Performance at Aix-en-Provence Festival by Bard Conservatory Alumna Jacquelyn Stucker ’13 Reviewed in the New York Times
Jacquelyn Stucker ’13, an alumna of Bard’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program, was reviewed in the New York Times for her role as Delilah in the opera Samson, a never-performed opera by Voltaire and Rameau, two of Enlightenment France’s most important cultural figures. Samson was performed as an updated production with pieces drawn from other Rameau works to replace the original score, which was lost some 250 years ago, at the Aix-en-Provence festival.
Performance at Aix-en-Provence Festival by Bard Conservatory Alumna Jacquelyn Stucker ’13 Reviewed in the New York Times
Jacquelyn Stucker ’13. Photo by Alfredo Llorens
Post Date: 07-09-2024
Bard College Conservatory Receives $50,006 Grant from New York State
Bard will receive the grant through New York State’s Higher Education Capital Matching Grant Program, which supports projects at colleges and universities across the state by providing construction and renovation of laboratory and research spaces, the purchase of technologies and equipment, and other investments. It will support the purchase of pianos and equipment for Bard’s László Z. Bitó Conservatory Building.Bard College Conservatory Receives $50,006 Grant from New York State
László Z. Bitó Conservatory building.
Post Date: 07-08-2024
“The sound of global connections”: Director of US-China Music Institute Jindong Cai and Bard Conservatory Students Profiled by China Daily
In a profile of the US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music for China Daily, Minlu Zhang spoke with Director Jindong Cai and several current Bard Conservatory students. “Our faculty comprises top experts in their fields, which naturally fosters interaction and collaboration,” Cai told China Daily. “At Bard, students studying Chinese music and Western music work closely together, becoming friends and often forming duets, trios, or learning each other’s instruments. This integration creates a vibrant musical community.”“The sound of global connections”: Director of US-China Music Institute Jindong Cai and Bard Conservatory Students Profiled by China Daily
Jindong Cai conducting The Orchestra Now at the 2021 China Now Music Festival. Photo by Karl Rabe
Post Date: 06-04-2024
More Conservatory News
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Bard Conservatory Faculty Lucy Fitz Gibbon Wins a 2024 Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship
Bard Conservatory Faculty Lucy Fitz Gibbon Wins a 2024 Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship
Lucy Fitz Gibbon, visiting faculty in vocal arts at the Bard College Conservatory of Music. Photo by Steve Riskind
“I am overwhelmed with gratitude to have received one of the Borletti-Buitoni Trust’s 2024 Artist Fellowships. The nomination process asked me to dream about what I could accomplish with the kind of latitude that this funding and administrative support would represent, but I found the range of possibilities almost too tantalizing to imagine, as if I could permit myself only an oblique gaze at what might be,” wrote Fitz Gibbon upon receiving the fellowship.
Lucy Fitz Gibbon is noted for her “dazzling virtuoso singing” (Boston Globe) and believes that creating new works and recreating those lost in centuries past makes room for the diversity of voices integral to classical music’s future. Spotlighted as a Rising Star of Classical Music for 2024 in the February 20, 2024, edition of the British Broadcasting Corporation's (BBC) Music Magazine, Fitz Gibbon is one of 15 young classical musicians that the BBC has identified worldwide who are making a prominent stamp on the industry, whether with concert performances, opera roles, or dazzling new recordings.
Post Date: 06-04-2024
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Bard Conservatory Student Hannah Park-Kaufmann ’24 Awarded Knight-Hennessy Scholarship
Bard Conservatory Student Hannah Park-Kaufmann ’24 Awarded Knight-Hennessy Scholarship
Hannah Park-Kaufmann ’24.
At Bard, Hannah was president of the Association for Women in Mathematics Chapter, tutored mathematics in New York state prisons through the Bard Prison Initiative, and gave a TEDx talk on a research study she designed and led at MIT on the physiological correlates of healthy versus injury-prone piano playing. She participated in the Polymath Jr., Emory and CMU mathematics REUs, and has coauthored multiple papers published in peer reviewed journals. Her teams’ projects won first place at the international hackathon HackMIT in the tracks Sustainability (2022) and Education (2023, with Elliot Harris ’24). She is the recipient of the Bard Distinguished Scientist Scholar Award, the Community Action Award, the Mind, Brain and Behavior Award, the Seniors to Seniors Award, and the Conservatory Scholarship.
