"Music Alive" at Bard on Wednesday, March 28

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—Eighteen performers drawn from Bard College and The Bard College Conservatory of Music perform works by Lukas Foss, Ming Gan, Olivier Messiaen, Benjamin Pesetsky, and Joan Tower on Wednesday, March 28. Free and open to the public, the concert, hosted by composer and pianist Joan Tower, begins at 7:30 p.m. in Bard Hall. “All the composers on this program are living except one, Messiaen. It is important to me that the members of this community, and especially the excellent performers from the Conservatory and the College, are hearing (and playing) different kinds of music written within the last 50 years,” says Tower. The performers include John Boggs, Conor Brown, Fu-Chen Chan, Allegra Chapman, Sarah Elia, Emmanuel Evans, Kristen Ezell, Ming Gan, Alysha Glenn, Jesse Kohl, Ava Lehrer, Shawn Moore, Matthew O'Koran, Yiwen Shen, and the Chimeng Quartet. Concert organizer Joan Tower received a B.A. from Bennington College and M.A. and D.M.A. degrees from Columbia University. She has received awards from the School of Music at the University of Texas (Eddie Medora King Award for Musical Composition), National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, Koussevitsky Foundation, American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Meet the Composer/Reader’s Digest. She won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in 1990 and has received commissions from the New York Philharmonic; St. Louis, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and National Symphonies; the Emerson, Tokyo, and Muir Quartets; the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio; and Carnegie Hall, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Aspen, and LaJolla Summerfest, among many others. Her CDs have been released on Naxos, Koch International, Delos, and d’Note Records. Tower was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1998 and the Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. She was composer in residence with the St. Louis Symphony, with conductor Leonard Slatkin, from 1985 to 1988 and has been composer in residence with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s since 1997. She was recently named the first composer for a major orchestral consortium project, sponsored by the American Symphony Orchestra League and Meet the Composer; the resultant work, Made in America, has been performed by 65 orchestras in 50 states. Tower was awarded an honorary doctorate by the New England Conservatory, where she gave the commencement address in May 2006. She is Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts at Bard College, where she has taught since 1972. The program is presented by the Bard Music Program and The Bard College Conservatory of Music. For further information, call 845-758-7250. # # # (3.19.2007)

This event was last updated on 03-29-2007

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