Eastman School of Music Posts and Musings
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…
Professor of Music Education Christopher Azzara traveled last week to Germany to teach as a guest faculty member at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hamburg and the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Mannheim. He writes below on his time in Hamburg. On Wednesday, I taught an improvisation class at the…
As an occasional feature of the Eastman Blog, I’ll ask various Eastman musicians or other guests about their first encounter with a particular piece or genre of music. (Yes, this is blatant theft of the New York Times’ “First Crush” feature.) In slightly late observance of the centenary of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, I asked…
The death of the remarkable Marian McPartland on August 20 deprived the jazz world of one of its great musicians, and also deprived Eastman of a dear friend. She performed here many times, encouraged outstanding talent among jazz piano students, and rewarded it with the Marian McPartland jazz scholarship. (My one encounter with her was…
This is a first for Eastman and a first for me – a blog about Eastman events, people, concerns, ideas, and perhaps other music-related items that catch my fancy. In my years writing for newspaper and magazines I have seen and heard events at Eastman many times, heard student performers who went on to become…