Established in 2016, the Knight-Hennessy Scholarship program seeks to prepare students to take leadership roles in finding creative solutions to complex global issues. Scholars receive full funding to pursue any graduate degree at Stanford and have additional opportunities for leadership training, mentorship, and experiential learning across multiple disciplines.
Post Date: 05-07-2024
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Bard Composer in Residence Missy Mazzoli Featured on NPR
Bard Composer in Residence Missy Mazzoli Featured on NPR
Missy Mazzoli, right, and Jennifer Koh, left, performed at NPR headquarters. Photo by Keren Carrión/NPR
Post Date: 04-03-2024
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Bard College Students Receive Two $10,000 Projects for Peace Summer Grants
Bard College Students Receive Two $10,000 Projects for Peace Summer Grants
Top: L-R: Blanche Darr ’25, Lexi Lanni ’26, Fredrick Otieno ’28 , and Aleksandar Vitanov ’25. Bottom: L-R: Leonard Gurevich ’24, Ifigeneia Gianne ’25 (top), Noa Doucette ’24 (bottom), and Mujtaba Naqib ’24. Photos by Jonathan Asiedu ’24
Bard students Gianne and Doucette witnessed firsthand the challenges faced by displaced children during a study abroad experience in Malaysia. As of January 2024, Malaysia has some 186,490 refugees and asylum-seekers registered with UNHCR. Inspired by the fieldwork and relationships they started while abroad, Gianne and Doucette, along with Gurevich, Naqib, and Petras, initiated their Projects for Peace proposal, “Creative Play in Malaysia.” The first phase of their project will offer in-person collaborative creative workshops, aimed at fostering direct engagement and interactive learning, at three schools in Kuala Lumpur—Agape Mission School, Elom Community Center, and Fugee School—and will reach about 300 school children. The workshops they’ve designed will engage children in the exploration of music and sound, theater techniques and bodily experience of movement, and storytelling, recording, and sound editing for podcasts. “These facets of art underscore its transformative power, making them vital tools for personal growth, advocacy, effective self-expression, community building, and empathetic communication. We believe in the transformative power of art and performance as a medium of expression and communication beyond words,” write the project leaders. The second phase of their project is the creation of a set of activities, a kind of curriculum, which include a detailed list of ‘games’ aimed at integrating the arts into daily academic routines and introducing some new teaching techniques. While in Malaysia, they will collaborate with teachers on this curriculum, respecting the existing cultural and academic frameworks, discuss how it might be incorporated into the students’ learning, and adjust it based on feedback. Committed to an ongoing dialogue with the children, teachers, and school administration, the group plans to launch an online forum with the schools and children for continual communication.
Initiated by Bard Conservatory students Darr, Vitanov, Lanni, and Otieno, the Projects for Peace proposal, “Musical Mentorship Initiative Kenya,” builds upon two student-run Trustee Leader Scholar projects at Bard—the Musical Mentorship Initiative (MMI) founded in 2020 by Vitanov and co-led by Darr and Lanni, and Musical Mentorship Initiative Kenya (MMIK) founded in 2023 by Otieno, a viola student from Kenya. Their project will establish a musical mentorship program as a collaborative partnership between MMI, MMIK, and the Ghetto Classics Program (GCP), which serves more than 1,500 children in Korogocho, one of Nairobi’s largest slums and home to approximately 300,000 urban poor. Bard student mentors will teach individual private music lessons, offer personalized high-level music instruction in strings, winds, voice, percussion, and other instruments, and organize masterclasses, presentations, and music performances for the children in the program. Mentors will also donate much needed musical instruments including oboes, French horns, violins, recorders, and bassoons to the children in Korogocho. At GCP, children share a limited number of instruments, many in poor condition and in need of repair, which hinders progress for the young students who cannot practice at home. An even bigger problem is GCP’s teacher to student ratio, which cannot facilitate individual learning. MMIK plans to provide pedagogical workshops to the teachers in GCP, in order to improve the teaching methodology and potential of the program. MMIK will also organize an online mentorship program to help facilitate ongoing individualized music instruction and access to world-class professional musical education for young children, which is an extremely rare opportunity in Korogocho. The goal is to keep this program running for many years to come. “Music, with its ability to transcend linguistic and cultural barriers, can be used as a powerful peacemaker by fostering unity across diverse individuals,” write the project leaders. “While our project focuses on Korogocho, it also serves as a blueprint for unifying people from varied backgrounds in different locations. The purpose and community that music provides is also an incentive for the children in GCP to not turn to a life of crime, drugs, or violence on the streets of Korogocho. Our initiatives stand as a beacon of hope—instilling discipline, perseverance, patience, and empathy in the youth, as well as forging the next generation of aspiring artists.”
