Summer at Eastman 2019 by the Numbers

Adventure Music Camp’s gamelan performance. Photo credit: Terry Fonda Smith

by Andrea Schuler, Summer at Eastman Program Coordinator

Summer@Eastman 2019 flew by in a flash! Here are some numerical highlights of our 40 days of summer. Many thanks to all the faculty and staff who helped compile our “summery summary”!

Summer students came to Eastman from 38 states (plus Washington, DC and the US Virgin Islands) and 7 countries. Our youngest student was 10 years old (Adventure Music Camp); the oldest was 84 (New Horizons Orchestra Camp).

We offered 46 programs this summer, 5 of which were new for 2019.

We welcomed 35 guest Summer faculty, presenters, and performers in 2019, including Megumi Kanda (Eastman Summer Trombone Institute), Betsy Burleigh (Choral Masterworks – Handel’s Messiah: Style and Structure), Joel Phillips (APSI Music Theory – Teacher Training), Elizabeth Freimuth (Eastman French Horn Institute), Andrew McCandless (Eastman Summer Trumpet Institute), and Jeffrey Barker (The Artistic Flutist: Bonita Boyd International Flute Masterclass). 13 guests were new to Summer@Eastman.

AP® Consultant (and Eastman alumnus) Dr. Joel Phillips, left, with the inaugural APSI class. Photo credit: a helpful (but anonymous) ESM Security officer

1 is for Summer@Eastman’s first partnership with the College Board! 18 high school AP teachers from 7 states attended our new APSI® Music Theory – Teacher Training course this year.

4 is the number of students in the inaugural cohort of Eastman’s Master of Arts in Music Leadership degree. All four students finished their 5-week capstone internships this summer (with Aspen Music Festival, Street Symphony, MassMoCA, and H.O.M.E.) and successfully completed the degree! (7 new students also began studies this summer as the second cohort of the program.)

1516 is the date of the “newest” piece performed by students in Singing Gregorian Chant and Renaissance Polyphony – New York City this summer. The oldest work was from the 9^th century.

Students in the Eastman Community Music School’s summer programs performed in a variety of ensembles: this year there were 3 full wind bands (Adventure Music Camp, High School Wind Ensemble, Music Educators Wind Ensemble), 2 large jazz bands and 6 small jazz ensembles (Summer Jazz Studies), 1 gamelan (Adventure Music Camp), 1 Baroque ensemble (Summer Baroque Ensemble), 1 string orchestra (Adventure Music Camp), and 2 full orchestras (New Horizons Orchestra Camp and Summer Community Reading Orchestra), as well as 11 classical chamber ensembles and duos and 11 opera scenes performed by vocalists (Summer Classical Studies). 8 student composers from Summer Classical Studies had works premiered during the program.

Summer@Eastman concerts took place at 11 performance venues in Rochester and New York City.

Eastman’s Orff “dream team,” 1992-2019. L-R: Karen Medley, program director Donna Brink Fox, Mary Helen Solomon, James Solomon, Janet Robbins. Photo credit: Hannah Bell

976 is the total number of registrations for Eastman’s Orff Schulwerk Teacher Education Course over the past 28 years (582 students attended the program at Eastman; many of those students registered for multiple levels over the years). We will miss the 4 wonderful guest faculty, but we take comfort in knowing that their legacy lives on through all the educators they taught here, whose work enriches the lives of many thousands of children across the United States and around the world.

18 deans, associate deans, department chairs, and faculty from universities around the US attended this summer’s Eastman Leadership Conference; 4 of those attendees are Eastman alumni.

Students in the Summer Organ Academy practiced and performed on 23 organs, 2 harpsichords and 1 clavichord this year (at Eastman and around Rochester). In addition to exploring many different instruments, they also played works from a variety of time periods: student recital programs included pieces by composers whose birth years ranged from 1601 to 1953.

3 is the number of online courses offered by Summer@Eastman this year. These courses expanded Eastman’s reach exponentially: students logged on from 4 continents for weekly synchronous class meetings!

Eastman Saxophone Project Institute students and TA Anne Kunkle in rehearsal. Photo credit: Matt Wittmeyer

Some stats from the debut of our new Eastman Saxophone Project (ESP) Institute: the final concert featured 17 performers playing musical arrangements by 4 ESM/ESP alums; 1 piece was played entirely from memory. The instruments on stage had a total of 411 keys (with only 170 musician fingers, this works out to approximately 2.42 keys per finger). All those saxophones together had approximately 84 feet of tubing and weighed almost 130 pounds!

Cheers to Professor William Weinert, Director of Choral Activities at Eastman, for 25 years of the Eastman Choral Institutes!

The 23 participants and 3 faculty members of the inaugural Eastman French Horn Institute played in lessons, solo coachings, masterclasses, horn choir rehearsals, chamber music rehearsals, individual practice, and 4 concert programs for an estimated collected total of 16,380 minutes of playing, yielding a total of 12.79 gallons of “condensation” deposited on the floors of Eastman classrooms, practice rooms, and concert halls.

Pro tip: A440 and A435 are NOT room numbers in the Annex (though they should be).

Students in MusiKinesis®: Music, Dance, Dalcroze worked with 12 children’s songs, 7 pieces by Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, 2 pieces by Béla Bartók, and 11 others! They also created 5 choreographies, 6 ‘figured’ melodies, 4 piano improvisations for movement and 2 spontaneous programmatic pieces at the piano.

40 is the number of degrees held by the 21 collegiate students and young professionals who attended the Eastman Leadership Academy this June.

454 is the total number of singers who participated in this year’s Summer Sings (community choral reading sessions open to the public, led by William Weinert, which have been part of Summer@Eastman every year since 1995). This July we reached Summer Sing #100; 12 student conductors from the Eastman Choral Institute led Handel’s Messiah. The best-attended Summer Sing this year: Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem, with 137 participants.

At this summer’s Eastman Cello Institute Bach Suites concert, 16 students performed 21 movements of solo Bach (including selections from all 6 suites).

Students from Theory and Analysis of Contemporary Music: Study Abroad Course in Paris attended 19 concerts at IRCAM during the month of June. They also spent 3 days at IRCAM’s “Spectralisms” conference for theoretical and musicological talks and heard Duo XAMP perform on 2 microtonal accordions. (No word on the number of pastries consumed.)

67 is the number of performances on this year’s Summer concert calendar. Admission to 44 of those concerts was free.