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The Score

Fall 2009

Alumni News

Jeff Roberts (PhD ’08 Composition) will present a paper on guqin improvisation and perform on guqin at the 14th CHIME Conference in Brussels, Belgium this fall. He has also been invited to the STEIM Foundation in Amsterdam, Netherlands in January to begin work on developing a software/hardware computer system for improvising with guqin and found object sounds. His book ‘Guitar Atlas: China’, a history of Chinese music with Chinese instrumental music transcribed for guitar, will be released by Alfred Press this fall. His new trio ‘Breaking Bamboo, Shaking Jade’ was premiered by members of Eighth Blackbird last July in Switzerland.  Ensemble E-Mex and Beijing New Music Ensemble will perform his music in China and Japan in the coming months. He is currently a visiting professor at The Beijing Center for China Studies (Loyola University) in Beijing. 

Graduate Student News

Undergraduate Student News

Matt Stern '08 Music Director, Jae Han '10  pianist
were working for six weeks this summer at the prestigious and historic (architecture by Stanford White)
Berkshire Theater Festival. Many Reviews and pictures are available of this production.
It had a very well attended and lucrative run..

Also the undergraduate Brandeis Ensemble Theater was featured with a wonderful picture in The Sondheim Review, No 4 Summer 2009, Ross Brown '10 and Austin Auh '10 from the Vocal Performance Track (Musical Theater) were also in this production.

Faculty News 

Composer Davy Rakowski has a new CD from Bridge Records: Etudes, Vol 3, with Amy Briggs, piano.  The cd contains 24 piano etudes, with engaging titles like: Stutter Stab, Pedal to the Metal, Cell Division, Madam I'm Adam, A Third in the Hand, Palm de Terre, Killer B's. The music and the playing are equally brilliant.

The Lydian String Quartet has a new CD on Centaur featuring the first four quartets of John Harbison. a recent review by Jeremy Eichler of  the Boston Globe states: "This is richly conceived, passionately executed music that seems at once steeped in the genre’s deep traditions and determined to say something freshly personal. The Third Quartet was actually written for the Lydians but they play with bite and authority throughout this disc, as if they owned the lot of them."

The Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University takes pleasure in announcing commission winners for 2009 celebrating the Endowment's 25th annniversary.  In considering 117 applications in our General and LDS commissioning programs the Endowment granted $45,000 to the following eight composers who will write works for the indicated ensembles and musicians: Brian Current (Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony); Pierre Jalbert (Emerson String Quartet); Yu-Hui Chang (Lois Shapiro and the Triple Helix Piano Trio); Missy Mazzoli (Chamber Players of the League of Composers); Sebastian Currier (Paul Dresher Ensemble); Benjamin Sabey (La Jolla Symphony); Stephen Anderson (University of North Carolina Symphony and Steven Harlos, pianist); and Joshua Harris (Appalachian State University Wind Ensemble). 

Composer Yu-Hui Chang has been awarded a Fellowship for 2009 from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.  Often characterized as "midcareer" awards, Guggenheim Fellowships are intended for men and women who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.  For its its eighty-fifth annual competition for the United States and Canada the  Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded 180 fellowships to artists, scientists, and scholars. The successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants.  http://www.gf.org/about-the-foundation/the-fellowship 

2008-2009

Congratulations to the graduating class of 2009!

Undergraduate music majors:

Eric Alterman (Performance: cello)
BA in Magna Cum Laude with highest honors in Music
Additional major: Politics

Katherine Bakes (Cultural Studies)
BA in Music
Additional major: Politics
Minor: Medieval and Renaissance Studies

Andrew Davis (Composition)
BA in Music
Additional major: History
Minor: Medieval and Renaissance Studies

Katya Dreyer-Oren (Performance: voice)
BA Cum Laude with high honors in Music
Minor: Philosophy

Alexander Hoberman (history)
BA Cum Laude with honors in Music
Recipient of the Florence and Charles H. Milender Prize in Music

Nina Hurwitz (composition)
BA in Music

Sasha Kern (Cultural Studies)
BA Magna Cum Laude with honors in Music
Additional major: Mathematics

