Bard Composer in Residence Missy Mazzoli Featured on NPR
Missy Mazzoli, composer in residence at Bard College, performed together with violinist Jennifer Koh for Tiny Desk Concerts at NPR’s headquarters. The two artists, who have collaborated on projects for 15 years, performed a set of pieces composed by Mazzoli and brought to life by Koh’s violin.
Bard Composer in Residence Missy Mazzoli Featured on NPR
Missy Mazzoli, composer in residence at Bard College, performed together with violinist Jennifer Koh for Tiny Desk Concerts at NPR’s headquarters. The two artists, who have collaborated on projects for 15 years, performed a set of pieces composed by Mazzoli and brought to life by Koh’s violin. “Dissolve, O my Heart, the first piece Mazzoli wrote for Koh, spirals out into an emotional journey touched with spasms of joy and grief,” writes Tom Huizenga for NPR. He continues: “Hearing this set, in all its rugged delight, feels like we're eavesdropping on something personal—a fruitful, collaborative friendship between composer and performer that has yielded amazing music.”
Two groups of Bard students have been awarded 2024 Projects for Peace Summer Grants, which provide student leaders awards of $10,000 to implement a Project for Peace. Ifigeneia Gianne ’25, Noa Doucette ’24, Leonard Gurevich ’24, Mujtaba Naqib ’24, and Antonios Petras won for their project “Creative Play in Malaysia,” an initiative to create immersive children’s workshops around music, theater, and storytelling. Conservatory students Blanche Darr ’25, Aleksandar Vitanov ’25, Lexi Lanni ’26, and Fredrick Otieno ’28 won for their project, “Musical Mentorship Initiative Kenya,” to establish a music mentorship program in Nairobi.
Bard College Students Receive Two $10,000 Projects for Peace Summer Grants
Two groups of Bard College students have been awarded 2024 Projects for Peace Summer Grants, which provide student leaders awards of $10,000 to implement a Project for Peace, typically over the summer. Bard students Ifigeneia Gianne ’25, Noa Doucette ’24, Leonard Gurevich ’24, Mujtaba Naqib ’24,and Antonios Petras won for their project “Creative Play in Malaysia,” an initiative to create immersive workshops and performances around the mediums of music, theater, and storytelling with the goals of helping refugee children in Malaysia to articulate their emotions, encourage their self-expression and build community. Bard Conservatory students Blanche Darr ’25,Aleksandar Vitanov ’25, Lexi Lanni ’26, and Fredrick Otieno ’28 won for their project, “Musical Mentorship Initiative Kenya,” to establish a music mentorship program in Nairobi, Kenya, in which Bard students will teach music lessons and establish a creative partnership between Bard and the Ghetto Classics Program in Korogocho, an area of dense poverty in Nairobi.
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.
The Bard College Conservatory of Music and Graduate Vocal Arts Program present Jacques Offenbach’s Orphée aux enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld). In a production by stage director Katherine M. Carter, the opera will be performed by Bard Conservatory of Music Vocal Arts Program singers with the Bard Conservatory Orchestra, conducted by James Bagwell, director of music performance studies and professor of music at Bard.
Bard College Conservatory of Music and Graduate Vocal Arts Program Present Orphée aux enfers on March 8 and 10
The Bard College Conservatory of Music and Graduate Vocal Arts Program present Jacques Offenbach’s Orphée aux enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld). In a production by stage director Katherine M. Carter, the opera will be performed by Bard Conservatory of Music’s Vocal Arts Program singers with the Bard Conservatory Orchestra, conducted by James Bagwell, director of music performance studies and professor of music at Bard. The opera will be sung in French with English supertitles, and dialog will be in English. The performances will be held on Friday, March 8 at 8pm and on Sunday, March 10 at 2pm in the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater. Tickets start at $25, with $5 tickets for Bard students made possible by the Passloff Pass. The first performance (March 8) will be livestreamed. Virtual livestream tickets are pay what you wish. All ticket sales benefit the Bard Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Scholarship Fund. To purchase or reserve tickets visit fishercenter.bard.edu, call 845-758-7900 (Mon-Fri 10am-5pm), or email [email protected].
