Online newsletter for the Duke University Department of Music • Winter 2008
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back to ContentsFaculty and Student NewsBryan Gilliam (Professor of Musicology and Frances Hill Fox Professor in Humanities) has contributed two essays for a forthcoming Richard Strauss Companion (Cambridge University Press, edited by Charles Youmans (Duke Ph.D., 1996). He has also co-organized a conference (with German Studies and Political Science) this spring at Duke: "Between Ideology and Redemption: Literature, Music, & Philosophy in Germany, 1845-1945" (April 24-25, 2008). Stephen Jaffe (Professor of Composition, Chair of the Department of Music) was Master Artist in Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in May and June, 2007. Seven associate composers worked on compositions at ACA, and had conversations with Steve, photographer Thomas Struth, poet Michael Burkard, and roughly 15 other associate artists. Jaffe's latest compositions include a sonata for cello and piano, written for the Kennedy Center Chamber Players concert featuring David Hardy, cello, and Lambert Orkis, piano, and a new work for the North Carolina Symphony in collaboration with the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in honor of its exhibit, El Greco to Velazquez: Art During the Reign of Philip III, to be presented next fall. Anthony Kelley (Assistant Professor of Music) composed music for The Doll, a short film produced at Duke based on a short story by early 20th century African-American writer Charles W. Chestnutt. The film premiered in October 2007. View a video feature about the making of this extraordinary project. Hsiao-mei Ku (Associate Professor of the Practice of Music (violin) and member of the Ciompi Quartet) has been awarded a grant from the Josiah Trent Foundation for her project entitled "Recovery of Chinese Compositional Heritage: Research and Artistic Performance of Two Works by Ma Sicong (1912-1972)." The project has two components: (A) to recover the parts for a newly discovered Piano Trio and a String Quartet by Ma Sicong (these need to be prepared from the surviving manuscript); and (B) to perform the premieres of both pieces in spring 2008, at Duke and in the Durham community. Randall Love (Associate Professor of the Practice of Music (piano) and Director of Performance) performed the piano version premiere of local composer Paul Whetstone's Bulgarian Dance and Fantasy in Nov. 2007. The piece, originally written for harpsichord, was a winner in the Aliénor Harpsichord Composition Competition in 2004. Louise Meintjes (Associate Professor of Music) was awarded the Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars from the American Council of Learned Socities. She is a fellow at the National Humanities Center this year, and her project is Unwavering Voice and Disintegrating Body: Zulu Song and Dance in a Time of AIDS. Tom Moore (Music Librarian and Director of the Collegium Musicum) will participate in the 5th Annual Carolina and Duke Consortium Spring Conference, The Politics of Culture in Latin America & the Caribbean, February 8-9, 2008 as panelist at the Round Table on Bilingual/Bicultural Politics and Culture. Emily Threinen (Director, Duke Wind Symphony) attended the MIDWEST Band/Orchestra Conference in Chicago in December. She was also selected as a participant in the First Annual Frederick Fennell Conducting Master Class in October 2007. Threinen is also the Project Producer of the CD, Raise the Roof: the Music of Michael Daugherty, performed by the University of Michigan Symphony Band, Michael Haithcock, conductor. R. Larry Todd (Arts & Sciences Professor of Music) is the Bouwsma Fellow at the National Humanities Center this year. His project is Becoming Fanny Hensel: The Life and Music of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel. Graduate student composers Kathleen Bader, Alex Kotch, Paul Leary and Amy Scurria had works performed at the UNC-Greensboro New Music Festival on October 24, 2007. Karen Cook was accepted to present papers at the 6th Annual Hawaii International Conference on Arts & Humanities in January 2008, the Centre for Medieval Studies 2008 Annual Conference, "Power and Patronage in the Middle Ages," to be held March 14-15, 2008 at the University of Toronto and the 43rd International Congress on Medieval Studies, May 8–11, 2008, where she will participate in the panel Economy and Exchange in the Later Middle Ages. She is also helping to plan the 9th annual North Carolina Colloquium in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, to take place February 15-16, 2008 at UNC-Chapel Hill, and is coordinating a series of workshops for beginning recorder players this spring, culminating in a performance during the Collegium Musicum spring concert on April 5. Three students, senior Kelley Chuang, sophomore Samiron Ray, and junior Michael Wood participated in a piano masterclass with the legendary Leon Fleisher on Nov. 15, 2007. While he was at Duke, Mr. Fleisher performed a solo concert and a concert with the Tokyo String Quartet. Chia-yu Hsu collaborated with choreographer Keith A. Thompson in November on "Pellucid Tensions," a new piece commissioned by the Duke Dance Program. More on Chia-yu's recent work. Alex Kotch will receive five performances of his recent work, Reduce Reuse Recycle, for two saxophones and piano, by Trio Saxiana in France this December, January and February. The work's alternate version, for clarinet, cello, and piano, was premiered last October in Normandy by Ensemble Zellig. He has also been commissioned to write a work for 100 student saxophonists as part of the biannual Festival Saxophones en Fête in Paris. George Lam participated in the American Opera Project's “Composers and the Voice” in New York last fall. Read about his opera, Someone Anyone. Another of his pieces, October Sketches: Words Become Unlatched (mixed chorus a capella), received a reading as part of the '07-'08 Volti Choral Arts Laboratory. Volti (San Francisco, CA) selects one composer each year for this residency/commissioning program, which gives the composer an opportunity to workshop excerpts of a new work for Volti in October 2007, as well as a performance of the complete work in May 2008. Also in Oct. 2007, Lam's Variations On (chamber concerto for seven players), words by Benjamin Rogers, text translated and adapted into Chinese by Lap Lam, received a performance by the Hong Kong Sinfonietta. This was the first performance of the new Chinese-English version of Congratulations to Kasey Mattia for defending her dissertation: Crossing the Channel: Cultural Identity in the Court Entertainments of Queen Henrietta Maria, 1625-1640 Amy Scurria has received a commission from the Fort Wayne Philharmonic in Fort Wayne, IN. They will also be performing her orchestral work, Beyond All Walking, in February 2008. The new work will be composed in honor of three former members of SAI who were active contributors to the arts in Fort Wayne. It will premiere on the first concert of the 2009-2010 season. Congratulations to sophomore Alyssa Zhu, who is the 2007-08 winner of the Duke Symphony Orchestra Concerto Contest. She will perform Franz Lizst's Piano Concerto No.1 at the Duke Symphony Orchestra concert in Baldwin Auditorium on March 5. Alyssa studies piano with Randall Love. Please share your faculty and student news! |