College of Musical Arts

• International horn competition held
• Alumni chamber choir tours Sweden
• Ohio’s first lady to visit BGSU’s Kindergarten Project
• New alumni to travel world as Fulbrighters
• 2007-08 Festival Series announced
• Findlay couple boosts BGSU arts center
• BGSU student’s work to be performed in Cleveland
• Jazz Fest features international lineup
• Celebrated conductor to receive honorary degree
• 2007 Summer Music Institute
• Bowling Green Opera Theater stages double bill
• 27th Annual New Music & Art Festival
• Emily Freeman Brown follows Silk Road to Kazakhstan
• Operatic tenor Jon Fredric West to appear at BGSU
• Givens Fellowship to open a world of possibilities for students
• Shrude premieres new work in Orlando
• Beerman work premieres to accolades in NYC
• BGSU music faculty present papers in Sweden
• Summer Music Institute

Between 50 and 75 musicians from around the globe were in Bowling Green July 19–22 when the Bowling Green State University College of Musical Arts hosted the International Horn Competition of America.

Founded in 1981 as the American Horn Competition, the event is America’s only internationally recognized competition for the horn. The competition is held in different venues across the United States every two years.

Fifteen former and current students of Bowling Green State University College of Musical Arts faculty member Dr. Mark Munson took a 10-day concert tour in Sweden.

Under the direction of Munson, members of the BGSU Alumni Chamber Choir presented concerts at the Östermalms Church in Kristianstad, the Cathedral of Lund, the Swedish Church in Höör and St. Clara Church in Stockholm.

Specifically formed for the July 9–18 tour, the choir was envisioned by Munson while he was on a faculty exchange in Sweden during the 2005–06 academic year.

Two mornings a week, Dr. Joyce Eastlund Gromko travels from BGSU to Weston Elementary School to work with kindergarteners, whom she’s been helping prepare for their music program on today (May 14).

On May 1, however, the BGSU professor of music education went to Columbus to share her methods with another interested listener—Frances Strickland, first lady of Ohio.

After hearing about Gromko’s Kindergarten Project, Gov. Ted Strickland’s wife accepted an invitation to visit the participating schools next fall. The first lady was also interested in broader dissemination of a music book like the one that was given to all the kindergarteners in the project this spring, Gromko said. She plans to contact a professional colleague who has recorded a CD that she hopes could be used to create another booklet of children’s folk songs.

An educational psychologist by training, Frances Strickland developed a widely used screening test for kindergarten-age children. Also known for playing the guitar and singing, she is now, as first lady, advocating for music education as well.

The University is celebrating a banner year for Fulbright awards. Not only have three faculty been named Fulbright Scholars, but three students as well—a first for BGSU.

David Wegehaupt of Glendale, Ariz., who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in music May 5, will be studying saxophone at the National Conservatory in Paris. Meaghan Geraghty of Austinburg, Ohio, who graduated with a major in English and a minor in political science, will be going to Hong Kong to teach English. And Paul Lajeunesse, a 2006 graduate of the School of Art now living in St. Louis, will study landscape painting in Iceland. (See next week’s Monitor for a related story.)

With five of six artists and ensembles making their local debuts, the 28th season of the College of Musical Arts’ Festival Series will offer both fresh and traditional talent to northwest Ohio audiences.

The series opens Sept. 28 with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Chamber Ensemble giving the Lois M. Nitschke Memorial Concert. Bassist Edgar Meyer and mandolin player Mike Marshall will perform on Oct. 12. Imani Winds returns to the series on Nov. 9. Marimbist Naoko Takada makes her debut on the Festival Series on Jan. 31, 2008. Dianne Reeves, the world’s pre-eminent jazz vocalist, will appear on March 14. The season concludes April 4 with the Louise F. Rees Memorial Concert, featuring Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero.

Festival Series performances begin at 8 p.m. in Kobacker Hall of the Moore Musical Arts Center.

Subscription prices for adults are $80, $120 and $150. Student subscriptions are $50, $80 and $120. Subscriptions may be charged using MasterCard, Visa or Discover.

The complete festival series information is available in the events section of the college’s Web site.

Findlay residents Thomas and Kathleen Donnell have announced a $750,000 gift to support the Wolfe Center for the Arts.

Their gift will provide for the main theater within the planned arts center on campus. In addition to the theater, the new facility will contain classrooms and production and studio spaces to link students and faculty in the School of Art, the Department of Theatre and Film and the College of Musical Arts.

The arts center project, which is part of Building Dreams: The Centennial Campaign for BGSU, was initiated when the state awarded BGSU $8.7 million in capital funding to build a state-of-the-art arts complex. The University is raising additional funds to complete the facility.

College of Musical Arts senior Kate Gibson pictured left.

A composition by Timothy Stulman, a doctoral student in Bowling Green State University’s College of Musical Arts, will be performed by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony.

