Message from the President |
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Dear Friends,
There are so many musical events taking place in April, that I am sending this newsletter to spotlight those student events in early April, with an edition of the newsletter for the later April events coming up in a few weeks.
Note that the COVID-19 safety protocols have recently changed at Emory. For both the Schwartz Center and the Performing Arts Studio, masking is encouraged but not required. For the Schwartz Center but not the Performing Arts Studio, proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test result is required for attendees (or an Emory ID). Most of the recitals in the PAS will be livestreamed, and links for those livestreams are given below. One of the advantages of the PAS livestreaming is that after the recitals, the videos will remain available on the PAS Virtual Stage. None of the recitals in the Schwartz Center will be livestreamed.
With best wishes,
Gray
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Saturday, April 2, 2022
Student Recitals
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Evelyn Sload & Lucienne “LuLu” Scully, Voice Recital
PAS, Noon
Evelyn Sload is a junior majoring in music and minoring in English. She studies vocal performance with Bradley Howard. She has been recognized for her dedication to music in receiving the Atlanta Symphony Chorus Robert Shaw Memorial Outstanding Singer Scholarship and is also a recipient of the Emory Liberal Arts Scholarship. She is from Darien, Connecticut, and attended Manhattan School of Music Precollege Division. She is also vice president of Emory Concert Choir, president of Emory’s chapter of Mu Phi Music Honor Fraternity, and a member of the Music Advisory Board.
Lucienne “LuLu” Scully, 19, of Denver, Colorado, is a sophomore double major in music and philosophy, politics, and law. She is a Woodruff Music Scholar. She has been taking voice lessons for more than eight years and is currently studying under Bradley Howard. Scully founded Over the Rainbow Music Mentoring in 2018, a non-profit providing free music lessons and mentorship to elementary school children. She is a member of the Emory Concert Choir, the vice president of programming for BridgeEmory, and a member of Phi Alpha Delta, a pre-law fraternity. She hopes to pursue a master’s degree in voice and eventually attend law school.
Attendance at this recital requires registration, which may be done by clicking here. From Evelyn and LuLu: "Evelyn Sload (Junior) and Lucienne "Lulu" Scully (Sophomore) are looking forward to putting on a vocal recital featuring works of Fauré, Mozart, Guastavino, and Delibes on April 2nd at noon in the Performing Arts Studio." The program may be seen by clicking here.
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Rachel Ofotokun, Composition Student Recital
PAS, 3:30 pm
Rachel Ofotokun (b. 2000) is a senior at Emory studying music composition and African studies. Hailing from Lilburn, Georgia, she began piano lessons at a young age that developed into her love for music and composition today. Much of her work is inspired by body movement, sensory experiences, nature scenes, and her love of community and storytelling.
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Sunday, April 3, 2022
Student Recitals
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Esther Ro, clarinet, and Hwanwook “Wookie” Seong, cello, Senior Recital
Schwartz Center, 2:00 pm
Esther Ro is a senior at Emory University, pursuing a bachelor’s degree in biology and music. She has been playing the clarinet for 12 years, currently under the mentorship of Marci Gurnow, an affiliated artist of Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Ro began her clarinet journey at age 10 from her mother’s insightful recommendation, noticing her daughter’s interest in playing the recorder. Ro immediately fell in love with the dark tone of the clarinet and avidly continued her clarinet journey. She auditioned and participated in competitive state ensembles including GMEA All-State Band, as well as Atlanta Youth Wind Symphony and Emory Youth Symphony Orchestra. Ro is currently an active member of the Emory University Symphony Orchestra. Besides music, Ro had been working as a medical assistant to build up her career as a physician associate.
Hwanwook Seong, 22, is a senior at Emory University studying biology and music. He began his cello studies at age 11 with Michael Way in El Paso, Texas, and has been playing since. He is from Sugar Hill, Georgia, and currently studies under Karen Freer. Seong has received top honors at regional and state competitions including All-Region, All-State, GMTA, UIL, and GHP. While living in Texas, he served as principal cellist for All-Region and El Paso Symphony youth orchestras. After moving to Georgia, Seong served as principal cellist for Georgia All-State orchestras, the Emory Youth Symphony Orchestra, and now with the Emory University Symphony Orchestra. He is an advising fellow at Matriculate, volunteers at Emory myLIFE Autism Center, and performs at the Wesley Woods Retirement Home with Continuo. Outside of music, Seong conducts research at the Department of Human Genetics in the School of Medicine.
Also performing with Esther and Hwanwook are two students, Jason Lin, piano and Rachel Seong, cello; and Thayer Naples, guitar.
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Above are stills captured from videos in Sawyer Gray's compositions that include his face.
