Music Faculty News
June 4, 2014
Jeffrey Biegel (Adjunct Associate Professor of Piano) recently released two recordings: "A Grande Romance" with ArkivMusic (2013) for Steinway & Sons, and "Life According to Chopin: Chopin's Greatest Piano Solos" with GPR Records (2014). Biegel's SATB/piano piece "There Shines a Light Ahead" was published by Porfiri & Horvath in 2013.
Carlos Conde (Adjunct Assistant Professor of Voice; B.A., 2004; M.Mus. in voice performance, 2005; D.M.A. in voice performance, SUNY/Stony Brook, 2008). In June 2014 Conde accepted the full-time administrative position of rector/chancellor at San Juan's esteemed Conservatorio de Música. Conde has taught many voice students in our conservatory since he returned to Brooklyn College in fall 2012.
William Fulton (Adjunct Lecturer in Music; M.A. in musicology, 2010; candidate for Ph.D. in musicology, CUNY Graduate Center). Fulton contributed a chapter on the music of Stevie Wonder for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, eds. Blake Howe, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Neil Lerner, and Joseph Straus (expected summer 2014). He also presented a paper on Stravinsky's music at the November 2013 AMS Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh.
Douglas Geers (Director, Center for Computer Music). Geers' new installation, "The Audible Edge," opened at the Katherine Nash Gallery at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis on May 17 as part of the Northern Spark Festival 2014.
Devora Geller (Adjunct Lecturer in Music; M.Mus. in Violin Performance, 2008; candidate for Ph.D. in musicology, CUNY Graduate Center). Geller has won numerous grants and travel monies for her ongoing work on Yiddish song and opera, research that began with her studies at Brooklyn College.
David Grubbs (Associate Professor, PIMA and Conservatory of Music). Grubbs' book Records Ruin the Landscape was published in March 2014 by Duke University Press and has thus far been highly acclaimed by critics here and abroad. As the publisher's press kit has noted:
"Records Ruin the Landscape is a pleasure to read, full of wonderful anecdotes and historical material. David Grubbs approaches John Cage and his legacy from a new and refreshing angle, by examining the vexed relationship of experimental and improvised music to recording and phonography. The questions that he poses—about the ontology and potentiality of recording in relation to live performance, improvisation, chance, and indeterminacy—are important, and he answers them in smart and provocative ways." — Christoph Cox, coeditor of Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music
John Cage's disdain for records was legendary. He repeatedly spoke of the ways in which recorded music was antithetical to his work. In Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs argues that, following Cage, new genres in experimental and avant-garde music in the 1960s were particularly ill suited to be represented in the form of a recording. These activities include indeterminate music, long-duration minimalism, text scores, happenings, live electronic music, free jazz, and free improvisation. How could these proudly evanescent performance practices have been adequately represented on an LP?
In their day, few of these works circulated in recorded form. By contrast, contemporary listeners can encounter this music not only through a flood of LP and CD releases of archival recordings but also in even greater volume through Internet file sharing and online resources. Present-day listeners are coming to know that era's experimental music through the recorded artifacts of composers and musicians who largely disavowed recordings. In Records Ruin the Landscape, Grubbs surveys a musical landscape marked by altered listening practices.
Marianne Gythfeldt (Assistant Professor in Clarinet, Conservatory of Music). The conservatory welcomed clarinetist Marianne Gythfeldt to its faculty in fall 2013. During 2013–14 Gythfeldt presented several master classes both on campus and off for students from several local schools. She continues to regularly perform with the contemporary ensembles Zephyros Winds and Talea Ensemble. For the Naxos CD Strange Flowers, released in October 2013, she was solo clarinetist in two works. In the Jan. 11, 2014, international benefit concert "Shostakovich for Syria" at Carnegie Hall, she played bass clarinet alongside dozens of top-ranking musicians from major orchestras of the northeastern United States. For the March 2014 Vienna Reinvented Festival, she performed with Talea Ensemble at Bohemian National Hall and at East Carolina University. In Talea's April 23, 2014, performance at Roulette, Gythfeldt played three clarinets (Bb, Eb and bass) in George Aperghis's "Happy End" for video, electronics and chamber ensemble. During the coming 2014–15 season her commissioned electroacoustic works for clarinet will be presented in a U.S. concert tour and at the International Electroacoustic Conference in Seoul, South Korea.