Stulman’s Si Ji Tu will be performed at noon May 11 on the Young and Emerging Composers Concert at Cuyahoga Community College’s Metro Auditorium.

Si Ji Tu won the composition division of the 39th annual Competitions in Music Performance at BGSU last year, and, as the subject of Stulman’s thesis, won an Outstanding Thesis Award from the College of Musical Arts in 2007.

Pianist Helen Sung, saxophonist Dimos Dimitriadis and vocalist/pianist Carol Welsman will headline the 2007 Jazz Fest at the College of Musical Arts, beginning March 26.

All events during the six-day festival, which runs though March 31, will be held in the Moore Musical Arts Center.

Sung, a native of Houston, intended to pursue a career in classical piano, but switched to jazz while working on her undergraduate degree at the University of Texas at Austin. Now a New York City resident, she can be found performing with jazz greats such as drummer T.S. Monk, trombonist Steve Terre and trumpeter Clark Terry. Her band works nationally and internationally, appearing at festivals and conducting university clinics and master classes.

Dimitriadis is an assistant professor of saxophone and director of jazz studies at Ionian University in Corfu, Greece. The founder of the university’s jazz and improvisation program, he was the first jazz musician to be elected to an academic position in Greece. He also serves as artistic director of the Summer Jazz Academy and the Ionian Jazz Concerts in Corfu.

Welsman, an internationally acclaimed singer and pianist from Canada, was named Pianist/Keyboardist of the Year and was a nominee for Best Female Vocalist at the 2006 Canadian Smooth Jazz Awards. Four of her five albums have also received Juno Award nominations.

Internationally renowned conductor Leonard Slatkin will receive an honorary doctor of music degree from the Bowling Green State University College of Musical Arts on March 14.

Slatkin’s visit to BGSU takes place under the auspices of the Conductors Guild’s Conductor Training Workshop, to be held on campus from March 14–17.

The degree conferral ceremony will be held at 1:30 p.m. March 14 in Kobacker Hall of the Moore Musical Arts Center. A rehearsal of the Bowling Green Philharmonia, conducted by Maestro Slatkin, will immediately follow. Both the ceremony and the rehearsal are free and open to the public.

Bowling Green State University is again offering music camps for students in seventh through 12th grades during its 2007 Summer Music Institute.

The institute, taught by faculty and staff from the University’s College of Musical Arts, provides musicianship and enrichment classes as well as clinics and guest artist performances.

The camps are intended to engage students of different age levels and experience in a compact, focused music curriculum. With limited enrollment, participants receive personalized attention, including private lessons, master classes and large and small ensemble participation.

The Opera Theater at Bowling Green State University’s College of Musical Arts will present Franz Joseph Haydn’s La Canterina and Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at 8 p.m. Friday (Nov. 3) and 3 p.m. Sunday (Nov. 5) in Kobacker Hall of the Moore Musical Arts Center.

La Canterina is a short, two-act comic opera featuring a clever plot, humorous characters, fast-paced action and dramatic music. The opera will be sung in Italian with English supertitles.

Dido and Aeneas, based on a story from the fourth book of Virgil’s Aeneid, depicts the tragic tale of the Queen of Carthage. The work, to be sung in English, is considered the first English opera ever composed.

Special guest composer Frederic Rzewski will headline Bowling Green State University’s 27th annual New Music & Art Festival Oct. 19-21. A showcase for the work of nearly three-dozen composers and artists, the three-day international festival includes concerts, video screenings, lectures, exhibitions and workshops.

Hosted by the MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music in the College of Musical Arts and the School of Art at Bowling Green, the festival brings together internationally recognized composers, performers and visual artists in a celebration of new work and new media.

October finds BGSU conductor Emily Freeman Brown on the road—the Silk Road. Brown is in Kazakhstan this week and next for special performances in Almaty and Astana celebrating the opening of the new American Embassy in Astana.

The music director and conductor of the Bowling Green Philharmonia and Opera Theater, Brown will conduct the Academy of Soloists, a professional orchestra, in Astana and the student orchestra at Almaty’s Conservatory of Music, where she will also hold workshops for students.

The College of Musical Arts will host a visit by heldentenor Jon Fredric West, a 1974 BGSU graduate, as this year’s Harold and Helen McMaster Endowed Professorship in Voice and Choral Studies.

Since earning his degree from Bowling Green, West has earned international acclaim for his portrayals of the heroic tenor roles of composer Richard Wagner and become known for his leading tenor roles as Canio in I Pagliacci, Florestan in Fidelio, Otello, and Siegfried in the Ring Cycle.

During his residency, West will perform an all-Wagner recital with pianist Kenneth Bowen at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 4, in Kobacker Hall of the Moore Musical Arts Center. Free and open to the public, the program will feature works from Die Walk¨re, Lohengrin, Siegfried and Tristan und Isolde.