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!”
Bard College Faculty and Alumna Win 2024 GRAMMY Awards
At the 66th annual GRAMMY Awards ceremony, the Recording Academy honored the 2024 GRAMMY winners. Among them, Bard Composer in Residence Jessie Montgomery won Best Contemporary Classical Composition, her first GRAMMY award, for her composition “Rounds.” Bard Conservatory of Music’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program alumna Julia Bullock MM ’11 also won her first GRAMMY award, winning Best Classical Solo Vocal Album for her album Walking in the Dark. Artistic Director of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program Stephanie Blythe is featured on the album Blanchard: Champion, which won for Best Opera Recording.
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.
“Opera Does Not Need to Be Repackaged”: Stephanie Blythe Profiled in The Daily Catch
Artistic Director of Bard Conservatory of Music’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program and acclaimed mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe spoke to The Daily Catch ahead of her concert performance, Stephanie Blythe Sings Brahms, with The Orchestra Now at the Fisher Center on February 3–4. Renowned for the emotional depth of her performances, Blythe connects the lines of Brahm’s “Alto Rhapsody,” which uses Goethe’s poetry for lyrics, to “a feeling of a place where you can breathe. I understand the notion of breaking through and wanting to breathe. When you understand the universality of this music, you understand its essential nature,” says Blythe, who believes opera, when presented for what it actually is, can appeal to a broader, more popular audience. “Being able to illuminate and elevate opera in a new way is really important,” she said. “I find that far too often people who present opera feel like they need to repackage it. Opera doesn’t need to be excused. You don’t need to make it something else for people to appreciate it.”
Bard Conservatory of Music’s US-China Music Institute and the Central Conservatory of Music, China, Celebrate the Year of the Dragon with “The Sound of Spring”: A Chinese New Year Concert with The Orchestra Now (TŌN)
The US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music, in collaboration with the Central Conservatory of Music, China, present the fifth annual “The Sound of Spring”: A Chinese New Year Concert with The Orchestra Now, conducted by Director of the US-China Music Institute Jindong Cai.Performances will take place on Saturday,February 10, 2024 at 3 pm in The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College and on Sunday,February 11, 2024 at 3 pm in the Rose Theater of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall in New York City. To purchase tickets for the February 10 Fisher Center concert, visit fishercenter.bard.edu, call 845-758-7900 (Mon–Fri 10 am – 5 pm), or email [email protected]. For tickets to the February 11 Jazz at Lincoln Center concert, please visit ticketing.jazz.org, or call 212-721-6500.
“The Sound of Spring” offers an authentic Chinese New Year concert of festive contemporary symphonic music from China. This year's program features erhu virtuoso Zhang Haiyue and dizi (bamboo flute) virtuoso Feng Tianshi from the Central Conservatory of Music, plus renowned Chinese wind virtuoso Guo Yazhi premiering composer Li Xinyan's new Suona Concerto.
In keeping with the long history and cultural diversity of Chinese society,the concert program includes a number of new works by contemporary Chinese composers inspired by musical traditions and folk customs from different regions. More than half of the repertoire has never been performed in the United States. Music Director and conductor Jindong Cai said: “Every one of us has familiar melodies that have been imprinted in our memories since we were children, and no matter where you come from or where you go, we can all enjoy listening to them. At the same time, to hear music from unfamiliar cultural traditions in distant places stirs the imagination with completely different pleasures and longings.”
The program starts off with Li Huanzhi's Spring Festival Overture, inspired by northern Shaanxi folk songs. Composer Ye Xiaogang, steeped in the folk music of his native Guangdong Province since childhood, presents familiar melodies reconstructed with Western orchestration for his Cantonese Suite. The young Taiwanese composer Chang Shiuan's Diu Diu Diu Diu Dang is a rhapsodic variation based on a Taiwanese nursery rhyme describing the sound of water dripping from the ceiling as a train passes through a tunnel. At the end of the first half, the US premiere of Hao Weiya's 2023 dizi (bamboo flute) concerto Blooming in the Spring evokes the beauty of nature in the countryside.