Daniel Newman (Composition)
BA Summa Cum Laude with highest honors in Music
Additional major: Philosophy
Minors: English; American and Anglo American Literature
Recipient of the Undergraduate Departmental Representative Award
Recipient of the Reiner Prize in Music Composition

Katherine Schram (Performance: voice)
BA with high honors in Music
Additional major: International and Global Studies
Recipient of the Shalom Award for Original Research


Graduate students:

Lou Bunk (Composition and Theory)
PhD in Music
Dissertation: An Evolving State of Déja Vu: Orbital Form in Morton Feldman’s
The Viola in My Life (2), and an original composition: Piano Trio

Grace Choi (Composition and Theory)
MA in Music

Elizabeth Joyce (Musicology)
PhD in Music
Dissertation: Representation of “the World” in the Church Cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach

Alicia Kaszeta-Corum (Musicology)
MA in Music

Annegret Klaua (Musicology)
MFA in Music

Joseph Morgan (Musicology)
PhD in Music
Dissertation: Oberon – A Reevaluation of Carl Maria von Weber

Victoria Petro (Musicology)
MA in Music

Margarita Restrepo (Musicology)
PhD in Music
Dissertation: A Genre Transplanted: The Madrigal in Spanish Collections of Printed Music

Holly Schwartz (Musicology)
MFA in Music

Jacquelyn Sholes, PhD '08 has accepted an appointment as Visiting Lecturer at Wellesley College for the 2009/10 academic year.

Musicology graduate student Reba Wissner has  received a Mellon Foundation Dissertation Research Grant from the GSAS for her archival trip to Venice this May. She will be visiting two libraries in Venice: Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, and Archivio di Stato di Venezia.

Roth Michaels '07 has been offered a spot in the Digital  Music Program at Dartmouth.

This spring kudos of all kinds are pouring in for David Rakowski's  new album, "David Rakowski: Winged Contraption," spans 15 years of his musical career and has just been released by BMOP/sound. 

The Center for German and European Studies at Brandeis recently announced recipients of 2009 Max Kade Travel grants, which support summer study and research in Germany or German-speaking countries. Nathaniel Eschler (PhD Candidate in Composition) will study composition in Berlin with Samuel Adler. Nicholas Alexander Brown ’10 will study Beethoven’s role in classical music in Berlin and Bonn, Germany, and Vienna, Austria.

In April conductor Diane Wittry (Music Director of the Allentown and Norwalk Symphony Orchestras, and author of Pulitzer-nominated Beyond the Baton) visited the Brandeis Department of Music. She led a conducting masterclass with seven participants from Brandeis and other Boston area universities and conservatories, including Dan Newman ’09, Nicholas Alexander Brown ’10, and Jared Field ’11. Maestra Wittry also presented a seminar for music students entitled “Navigating the Music Industry: Tools for Success as a Performer, Composer, and Administrator.”

In November James Conlon (Music Director of the Los Angeles Opera, and former Principal Conductor of the Paris National Opera) led a discussion with music students and faculty about his life in music and about making the transition from school to a professional career. Maestro Conlon gave his “Recovered Voices” lecture, which discusses the music of Holocaust era composers whose music he performs frequently and advocates.

In recent months composer Yu-Hui Chang has received three prestigious awards in music composition: The Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University, founded by the late Paul Fromm in the fifties, has commissioned over 300 new compositions and their performances, and has sponsored hundreds of new music concerts and concert series, among them Tanglewood's Festival of Contemporary Music and the Fromm Concert Series at Harvard University.  In addition to the commissioning fee, a subsidy is made available for the ensemble performing the premiere of the commissioned work. These commissions represent one of the principal ways that the Fromm Music Foundation seeks to strengthen composition and to bring contemporary concert music closer to the public.  http://www.music.fas.harvard.edu/fromm.html

