music degree from NEC, beginning in the 2005-2006 school year. The initiative will benefit those students who are both musically and intellectually talented, and who might otherwise have to choose between Harvard's rigourous education in the liberal arts and sciences and the professional music training offered by NEC.
Students will begin the first year of the two-year M.M. program concurrently with the fourth year of the A.B. program. Admission to the new program will be open to high school seniors who would apply to both institutions for the freshman year. Students already enrolled at Harvard may also apply at the end of their freshman or sophomore years. A maximum of four or five students are expected to be admitted each year.
Both Harvard and NEC believe the initiative will enhance their academic communities. According to Thomas Forrest Kelly, chairman of the Harvard Music Department, the program "will attract extremely talented musicians, capable of a major career in music, and capable of being recruited to Harvard, who do not go to Harvard because of their desire to retain close connections with the professional world of music." Such students "would enrich the Harvard community by their presence and the musical world by the quality of their education."
"This new opportunity will build on the work emerging from the Harvard College Curricular Review by expanding the opportunities for artistic expression within the College's liberal arts education," said William C. Kirby, dean of the FAS and Geisinger Professor of History. "We look forward to welcoming such talented students to the College and helping them combine a broad humanist perspective with advanced musical training."
Founded in 1867, the NEC is the oldest independent school of music in the United States. It offers rigorous training in an intimate, nurturing community to 750 undergraduate, graduate and doctoral music students from around the world. its faculty of 225 includes internationally esteemed artist-teachers and scholars. Its alumni go on to fill orchestra chairs, concert hall stages, jazz clubs, recording studios, and arts management positions worldwide.
FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.newenglandconservatory.edu/whatsnew/index.html |
| |
COMPOSER RANDS ELECTED TO AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS & LETTERS
The American Academy of Arts and Letters elected nine new members in January, 2004. Harvard's Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music BERNARD RANDS is one of two composers to be inducted at the Academy's annual Ceremonial in May. Other electees are artists Lee Bontecou and Lester Johnson; writers Isabel Allende, Paula Fox, Jamaica Kincaid, James Tate and Lanford Wilson; and composer Robert Beaser.
An annual election is held to fill vacancies in the Academy's membership of 250 American artists, architects, writers, and composers. Nominations are first voted on by discipline (Art, Literature, Music). The names of those candidates receiving the highest number of votes are then submitted to the entire membership. The honor of election is considered the highest formal recognition of artistic merit in this country.Bernard Rands, born in Sheffield, England in 1934, became a naturalized American citizen in 1983. He attended the University of Wales. He studied composition with Luigi Dallapiccola, composition and conducting with Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderno, and electronic music with Luciano Berio. He has taught at Harvard since 1989. Through more than a hundred published works and many recordings, Rands is established 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. His large orchestral suites Le Tambourin won the 1986 Kennedy Center Freidheim Award. Rands has composed for musical theater, orchestra, instrumental ensembles and vocal pieces, and instrumental solos.
Rands' newly commissioned Quartet will be on the program of the Ying Quartet performance at John Knowles Paine Concert Hall at 8:00 pm on Thursday, April 15th (free concert, passes available after April 1 at Harvard Box Office). |
| |
May 15, 2003
Anthony Cheung '04 Recipient of 2003 ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Award
Anthony Cheung '04 was selected as one of the 24 winners from a pool of 500 entries to the ASCAP Foundation's Morton Gould Young Composer Award.Each year the ASCAP Foundation holds a national competition for gifted Young Concert Music composers. This competition was named in honor of the late Morton Gould, an esteemed Pulitzer Prize winning composer, former President of ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers).
Established in 1979, this ASCAP Foundation program recognizes composers up to 30 years of age with substantial cash prizes. |
|
May 5, 2003
David B. Lewin 1933-2003
Husband of June Lewin, father of Alex Lewin. Born in New York City in 1933, he studied piano and harmony with Edouard Steuermann. He graduated with a BA in mathematics, summa cum laude, from Harvard University in 1954. In 1958, he earned an MFA in music at Princeton University, where he studied composition with Roger Sessions; and theory and analysis with Milton Babbitt, Edward T. Cone, and Earl Kim. From 1958-1961, he was a Junior Fellow at Harvard University. Professor Lewin taught music at the University of California at Berkeley (1961-1967), State University of New York at Stony Brook (1967-1980), Yale University (1979-1985), and Harvard University (1985-2003). At Harvard, he held the Walter W. Naumburg professorship.
Professor Lewin was a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow in 1983-1984, and held a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference Center at Bellagio, Italy. He was awarded honorary degrees by the University of Chicago (1995) and the New England Conservatory of Music (2000). He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1985-1988; life member 2000). A symposium in his honor on the Schoenberg string quartets was held at Harvard University in 1998.
Professor Lewin's main work includes numerous compositions and many publications in the field of music theory. His books are Generalized Form and Transformation (New Haven, 1987); and Musical Form and Transformation (New Haven, 1993), which won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. He also wrote many articles in Journal of Music Theory, Perspectives of New Music, Music Perception, Nineteenth-Century Music, and other journals.
David Lewin's work revolutionized the field of music theory through his development of transformational networks and related topics. He forged links between tonal and atonal repertories, harmony and rhythm, breaking down long-standing intellectual boundaries. He was a beloved teacher and advisor to a generation of music theorists who are currently active in the United States and abroad.
A memorial gathering is planned for the fall of 2003 at Harvard University.
Donation in his memory may be made to Physicians for Social Responsibility or Doctors Without Borders. |
| |
April 9, 2003:
Lockwood's Beethoven named Pulitzer Finalist
Beethoven: The Music and the Life by Lewis Lockwood, Fanny Peabody Professor of Music, emeritus, was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the category of biography. Lockwood's book was released by W.W. Norton, New York, on the composer's birthday this past December, 2002. Professor Lockwood previously won the Einstein and Kinkeldey awards of the AMS, and an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for his book, Beethoven: Studies in the Creative Process (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). |
|