Stephanie Jensen-Moulton (Assistant Professor, Conservatory of Music). Jensen-Moulton's edition of Miriam Gideon's unpublished opera Fortunato: An Opera in Three Scenes (1958) was published by A-R Editions in 2013. A positive review in the June 2014 issue of Music Library Association Notes praises Jensen-Moulton's "excellent editions" as "a hugely valuable contribution to scholarship on Gideon," drawing "attention to the wider repertoire of operas written by American women composers during the mid-twentieth century." During summer 2014 Oxford University Press will publish its Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, eds. Blake Howe, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Neil Lerner and Joseph Straus, for which Jensen-Moulton has written two chapters: "Musical and Bodily Difference in Cirque du Soleil" and "Defamiliarizing the Familiar: Michael Nyman, Narrative Medicine, and the Composition of Mental Blindness."
Arturo O'Farrill (Assistant Professor, fall 2014-). In April 2014 the Conservatory of Music was delighted to announce the addition of Arturo O'Farrill to its jazz performance faculty. O'Farrill is a world-renowned, Grammy Award–winning pianist, composer and educator. In 2002 he created the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra (ALJO) in order to bring the vital musical traditions of Afro Latin jazz to a wider general audience, and in order to greatly expand the contemporary Latin jazz big band repertoire through commissions to jazz and Latin jazz artists across a wide stylistic and geographical range. O'Farrill was born in Mexico and grew up in New York City, educated at the Manhattan School of Music, Brooklyn College Conservatory (B.Mus., 1994; from which he received the Distinguished Alumnus Medal), and the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College (M.A., 2004). He played piano with the Carla Bley Big Band from 1979 through 1983, then went on to develop as a solo performer with diverse, distinguished artists including Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Bowie, Wynton Marsalis and Harry Belafonte. O'Farrill has performed throughout the world both as a solo artist and with his smaller musical groups. He has recorded numerous CDs, several of them Grammy nominees, and his performances are on the soundtracks of two critically acclaimed films, Calle 54 and Chico and Rita. He and the ALJO received the 2008 Grammy for Best Latin Jazz Album album for Song for Chico, released on the ZOHO label. They were again jointly nominated for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album in 2011 for 40 Acres and a Burro, also released on ZOHO. A celebrated composer with a frequent new ground-breaking and forward-looking perspective, O'Farrill has received commissions from Meet the Composer, the Big Apple Circus, the Philadelphia Music Project, Symphony Space and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. He has also composed music for films, including Hollywoodland and Salud. In 2007, O'Farrill established the nonprofit Afro Latin Jazz Alliance (ALJA) as a new institutional support for the orchestra with a yet more ambitious agenda. The mission of the alliance is to promote Afro Latin Jazz through a comprehensive array of performance and educational programs. O'Farrill is a Steinway Artist. He has taught at several institutions of higher education, including The Juilliard School, Queensborough Community College, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, The New School, SUNY-Purchase and Manhattan School of Music. O'Farrill looks forward to leading the development of a master's jazz program at the conservatory.
Tania León (Distinguished Professor in Music Composition). In April 2014 the National Endowment for the Arts announced a $15,000 grant to the University of Central Arkansas to support the commission, development and premiere of "Little Rock Nine" by composer Tania León and librettist Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Working with visits to the historically significant Little Rock sites, León and Gates will create a two‐hour score that will be work-shopped at the University of Central Arkansas and evaluated by outside reviewers. The opera tells the true story of nine ordinary yet courageous African‐American students who in 1957 under federal troop escort entered the previously all‐white Central High School to obtain an equal education. Little Rock and "The Nine" came to symbolize the federal government's commitment to eliminating separate systems of education for blacks and whites. A universal and original story of heroism in the face of racial prejudice, the opera is expected to resonate with a diverse audience.
Michael Lupo (Adjunct Lecturer; B.A., music, 2009; M.A., musicology, 2011; candidate for Ph.D. Musicology, CUNY Graduate Center). Lupo attended the national meeting of the International Society for the Study of Popular Music in March 2014 and presented his paper "The Perceptual Flow of Metric (Re)evaluation in Radiohead's ‘Bloom'," from research that started with his master's thesis here at Brooklyn College.
Wang Jie (Adjunct Assistant Professor in Composition). In March 2014 the Detroit Symphony Orchestra premiered to great acclaim Symphony no. 2 by the conservatory's guest composition professor, Wang Jie. Read the Detroit Free Press review.
Doctoral Students of Professor Oppens Honor Her in Birthday Concert
Distinguished Professor Ursula Oppens, piano, was honored at Symphony Space in Manhattan on March 27, 2014, by a 70th-birthday concert prepared by several of her current and past students, including Ran Dank, Soyeon Kate Lee, Winston Choi and Anthony Molinaro. The concert included a performance by Dank of Frederic Rzewski's "The People United Will Never Be Defeated" that Professor Oppens had commissioned for a 1976 American Bicentennial concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. The evening opened with a surprise performance by Oppens of a new piece ("Winter Stars") composed by Conservatory Professor Jason Eckardt especially for her birthday.
Back to Fermata – Spring 2014
