Peabody Faculty Win Johns Hopkins Catalyst Awards
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Peabody Assistant Professor of Musicology David Gutkin and Assistant Professor of Composition Felipe Lara are 2020 awardees of the Johns Hopkins Catalyst Awards. Gutkin's award will support his work to complete a book exploring the New York avant-garde’s engagements with and influence on opera and operatic form during the 1970s and 1980s. Lara's award will support the creation of
Chambered Spirals, a new 30-minute work for large mixed chamber ensemble, and its premiere at Peabody by New York’s Talea Ensemble. The work will be the last remaining piece to complete a large-scale cycle titled
Ciclo Concertante.
Catalyst Awards support the promising research and creative endeavors of early career faculty with the goal of launching them on a path to a sustainable and rewarding academic career.
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This has been an unusual summer here at Peabody. July typically offers an opportunity to take stock of the past year and plan for the next. The continued navigation around the impact of COVID-19 and the need to prepare for a variety of contingencies that may come our way in the months ahead has made for a unique undertaking. Following several months of dedicated work by our faculty and staff, we just recently announced our
plan of return for the fall. With the safety of the community and the delivery of the best quality education possible as guiding principles, we have fashioned a hybrid-flexible experience that will allow many of our students to return to campus for much of their applied, performance-based training, while continuing to offer the option of studying remotely. While there have been many challenges in this new world, it will further challenge our students with developing important entrepreneurial, creative, and technological skills that we have been emphasizing in recent years through the Breakthrough Curriculum. Well before the pandemic, Peabody started providing students with a comprehensive education that prepares them for the real world, a world that can change at a moment’s notice, as we have all experienced over these months. This kind of education provides students with the background they need for innovation and creativity, resilience and perseverance, and the skills to be flexible and adaptable as they navigate the ever-changing performing arts landscape.
We recognize also that the experience of being on campus is more than just a musical or academic experience. We are a community. And it will be a different kind of community for a while. Masks, social distancing, the need to “de-densify” the campus, all will make for an unusual campus experience. And even as I write this, we don’t know exactly what the trajectory of the 2020-21 academic year will be and how it will all play out. But I do know that through a combination of exceptional faculty and caring staff, we are now prepared to give our students the best education possible in this strange new normal.
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An Die Musik Live
An Die Musik Live! will be featuring several Peabody artists this weekend in live streamed concerts. Tonight, Friday, July 17 at 7:00 pm, jazz faculty artist Warren Wolf will present “What's Going On/Marvin Gaye.” Cello Professor Amit Peled will present “When Bach Met Bloch” on Saturday, July 18, at 2:00 pm. Then Saturday at 7:00 pm, Wolf joins Richard and Elizabeth Case Chair in Jazz Studies Sean Jones and Tim Green in a “Tribute to Past Great Trumpeters.”
Brad Balliett
On Sunday, July 19, at 7:15 pm, faculty bassoonist Brad Balliett and French horn player Laura Weiner will perform solos and duets in an
online concert which is part of ChamberFest Canandaigua's summer music festival in Canandaigua, New York.
Seth Knopp and Tony Arnold
Professor Seth Knopp serves as artistic director of
Yellow Barn, a Vermont summer festival. He will be the featured pianist in streamed concerts on Thursday, July 23, and Saturday, July 25. Associate Professor of Voice Tony Arnold, soprano, will perform György Kurtág's
Kafka Fragments on Friday, August 7. On Saturday, August 8, Arnold and Knopp will perform Shostakovich's
Seven Romances on Poems of Alexander Blok in the season finale.
Mind on Fire
Mind on Fire presented 11 short, art performances in a Virtual Variety Show with music, poetry, prose, improvisation, opera, puppetry, song, and space
online on July 11 in collaboration with the Enoch Pratt Free Library. Taylor Hillary Boykins (
MM ’14, Voice), Jennifer Hughson (
MM ’12, Clarinet), Tyrone Page Jr. (
BM ’16, MM ’18, Saxophone; BM ’16, Music Education), Stephanie Ray (
MM ’12 Flute), and Randi Withani Roberts (
’16, Jazz Voice) were featured on this show.
Marina Piccinini
Flute Professor Marina Piccinini will participate in the Seattle Chamber Music Society’s
Virtual Summer Festival. On July 29, she will perform the world premiere of Siren Song for Solo Flute by Aaron Jay Kernis, and on July 31, she will perform Pierre Boulez’s Sonatine for Flute and Piano with Andreas Haefliger, piano.
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Peabody Notes highlights select online performances featuring Peabody performers. For other events, please visit our Peabody Conservatory Facebook
page.
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Doctoral composition student Richard Drehoff Jr. (
MM ’18, Composition, Music Theory Pedagogy) was commissioned by the Dina Koston and Roger Shapiro Fund for New Music in the Library of Congress as part of The Boccaccio Project: A Series of Musical Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic. His piece for oboe alone,
shadow of a difference / falling, was written for Andrew Nogal of the Grossman Ensemble.
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Sahun Sam Hong (
GPD ’15, MM ’17, Piano), a DMA piano candidate, has been granted a cash prize of $50,000 as a finalist of the 2021 American Pianists Awards. In response to the pandemic, the American Pianists Association has awarded prizes to each of the five finalists now and will announce the winner of the Christel DeHaan Classical Fellowship in June 2021.
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HOCKET, a cutting-edge piano duo based in Los Angeles with Sarah Gibson and Thomas Kotcheff (
BM ’10, Piano), has commissioned 50 composers to join them in #What2020SoundsLike. The commissioned composers have been invited to musically respond to this year with miniatures written for piano duo, which are being performed from mid-June through September 2020.
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Ashna Pathan, a junior in the Music for New Media program, organized, engineered, and edited a
video featuring 73 musicians (including 11 Johns Hopkins students) from all over the world performing Verdi’s Overture to
La Forza del Destino. Pathan received 265 video clips and over 10 hours worth of audio for the project.
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Ryo Usami (
BM ’17, Violin), who studied with Violaine Melançon, has won a position with "The President's Own" U.S. Marine Chamber Orchestra in Washington, D.C. Auditions were held in early March 2020, just before the quarantine.
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Sean Meyers (
BM ’16, Saxophone, Music Education) is a founding member of the award-winning Vanguard Reed Quintet, releasing its debut album
Red Leaf Collection. The full-length album features six world-premiere recordings of compositions for reed quintet, a chamber music ensemble comprising five woodwind instruments: oboe, clarinet, saxophone, bass clarinet, and bassoon.
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Professor Amit Peled, cello, released a new recording of Franz Schubert's String Quintet in C major and String Trio in B-Flat major with the Aviv Quartet on the Naxos label. Described as one of the most compelling and moving works in the chamber music canon, the quintet stands as the summation of Schubert’s writing for chamber forces.
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Call for Submissions: Peabody ArtReach
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Peabody ArtReach is a collection of resources and performances to help our artistic community weather the COVID-19 pandemic and stay connected. You can enjoy the amazing performances, teaching moments, healing resources and more that Peabody students, alumni, faculty, and staff have been creating during this time by visiting
Peabody ArtReach online. If you are a member of the Peabody community who has created content in response to the crisis, you can also be a part of this online community project by submitting your creative work to be considered for ArtReach and the Friedheim Library's ArtReach archive, which will serve as a lasting record of our creative processes and innovation during a difficult time. Please visit the
ArtReach archive to learn more and submit your materials.
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