Otieno, an alumnus of GCP and one of the project leaders, adds: “Growing up in the third largest slum in Kenya, Korogocho, means that you are exposed to the darkest side of the world. Joining Ghetto Classics gave me a choice to live a different life. The exposure and the people I met through Ghetto Classics supported me and made sure that the dream of becoming an architecture student and viola player in a school like Bard College was no longer an impossible dream to reach. I managed to change my life through music and I know that someone else in Korogocho can also change their life as long as they have a skill at hand. With these children getting these opportunities, they are pulled away from their normal life and shown a different dimension of being in a slum. They are helped to shape purpose and build dreams for themselves.”
Projects for Peace was created in 2007 through the generosity of Kathryn W. Davis, a lifelong internationalist and philanthropist who believed that today’s youth—tomorrow’s leaders—ought to be challenged to formulate and test their own ideas. The Summer Grants program encourages young adults to develop innovative, community-centered, and scalable responses to the world’s most pressing issues. Since its founding, Projects for Peace has funded more than 2000 projects in more than 150 countries. Learn more here.
Post Date: 03-19-2024
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Bard College Conservatory of Music and Graduate Vocal Arts Program Present Orphée aux enfers on March 8 and 10
Bard College Conservatory of Music and Graduate Vocal Arts Program Present Orphée aux enfers on March 8 and 10
Graduate Bard Conservatory of Music VAP students in rehearsal for the 2024 VAP Opera production of Orphée aux enfers (by Jacques Offenbach). L-R: Joseph Breslau, Emily Finke (seated in deep background), Nisha Caiozzi, Jun Mo Yang, Georgia Perdikoulias, Jacob Hunter, Sam Warshauer, Megan Maloney, Colton Cook, Abbegael Greene. Photo by Katrine Ottosen
Orphée aux enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld) welcomes the audience to a world of humans, gods, and goddesses that seems all too familiar. This is Olympus High, a place where the tipping scales of popularity and power provide the perfect backdrop for a tale of love, jealousy, and intrigue. This is prom and circumstance for the ages, a lively, witty operetta springing from the genius of a young, aspiring Jacques Offenbach in 1858, playing out here in the year 1986, where relationships and hierarchy haven’t changed a bit.
“It has been exciting to see the opera evolve under the artistic guidance of director Katherine Carter, who, along with the cast, is creating new dialogue to set the story in a 1980’s American high school,” says Associate Director of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program Kayo Iwama. “If you ever thought high school was ‘hell’, you will relate to this ironic twist on the classic love story of Orpheus and Eurydice!”
Post Date: 02-12-2024
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Bard College Faculty and Alumna Win 2024 GRAMMY Awards
Bard College Faculty and Alumna Win 2024 GRAMMY Awards
L-R: Bard Composer in Residence Jessie Montgomery (photo by Jiyang Chen) and Julia Bullock MM '11 (photo by Allison Michael Orenstein) win 2024 GRAMMY Awards.
Jessie Montgomery’s “Rounds” is a composition for piano and string orchestra inspired by the imagery and themes from T.S. Eliot’s epic poem Four Quartets, fractals (infinite patterns found in nature that are self-similar across different scales), and the interdependency of all beings.
Julia Bullock’s Walking in the Dark was recorded with her husband, conductor and pianist Christian Reif, and London’s Philharmonia Orchestra. The album combines orchestral works by American composers John Adams and Samuel Barber with a traditional spiritual and songs by jazz legend Billy Taylor and singer-songwriters Oscar Brown, Jr., Connie Converse, and Sandy Denny.
The Metropolitan Opera’s recording of Terence Blanchard’s Champion, an opera about young boxer Emile Griffith who rises from obscurity to become a world champion, was conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin and featured a cast including mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe as Kathy Hagen.Artistic Director of the Bard College Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Program Stephanie Blythe
The GRAMMYs are voted on by more than 11,000 music professionals—performers, songwriters, producers, and others with credits on recordings—who are members of the Recording Academy.
Further Reading:
Jessie Montgomery’s “Rounds” Wins 2024 GRAMMY Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition
Julia Bullock Wins First Grammy Award with Walking in the Dark, Her Solo Album Debut
The Metropolitan Opera wins 2024 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording for Terence Blanchard’s Champion
Post Date: 02-06-2024