Bard Conservatory News Archive

The Galloping Cure, an opera by Missy Mazzoli, composer in residence at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, was featured on the BBC’s Radio 4: Front Row. A collaboration between Mazzoli and author and Bard Fiction Prize winner Karen Russell, The Galloping Cure is based on a short story by Russell that was inspired by Kafka’s short story “A Country Doctor.” The opera is an allegory for the opioid crisis in which a mysterious carousel cures a town of its illnesses but becomes more expensive and addictive as time passes. The Edinburgh International Festival, where the opera premiered, described it as “visually stunning and emotionally gripping… [evoking] a darkly funny and devastating vision of a crumbling society.”

Mazzoli spoke with the BBC about her opera, which they describe as “sometimes elegiac, sometimes… dystopian.” “Opera is inherently multimedia [and] immersive,” Mazzoli said. Her research involved riding on and listening to carousels in Paris and Coney Island in New York, to “make the audience feel like they were on a carousel [by] recreating this doppler effect.” Although The Galloping Cure is about a serious subject, “it’s not moralistic, it’s not dour… my goal is that people come out of it having more of a language to discuss something that’s very hard to talk about. Losing someone to addiction, it’s very hard to have the words for it. So my attempt to talk about it was to make this piece.”

The Galloping Cure premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival earlier this month. Mazzoli’s next opera Lincoln in the Bardo, which is based on the novel by George Saunders, will premiere in October at the Metropolitan Opera, the first opera by a woman to do so.

Bard Composer in Residence Missy Mazzoli was profiled in a New York Times article about the Luna Composition Lab, the mentorship program she founded with fellow composer Ellen Reid. They founded the lab after they realized they’d never experienced female mentorship in composing. “We took a good hard look at what we wished we had had,” said Mazzoli, and the two asked themselves, “What can we do to make this more diverse, more vital, more alive, more fun?” The Lab, which turns 10 this year, matches young and experienced composers who are female, nonbinary or gender nonconforming, and mentees receive eight months of mentorship and attend a music festival in New York. Now, Mazzoli and Reid are organizing musical events for LunaLab@10, an anniversary celebration of the program and its expanded reach. “We want the field to expand,” said Mazzoli, “and so bringing in gender diversity, racial diversity, economic income diversity, geographic diversity helps [the] field survive and thrive.”

Mazzoli is a Grammy-nominated composer and musician who has written operas including Lincoln in the Bardo and Proving Up that are based on contemporary literature. She teaches in the Bard College Conservatory of Music, which provides the best possible preparation for a person dedicated to a life immersed in the creation and performance of music.

Professor of Music James Bagwell, director of the music program at Bard College and director of performance studies in the Bard College Conservatory of Music, has been announced as the principal conductor of the Tulsa Symphony Orchestra, as well as principal conductor and director of choral music at the Berkshire Bach Society. Bagwell will assume a central artistic leadership role with Tulsa Symphony, helping shape programming and performances as the orchestra continues to expand its artistic vision and community impact. Bagwell was recognized by both organizations for the role he has played over the past two decades in creating a consistent record of excellence in choral performance. “These two appointments mark the culmination of a long artistic association with the Tulsa Symphony and Berkshire Bach,” said Bagwell. “I look forward to many more years of artistic collaborations with these two prestigious organizations.”

He has been a regular guest conductor for the Tulsa Symphony since 2007, leading it in performances of Mozart’s Requiem and Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem, returning in subsequent seasons to conduct Britten’s War Requiem, and Mahler’s First Symphony. “We are thrilled to welcome James Bagwell as principal conductor of the Tulsa Symphony Orchestra,” said Morgan Walker, executive director of Tulsa. “His long-standing relationship with the orchestra, combined with his depth of experience and artistic leadership, makes him the ideal partner as we look ahead to an exciting new chapter.” 

Bagwell, who additionally serves as codirector of the Bard Conservatory Graduate Program in conducting and is associate conductor of The Orchestra Now (TŌN), also frequently appears as a guest conductor for orchestras around the country and abroad, including the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, the Interlochen Music Festival, and the Jerusalem Symphony. “I’ve long admired James Bagwell’s work as a choral conductor,” said Eugene Drucker, artistic director of Berkshire Bach, “specifically in the Berkshire Bach Society vocal concerts for which I’ve had the pleasure of serving as his concertmaster, and more generally in his meticulous preparation of the chorus for opera productions at Bard College’s Summerscape and for oratorio performances with the American Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.” 

The Music Program, one of the largest programs on Bard’s campus, provides a wide range of musical concentrations, from classical composition and performance to jazz, electronic music, musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory. 
 

The US-China Music Institute's eighth annual conference on Chinese Music in the West was highlighted in China Daily. The three-day program brought together renowned guzheng masters from China, musicians from across North America, and young student performers for a gathering of artistic exchange, collaboration, and performance. The event culminated in a special performance by the Gu Zheng Tianxia Ensemble, held at Olin Hall at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, which featured 40 guzheng players, “their sound flowing as one and filling the hall with a powerful, continuous wave of music,” writes China Daily. The guzheng, one of China's most recognizable traditional instruments, has become increasingly popular in China and the West as musicians explore new techniques and forms of innovation while maintaining the instrument’s traditional character, said Cai Jindong, director of the US-China Music Institute. 

A dual opera performance featuring Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amelia Goes to the Ball and Giacomo Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, performed by the Bard College Conservatory of Music and Graduate Vocal Arts Program, was reviewed in the Millbrook Independent. “This production was both local treat and professional declaration,” writes Kevin McEneaney, adding that “The audience responded with vivid acclamation.” Menotti’s opera relays the story of an Italian socialite’s navigation of hurdles to attend the season’s first ball, while Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi transforms a Dantean tale of fraud into a masterclass of operatic irony and memorable motifs. “The chorus sang with probing, elevated emotion and remarkably tight harmony,” continued McEneaney. “Both witty operettas celebrate skillful women in a male-dominated society.”