During the month of March, we celebrate the achievements of women throughout musical history. At Eastman, this takes its most visible form with our annual Women in Music Festival, returning for its tenth year from March 24-29, 2014. Begun in 2005 by Eastman professor Sylvie Beaudette, the festival not only exalts women as musical…
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…
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…
The Breaking Winds is an Eastman alumni success story — and a very unusual one, since they are a bassoon quartet. Brittany Harrington (BM ’10), Yuki Katayama (BM ’11), Kara La Moure (BM ’10), and Lauren Yu (BM ’11) are building a name for themselves in the music business, including YouTube videos (see the latest…
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…