The second half of the concert begins with “Erhu Rhapsody No. 6,” the latest masterpiece of composer Wang Jianmin with Tibetan folk music at its core. This stirring work is a milestone in the development of modern erhu as a solo instrument, combining the structure of a Western rhapsody with Chinese folk style. The suona concerto The Magic Land was commissioned by “The Sound of Spring” and composed by Li Xinyan for wind instrument master Guo Yazhi. Both are on the faculty of the Bard Conservatory of Music. The concert concludes with Joyful Songs of Mountains and Waters, composed by up-and-coming composer Wang Danhong in 2023. Wang says she was inspired to write this piece after a visit to the Eighteen Caves Village in southern China, where she heard joyful folk singing in the Miao ethnic style.
The two performances of this year’s “The Sound of Spring” coincide with the first Lunar New Year weekend since New York State declared the Spring Festival an official holiday, demonstrating the importance of this time in the local community. The concerts are family friendly events which will include Chinese instrument demonstrations and new year celebrations in the theater lobby prior to each the performance. Pre-concert events start at 2 pm.
“The Sound of Spring” is generously sponsored by the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute. For more information about the concerts visit barduschinamusic.org/events.
Joan Tower’s Concerto for Piano (Homage to Beethoven) and Missy Mazzoli’s Dark with Excessive Bright Included in NPR’s Top Ten Classical Albums of 2023
Concerto for Piano (Homage to Beethoven) by Joan Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts and composition faculty of the Conservatory of Music at Bard, and Dark with Excessive Bright by Missy Mazzoli, Bard composer in residence, were both included in NPR's roundup of top ten classical albums of 2023. NPR music producer and classical music reviewer Tom Huizenga writes, "Now 85, Tower could rest on her achievements, but she's still fulfilling commissions with her singular, sturdy music," noting the many leading contemporary composers revere her, including Missy Mazzoli, whose album was also selected in this year's top ten. "[T]he album is tonal — in a Bartók or Joan Tower kind of way — with notes stacked to produce fresh, often unusual sounds," writes Huizenga, who says this album proves Mazzoli "can create shimmering instrumental music with large forces."
Interview: President Botstein with David Krauss for Speaking Soundly Podcast
Bard President Leon Botstein spoke with David Krauss for the podcast Speaking Soundly, where he discussed the current state of the arts and classical music, the perspectives that informed his journey as a musician, and his approach to leading Bard for nearly 50 years. “Music is part of life, it’s not a segregated technical enterprise,” Botstein told Krauss. “So I thought, if I’m going to contribute something as a musician, I have to bring something different to the table.” He continues, “I focused early on the reclaiming effort of the history of music, to rewrite the history of music on the concert stage.” In conversation with Krauss, Botstein goes on to examine the practical and emotional challenges faced by a conductor while leading an orchestra, the role of broader education in becoming an instrumentalist and composer, and the importance of having an inquiring mind as a musician.
Bard Conservatory and Music Faculty and Alumni/ae Nominated for 2024 GRAMMY Awards
Five Bard Conservatory of Music and Music Program faculty members and alumni/ae have been nominated for the 2024 GRAMMY Awards. Artistic Director of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program Stephanie Blythe is featured on the album Champion, nominated for Best Opera Recording. Bard Composers in Residence Jessie Montgomery and Missy Mazzoli are both nominees for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. Mazzoli’s concerto Dark With Excessive Bright and Montgomery’s “Rounds” for piano and string orchestra (featured in pianist Awadagin Pratt’s Stillpoint) have been nominated for the GRAMMY. Julia Bullock MM ’11 has been nominated for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album for her album Walking In The Dark. In the category of Best Contemporary Instrumental Album, music program alumnus Max Zbiral-Teller ’06, along with his House of Waters bandmates, has been nominated for On Becoming. The 2024 GRAMMYs, officially known as the 66th GRAMMY Awards, will take place Sunday, February 4 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.