Eastman School of Music Posts and Musings
Spring semester classes start today at Eastman — and spring semester concerts and recitals have already started! You can keep up with our busy performance calendar by picking up a copy of Encore!, available in the Main Hall and at the Concert Office. Highlights of the coming semester include Leon Fleisher and the Ying…
This Sunday, January 12, Eastman presents its annual William Warfield Scholarship Fund Scholarship Concert, featuring soprano Joel Dyson, an Eastman senior who has won this scholarship two years in a row. The Warfield Scholarship Fund, founded in 1977, provides financial aid to talented, deserving voice students who attend Eastman. It also serves as a reminder…
Today, December 16, is an important date in any music school: the birthday of Ludwig van Beethoven (his 243rd, to be exact). Beethoven’s music has always occupied a central place at Eastman; to celebrate the great day, here is a video about the 2012 Eastman Rochester Chorus performance of one of Beethoven’s greatest works,…
World music ensembles have been part of Eastman’s offerings since 1993, when the Balinese gamelan ensemble Lila Muni (Heavenly Sound) was formed. A gamelan (pictured on the top) is a communal percussion orchestra native to Bali, which often accompanies dancing or other performance. In 2004, Eastman started its own Zimbabwean mbira ensemble, Mbira dze…
Saxophonist Jonathan Wintringham, a master’s degree student of Chien-Kwan Lin and assistant director of the Eastman Saxophone Project, was featured during the week of November 20 as a Young Artist in Residence on the American Public Media program Performance Today. He performed music by Bariller, Grieg, and Djupstrom, and was interviewed by host Fred Child.…
HAPPY 100th BIRTHDAY, BENJAMIN BRITTEN! Today, music lovers throughout the world are celebrating the centenary of the great English composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976). Britten’s music is increasingly popular – you may have heard several of his works in the recent movie Moonrise Kingdom – and has been frequently performed at Eastman over the years, particularly…
This morning, the UK’s Times Higher Education magazine posted a remembrance of Douglas Lowry, who served as the Joan and Martin Messinger Dean from 2007 until shortly before his untimely passing on October 2. Last summer, Jon Marcus interviewed Dean Lowry for an article in the THE on the founding of the new Paul R. Judy…
Outside of George Eastman, Howard Hanson is the most visible historical presence on the campus (and inside of George Eastman, it’s too dark to see anyway). Rightly so: hired by Eastman himself, Hanson served as director for 40 years and, as school historian Vincent Lenti in a video produced by James Goodman of the Democrat…
This Sunday at 7:30 p.m., Eastman doctoral candidate Cahill Smith and colleagues present a recital in Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall of music by Nicolas Medtner. It’s a program that spans the composer’s career, from Op. 1 to his posthumous Piano Quintet, and the first survey of Medtner’s compositions at Carnegie Hall since the…
Professor of Music Education Christopher Azzara reflects on his classes in Mannheim as part of a trip to Germany. On Saturday, I started a two-day class at the Musikhochschule in Mannheim. This group of undergraduates, graduate students, and in-service teachers had excellent musicianship skills, but didn’t have too much experience improvising. We sang and played…