From left to right: Rachel Brashier, Annie Fullard, and Ian Rosenbaum

In 1984, Indiana University violin undergraduate Annie Fullard cofounded a string quartet named for 19th-century Italian luthiers Giovanni and Vincenzo Cavani. Forty years on, members of the ensemble have changed, but Fullard and the renowned Cavani String Quartet have become respected advocates for chamber music performance and pedagogy, and co-authors of the upcoming book, The Art of Collaboration: Chamber Music Rehearsal Techniques and Teambuilding. Fullard comes to Peabody this fall as Professor and Sidney M. Friedberg Chair of Chamber Music, one of a number of distinguished artist-educators joining the Conservatory faculty. Rachel Brashier, the incoming Chair of Music Education, is the founder of the annual Active and Integrative Music Education (AIME) conference and a music-education researcher. Alumnus Ian Rosenbaum (BM ’08, Percussion)—a founding member of the Grammy-nominated new-music group Sandbox Percussion with Jonathan Allen, Victor Caccese (BM ’11, Percussion), and Terry Sweeney (BM ’13, Percussion)—joins the Percussion department as Associate Professor. They join Boris Slutsky and Shirley Yoo, whose return to the Piano faculty were announced earlier this year, as well as new Music Theory assistant professors Emily Milius and Richard Drehoff Jr. (MM ’18, Composition, Music Theory Pedagogy). Welcome!

As we near completion of the Breakthrough Plan 2024—the successor to Peabody’s first strategic Breakthrough Plan, which we launched in 2015—we begin our work to establish a new roadmap for the coming years. Within the context of unprecedented new investments now being made in financial aid, capital initiatives, and faculty, and on the heels of a successful external review, Peabody is now developing an exciting new set of strategic goals across five key areas of focus including: academic programming; financial aid as a driver of access and excellence; expanding our reach; Peabody’s people and culture; and our vision for the Mount Vernon campus.

To accomplish this, the Peabody Institute Executive Team and Senior Management Group held a facilitated planning session in June, followed by a similar session of the Peabody Institute Advisory Board, focusing on institutional strategic objectives going forward. In the weeks since these working sessions, the process to shape future strategic goals—based on the planning sessions and building on Peabody’s Breakthrough Plan 2024—has begun. Input on preliminary draft goals will be solicited from faculty, staff, and students across the Peabody community in early fall 2024, after which our institutional goals will be finalized and a series of action steps to meet each goal will be established. We expect planning to be completed by December. We are truly excited to launch a new plan that both builds on our recent progress and history and boldly looks to the future. More to come on this soon!

Sincerely,

Saturday, August 10, through Tuesday, August 20

Faculty composer Kevin Puts and librettist Mark Campbell’s Elizabeth Cree ingeniously threads the fictional travails of the titular heroine, on trial for allegedly killing her husband, into the real-life music halls and Jack the Ripper anxiety of 1880s Victorian London. Opera Philadelphia inventively premiered this murder-mystery in 2017, and the Glimmerglass Festival presents it as part of its 2024 season in a production directed by Alison Moritz and conducted by Kelly Kuo. Performances takes place August 10, 12, 16, and 20 at the Alice Busch Opera Theater in Cooperstown, NY, and tickets are available online.

Friday, August 16, 7:30 pm GMT

Conductor Gemma New (MM ’11, Conducting) was praised for her Proms debut in 2023, leading the BBC Scottish Orchestra through Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and the European Premiere of Samy Moussa’s Symphony No. 2 at Royal Albert Hall. She returns to the annual BBC summer season this month to lead the Orchestra through Mel Bonis’ Salome, Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A major, featuring soloist Anthony McGill, and Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (incidental music). Tickets are available online, and Proms performances are broadcast live on Radio 3.

Friday, August 16, 5:30 pm MDT

For the 75th anniversary of the Aspen Music School and Festival, Music Director Robert Spano organized a summer season that includes spotlights on festival alumni and new music from living composers. Faculty artist Marina Piccinini has attended the festival for the past 15 years, and this summer she performs for the first time with the Aspen Music Festival Chamber Symphony and conductor Cristian Macelaru, premiering composer Christopher Theofanidis’ "The Universe in Ecstatic Motion," co-commissioned by the festival and written for the Peabody flute professor. The performance takes place at the Klein Music Tent in Aspen, CO, and tickets are available online.

Sunday, August 18, 11:00 CEST

Current Composition DMA candidate Benjamin Scheer travels to Germany as Composer-in-Residence at the Moritzburg Festival, the annual chamber music event in Dresden. Scheer’s The Funambulist's Double receives its European debut there, and the festival’s concert finale features Felix Mendelssohn’s String Octet in E-flat major, Op. 20; Richard Strauss’ Piano Quartet in C minor, Op. 13; and the world premiere of Scheer’s String Octet, commissioned by the festival. The concert takes place at the Moritzburg Church in Dresden and tickets are available online.

Wednesday, August 28 to Sunday, September 1

The 20th annual DC JazzFest welcomes a knockout lineup to the nation’s capital this month, from veterans such as bassist Ron Carter, guitarist Stanley Clarke, vocalist Carmen Lundy, saxophonist David Murray, and trumpeter Nicholas Payton to up-and-coming new stars such as alto saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin, vocalist Samara Joy, and harpist Brandee Younger. Peabody adds artists to both lineups: Jazz undergraduates Ebban and Ephraim Dorsey perform a free show August 29 at the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage as part of the festival. And faculty artist Nasar Abadey and his Supernova ensemble perform August 31 at the DC JazzFest’s Union Stage; tickets are available online.

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Peabody Notes highlights select off-campus performances featuring Peabody performers. For other events, please visit our Peabody events page.

Portals

The intrepid Talea Ensemble premiered faculty composer Felipe Lara’s Chambered Spirals at Peabody in fall 2021 during the ensemble’s residency on campus. The swirling, kaleidoscopic work highlights Lara’s compositional ability to create moments of sustained intensity, sound that produces that queasy feeling of looking from a vast height. That sense of restless mystery surfaces in all four works on Lara’s new album Portals (Kairos), made possible by a Johns Hopkins’ Catalyst Award and a Dean’s Excellence Accelerator Grant. Talea performs the ensemble works—Chambered Spirals, Ventos Uivantes, and the haunting Fringes—while Injust Intonations for piano solo, performed by Conrad Tao, is a modest, meditative remembrance. Portals is available online.

Music from SEAMUS, Vol. 33

The Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States was founded 40 years ago at the California Institute of Technology, holding a conference every summer and releasing a compilation of works by its member composers. The latest edition, Music from SEAMUS, Vol. 33 (New Focus Recordings), includes “Tri” by Qiujiang Levi Lu (MM ’23, Computer Music) and “Matrix (for George Lewis)” by faculty artist Sam Pluta, a member of the daring collective of composer-performers and improvisers called Wet Ink. Wet Ink performs at the TIME:SPANS festival of 21st-century music August 15 at 7:30 pm at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music.