Sawyer Gray, Senior Honors Recital
PAS 3:30
Sawyer writes:
Welcome! Thank you for your interest in my work. I began to put this concert together at the beginning of my junior year, and when I look back over my work as a composition student, I find that most of my pieces deal with some form of investigation of an issue or topic—like a musical “sketch.” Each piece in this program illustrates a domain of my life. Collected together, they render my experiences coming of age in a new digital world.
In my Sketchbook, each work illustrates some aspect of the world as I experience it, filtered through and expanded by the limits of my ability with the laptop. While the subject of each piece varies, two main themes emerge throughout the program. The first theme is the self and all it entails. As you will see throughout this program, the self is multi-faceted. Through these works, I study its many faces—the self informed by kinship and ritual, the self decoded by echo chambers, the self enraptured by constant content, the self as a political badge, the self in intimacy, and the self as enmeshed in a network of other selves.
The other theme is vulnerability, specifically the complex relationship between vulnerable selves and social media. The internet has split my generation’s social landscape between a physical and digital world, and my identity has become, in part, a commodity for advertisers and followers. Online content repositories have also commodified my attention. Attention and identity are both rooted in the self—now troubled in the new millennium. Personally, identity and attention have both been sites of turmoil for my sense of self, turmoil that manifests in my music.
Here in the social media age, we are implicitly asked to make a brand of ourselves. Especially as a content creator, my success in the internet’s content feeding machine depends on marketing more than anything else—social media judges success in quantities of likes, shares, and followers. Not only is my attention now dependent on a drip-feed of content, my self-worth is chained to its production on the other end.
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Sunday, April 10, 2022, 4:00 pm
Emory Chamber Ensembles, Schwartz Center
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This program will include a great variety of different ensembles, ranging from two violins, to various combination of strings, strings and piano, a trombone quarter, a saxophone quarter, and a percussion ensemble.
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Sunday, April 10, 2022, 7:00 pm
Emory Concert Choir | Daybreak, Schwartz Center
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The Concert Choir is Emory’s select chamber choir. The singers in the ensemble come from across the country and around the world. All are students at the university with a wide variety of academic majors. The choir sings sacred and secular repertoire from the Middle Ages to the present, from chant to new commissions. The choir has sung at both the southern and national conventions of the American Choral Directors Association, an honor reserved for the nation’s finest choral ensembles. It has toured internationally and has sung at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the Vatican in Rome, and the Alhambra in Seville.
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Thank You to our Members! |
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A big Thank You to those who have already renewed your membership for the 2021-2022 year, and especially to those of you who have even increased your level of support or are new supporters! There is no way to thank you enough. It is absolutely true that your contributions are needed more than ever.
Much of our support for students and faculty is through grants to provide scholarships for students to help pay for required music fees, to help fund undergraduate research projects, and to provide enhancements for classes. You can see the grants we have awarded for this year by clicking here.
A special thanks to those of you who are sustaining members, either through payroll deduction, or a continuing contribution on your credit card. It is possible to make sustaining contributions on our giving page, but it is not straightforward. (See instructions below.)
Please Note: It is surprisingly difficult to generate a list of members who are current in their giving. We measure our giving year from the start of our annual campaign, which is usually in July of each year. Some members give through payroll deduction or give more than one gift per year (thank you to both!) and we want to make sure we correctly acknowledge the level of giving. We don't have a set format for how names are listed and depend on member's preference. Sometimes we make mistakes. Please let us know if you find any errors in the list of members above. You can just reply to this newsletter and we will be glad to correct any mistakes. The date that the list was updated is given at the bottom. Among other problems, we are finding that it can take several weeks for us to get news of gifts.
Become a Sustaining Member
Sustaining Members, those who make a continuing monthly donation, are very valuable for organizations, and convenient for donors. There are two ways in which one can become a Sustaining Member: through payroll deduction for Emory employees, or via credit card donations for others. If you would like to become a Sustaining Member via our online donation page, you can click here for instructions.
Thank you for considering this option!
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Thanks to the COVID-19 vaccines, we are now able to attend many musical performances in person. However, some people are still hesitant to attend live events, even when COVID-19 safety protocols are in place. Given the virulence of some of the COVID-19 variants, such reluctance is understandable. In addition, the pandemic has demonstrated that with modern technology, it is possible to enjoy music virtually, either as it is performed live, or in video recordings. That makes it possible to "attend" performances that we could not otherwise hear.
During the pandemic, various venues invested heavily in equipment to do high quality recordings, and they are continuing to provide at least some livestream and recorded content. When it was not possible to have live audiences, the only way that musicians could connect with audiences was virtually. Now that music can be presented for live audiences, producing livestream and/or recorded content represents additional costs and so we will be able to virtually attend only some of the musical performances in Atlanta.
In the next articles I list what is currently known about music performances from Emory-associated sources. I include the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra because it is the source of many of the artist affiliates in the Emory Music Department.