American Academy of Arts and Letters 2009  Charles Ives Fellowship
The American Academy of Arts and Letters announces sixteen recipients of this year's awards in music, which total $170,000.  The winners were selected by a committee of Academy members:  Robert Beaser (chairman), Martin Bresnick, John Corigliano, Mario Davidovsky, and Shulamit Ran.   The awards will be presented at the Academy's annual Ceremonial in May, 2009.  Candidates for music awards are nominated by the 250 members of the Academy. Harmony Ives, the widow of Charles Ives, bequeathed to the Academy the royalties of Charles Ives' music, which has enabled the Academy to give the Ives awards in music since 1970.  Two Charles Ives Fellowships, of $15,000 each, have been awarded to Yu-Hui Chang and Ray Lustig.  http://www.artsandletters.org/awards2_all.php

The Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress and the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, Inc. were established as an expression of Dr. Koussevitzky's gratitude to the creators to whom we owe our musical heritage and who are providing our legacy to the future. Commissions are awarded annually on a competitive basis and are open to performing organizations or individuals and to composers regardless of national origin or affiliation.

Composer Davy Rakowski was recently awarded the Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer '69 Prize for Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring at Brandeis University.
Each year Brandeis students, faculty, and alumni are invited to nominate outstanding professors for the Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer '69 and Joseph Neubauer Prize for Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring, which honors an individual who is involved in the cocurricular and extracurricular life of the campus, and more importantly, has had a significant impact on students lives as an exceptional teacher, mentor, adviser and friend.

Congratulations Matt Stern '08,  Matt will be the music director for a six-week professional production of Candide at the Berkshire Theater Festival this summer .

Five Brandeis students performed with Futureman and the Black Mozart Ensemble on February 7. Georgia Luikens, violin; Hannah Saltman, viola; Eric Alterman, cello; Noa Albaum, cello; and Dan Newman, bass.

The 215th Army Band recently named Specialist Nicholas Alexander Brown ’10 the 2008 Soldier of the Year. “This achievement demonstrated a high degree of professionalism and dedication to service.” In addition, Brown was a participant in the 2009 International Conductors Workshop and Competition in Macon, GA, under Maestro Adrian Gnam, and will be a participant in Boston University’s “Conducting Nuances: A Workshop in Technique” with Maestro Anthony Maiello in February.  In January, Nick  served as one of three coordinators of the 2009 Annual Conference of the Conductors Guild in New York City.  The conference included seminars, panel discussions, roundtables, exhibits, and valuable networking. To read about the conference, click here. 

Brandeis Music Graduate Students Achievements

Mu-Xuan Lin has been awarded a fellowship by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA). The VCCA is located near Sweet Briar College in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in rural Virginia. Mu-Xuan Lin will be among the approximately 20 Fellows focusing on their own creative projects at this working retreat for visual artists, writers and composers. Serving more than 300 artists a year, the VCCA is one of the nation's largest year-round artists' communities. 

Richard Beaudoin's new song cycle, entitled "Nach-Fragen" will be premiered at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Wiener Konzerthaus, and the Konzerthaus-Dortmund in March 2009. The seventeen-song cycle, composed for the renowned German soprano Annette Dasch (Elsa at Bayreuth 2010) and the pianist Wolfram Rieger, is based on texts by the East German author Christa Wolf. The work was commissioned by the Konzerthaus-Dortmund. 

Joe Johnson been working on a collection of Chinese folksongs for piano and is pleased to announce that they have arrived in print courtesy of Hal Leonard.
http://www.halleonard.com

Yohanan Chendler and Florie Namir, are joining another Israeli composer in writing a three movement quartet (a movement from each composer), for a special multi-disciplinary event, Quartetto Mansi, in Lucca, Italy that will take place on November 30. There will be a special concert inaugurating a string quartet playing on 4 instruments made by Lucca violin maker Fabio Piagentini.

The Quartetto Mansi is a multidisciplinary project that, thanks to the collaboration of a group of artists and thinkers (violin-makers, composers, musicologists, musicians, photographers, videomakers,  scenographers, and directors), experiments with new and expressive forms of contemporary language. The project envisions the realisation of an original theatrical exhibit, which is characterised by a string quartet in concert, with music and instruments that were created specifically for the occasion, and with the construction of these instruments playing an integral role in this video installation. Together, the music and the video create a synergy which transforms the music into a new and innovative form of theater.     www.quartettomansi.it

John Rubinger, BA music composition '08 is working on a Beatles project at Harmonix.