Beginning next summer, BGSU students might be found trekking in the Amazon, working with Senegalese immigrants in Minnesota or conserving pandas in China—thanks to a newly created fellowship that allows undergraduates to determine the setting for their learning.

BGSU’s Ellen and Dr. Chris Dalton have created the Stuart R. Givens Memorial Fellowship to provide up to two undergraduates a year the funding to pursue a passionate interest in a self-designed experience that would not be possible in a traditional classroom, job or even study abroad.

The goal is that the experience will enrich their lives and be a growth experience, enabling the Fellows to fulfill a longstanding desire.

“The neat thing about it is that it allows people to do something they are passionate about, and not something someone else is telling them to do,” Ellen Dalton said.

“We wanted to name the fellowship after the late Stuart Givens because it fits so well with his ideals of education,” Chris Dalton said. “Professor Givens was an individual who we, along with the rest of the Bowling Green community, greatly admired, and we are pleased that his family has graciously allowed the program to be named in his honor.”

There was deep meaning and emotion behind the music when Distinguished Artist Professor Dr. Marilyn Shrude’s Lacrimosa premiered July 29 at the national convention of Sigma Alpha Iota (SAI), the professional fraternity for women musicians.

When she was commissioned three years ago to write the piece for the triennial event, Shrude began composing a lively, fast work. But unexpected events changed the mood dramatically. “I was in residence at the Moscow Conservatory in April 2006 and was working on the piece,” she recalled. “I received word that two of our BGSU graduates had been killed in a plane crash in Indiana. Needless to say, this was a tremendous shock. Robert Samels was a composition student of mine—an incredibly talented musician.

“I made an instant decision to recast the piece into something that was much more somber and introspective. The title, Lacrimosa, is Latin for tears and weeping. It reflects the many moods that such an event might evoke,” she said.

Fittingly, Shrude and her husband, Distinguished Artist Professor Dr. John Sampen, performed Shrude’s 10-minute piece for piano and saxophone following the fraternity’s memorial service for past presidents of the organization.

To be eligible to perform at the SAI convention, musicians must be members of the organization, which Sampen was not. BGSU’s student chapter of SAI solved the problem by inducting him as a national arts associate. “It’s a nice honor for him, and one he certainly deserves,” Shrude said of her husband. An internationally known, award-winning classical saxophone specialist with a doctorate from Northwestern University, Sampen is coordinator of woodwinds in the music performance studies department.

A new work by Dr. Burton Beerman, music composition, was the opening-night highlight of the American Composers Alliance’s annual festival at Symphony Space in New York City, according to a June 9 review in the New York Times.

In an article titled “Classical Traditions Kept and Upended,” Bernard Holland writes “The most interesting, and by far the most elaborate, display of experimentation was Burton Beerman’s Still, Small Voice: a multimedia field day of opportunities. Celesta Haraszti danced. Madeleine Shapiro played the cello. And geared in response were Mr. Beerman’s computer-generated sounds: an entertaining vocabulary of explosions, industrial shrieks and whistles and mimicked human voices. Commenting on all these were projections on a screen behind the performers.”

The result of a 2005 Barlow Commission, A Still, Small Voice was composed for Shapiro and Haraszti. Considered the preeminent performer of experimental music for cello, Shapiro has participated in the premieres of numerous works by composers such as Milton Babbitt, John Cage, Charles Wuorinen and Mario Davidovsky. She is the director of the chamber ensemble MODERNWORKS!, which has appeared at the Ravinia Festival in Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Haraszti likewise has had a long involvement with innovative dance, having performed in and created more than 40 experimental works. Described a “virtuoso performer” by the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Haraszti has toured with Beerman since 1982 as the Electric Arts Duo, performing throughout the United States, Canada and Europe.

Dr. Per Broman and Dr. Nora Engebretsen, both assistant professors of theory at Bowling Green State University's College of Musical Arts, will present papers this summer in Sweden. They will give their presentations at a special, joint international music conference themed Contemporary Classical Music of the International Association of Music Information Centres, in Göteborg, Sweden, June 18–23.

Broman will address the topic of “Appealing to the Muse and Connecting the Dots: Writing a History of Post-World War II Swedish Art Music,” during the Sweden, Ancient and Modern portion of the event on June 19. Engebretsen will speak on “Neo-Tonality Redux? A Neo-Riemannian Perspective on Contemporary Tonality” during the Passing the Post portion of the conference on June 22.

The College of Musical Arts is once again offering music camps for students in grades 7–12 through its annual Summer Music Institute.

The 2006 institute, taught by experienced musical arts faculty and staff, will provide musicianship and enrichment classes as well as clinics and guest artist performances.

The camps are intended to engage students of different age levels and experience in a compact, focused music curriculum. With limited enrollment, participants receive personalized attention, including private lessons, master classes and large and small ensemble participation.

Summer Music Institute information and registration forms can be found at www.bgsu.edu/music/outreach/smi/