How best to view Virtual Concerts
One note about these performances: One generally accesses the programs via a computer. It is likely that many of us have been watching more movies at home during the pandemic, and it is generally preferable to watch those movies on our TVs rather than on some type of mobile device. Similarly, it is much preferable to watch virtual music programs on a large screen with good sound. The most reliable way to connect your device to a TV is via an HDMI cable (perhaps with an adapter) if both your device and the TV supports such a connection. Another method is to mirror your device screen onto your TV. There are many ways to do that. Clicking on this link will take you to an article that describes various ways to do that screen mirroring.
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The Schwartz Center is the hub of most musical performances at Emory. Emerson Hall in particular has greatly enhanced capabilities for livestreaming and recording. However, the decision on what performances will be livestreamed or recorded appears at this point to be made individually for each performance. Here is what I have been able to find out about some of the concert series in the Schwartz Center:
Candler Concert Series
The first two performances in the Candler Concert Series were livestreamed, and an email sent to subscribers stated: "Ticket holders who prefer not to attend this concert in person may watch the livestream by logging in to their box office account on the evening of the performance." That wording suggests that it will not be able to watch a recording of the concert at a later time. It is also not clear if that will be a possibility for later concerts in this series; it is possible that such a decision might be up to the particular artist.
Atlanta Master Chorale
It is great to contemplate the possibility of once again hearing choral music. Singing has been such a dangerous activity that there has been very little live choral music performed in the last 18 months, even in the absence of audiences. In addition to their in-person concerts at the Schwartz Center this year, the AMC has just announced that all ticket holders will have access to a livestream recording of the concert for seven days after the concert, and that it will also be possible to purchase livestream-only access to the concerts. Full details may be seen by clicking here. This represents a great way to view their performances if you are not able to attend in person, as well as supporting AMC.
Student Performances
It is not yet clear how many student performances will be livestreamed. Some of the student performances in the Schwartz Center and in the Performing Arts Studio will be livestreamed. (See below for information about the PAS Virtual Stage).
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The PAS Virtual Stage is once again being used for at least some performances that are taking place in the Performing Arts Studio:
Livestreaming might not be available on that site, but recorded performances will be moved to the PAS Virtual Stage within a few days of a performance.
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I assume that all of our readers are familiar with ECMSA, whose artistic Director is Professor William Ransom. I am listing them separately because ECMSA has a variety of music series, only some of which are at the Schwartz Center. The full array of their concerts can be seen on the ECMSA website.
The Emerson Series is at the Schwartz Center. Free tickets are required. At this time, there are no plans for livestreaming of these performances.
The Cooke Noontime Series is at the Carlos Museum and free registration in advance is required to attend. There is no livestreaming of this series.
Most of the Family Series concerts are at the Carlos Museum. There is no livestreaming of these concerts.
The Bach's Lunch Series is part of the Concerts@First series held in the sanctuary of First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta. There is no charge for the Bach's Lunch Series, although there are charges for some of the other concerts. Most of the concerts are also livestreamed for no charge. Tickets are purchased through the Concerts@First website and livestreaming is available at that site as well.
A new series for this year is the Masterclass Series, which is an incredible gift for our students. These masterclasses feature outstanding musicians who will teach Emory students in these classes. Moreover, our members are invited to attend these masterclasses. The plan is also for these masterclasses to be livestreamed. The information needed to attend these masterclasses on Zoom is not available on the Music Calendar. Zoom information about the first of these masterclasses is given in this newsletter. Those who are on the ECMSA email list will receive the necessary information before each of the masterclasses.
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Atlanta Symphony Orchestra |
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For the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, the ASO is performing for live audiences this fall. In addition to other safety precautions, they are requiring that all audience members be masked the entire time and fully vaccinated. These policies represent great leadership of the ASO organization.
The entire concert series is detailed on the ASO website. For last year, the ASO began a virtual "Behind the Curtain" series. That series was a stunning reimagining of what a virtual concert could be, with great sound and varied and close up camera work. Given that there could only be limited practice and performance time due to COVID protocols, the results were a great showcase of how fortunate we are to have the ASO musicians and leadership. Our Emory music students are also extremely fortunate, as many of our artist affiliates are members of the ASO.
Although the ASO is performing before audiences this year, they are fortunately continuing the "Behind the Curtain" series. The performances are not being livestreamed. Rather, the concerts will be released in monthly intervals and will "feature selections from the previous month's Delta Classical concerts." This process will give time for increased production values. Also, members and subscribers will be able to access the concerts throughout the ASO season. Those who are subscribers to an ASO concert series will have access to these virtual concerts. In addition, it is possible to purchase virtual memberships that will allow access to these concerts for just $99 for the year or $10/month.
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Emory Friends of Music
Schwartz Center for Performing Arts
1700 N. Decatur Rd, Suite 206
Atlanta, GA 30322
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