Celebrating Black History Month in Music – 2

  One of the most-recorded jazz bassists in history is an Eastman School of Music graduate: Ron Carter (1937 —     ), who received a bachelor’s degree in 1959 and an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Rochester. (The photo shows him performing in Eastman’s Kilbourn Hall before the awarding of the doctorate in October…

Pulitzer Prize Winner Jennifer Higdon is Composer-in-Residence for Women in Music Festival’s 10th Anniversary Celebration

Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Higdon, one of America’s most frequently performed composers and a major figure in contemporary classical music, headlines this year’s Women in Music Festival at the Eastman School of Music March 24 to 29. As composer-in-residence, she will hold a master class and a forum with students, and her solo and chamber…

Celebrating Black History Month in Music

George Walker was the first African American composer to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music, in 1996 for his vocal-orchestral work Lilacs. One of America’s most distinguished composers, Walker was born in 1922. He was trained as a pianist and as a composer at the Eastman School of Music, where he received doctoral degrees in…

Meet the Masters

  This weekend, Eastman hosts two of the music world’s most famous performers: pianist Leon Fleisher (pictured above), who will perform the Brahms Piano Quintet with the Ying Quartet on Sunday afternoon’s Kilbourn Series chamber music concert; and violinist Itzhak Perlman (pictured below), who appears with conductor Neil Varon and the Eastman Philharmonia in Max…