THE CONDUCTORS INSTITUTE AT BARD FACULTY BIOGRAPHIES.

Harold Farberman, founder and artistic director, is a noted conductor, composer, and musician. Born into a family of klezmer musicians, he graduated from The Juilliard School and became the youngest member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) when he joined its percussion section. He received a master's degree from the New England Conservatory of Music. His earliest composition, Evolution, has been recorded four times, once by Leopold Stokowski. Aaron Copland invited Farberman to study composition with him at Tanglewood after hearing Evolution. Farberman also studied conducting at Tanglewood under Maestro Eleazar DeCarvalho and in 1963 left the BSO to pursue a conducting career. He was music director of the Colorado Springs and Oakland Symphony Orchestras, principal guest conductor of the Denver Symphony Orchestra and the Bournemouth (Great Britain) Sinfonietta. He has been a frequent guest conductor and recording artist with orchestras including the London Symphony, the Royal Philharmonic, BBC Symphony, and the Stockholm Philharmonic. A prolific composer of music for orchestra, ballet, film, chamber music, concertos, and opera, he was awarded the Ives Medal for his dedication to the music of Charles Ives. Farberman founded the Conductors Guild and is the author of The Art of Conducting Technique (book and video), and "Teaching and Conducting Technique," a chapter in a book forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

Michelle Basile is a conductor, composer, pianist, and teacher. A graduate of Indiana University and the Hartt School of Music, she has performed and conducted in the United States and abroad. She has studied with Harold Farberman and Leonid Grin, among others. Basile incorporates into her teaching energy-balancing techniques, that focus on centering, clearing, and balancing posture, leading the conductor to a freer, more expressive presence on the podium. Basile will be available to all participants for energy-balancing sessions.

George Crumb received a Pulitzer Prize for his composition Echoes of Time and River (1968). His other honors include the Edward MacDowell medal from the MacDowell Colony, the International Rostrum Composers Award, the Koussevitzky Foundation Award, and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. Crumb was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1967. He is professor emeritus of music composition at the University of Pennsylvania.

Daniel Lewis was director of conducting studies at the University of Southern California (USC) and conductor of the USC Symphony for twenty-five years. Former music director of the Pasadena Symphony, he has also been guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute, Louisville Symphony, Seattle Symphony, and Minnesota Orchestra. Lewis was codirector, with Leonard Bernstein, of the first season of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute.

Conrad Pope is active in television and film as a composer, orchestrator, and conductor. He has contributed to the music of more than fifty films, among them Amistad, The Lost World, and Patriot Games. His current project is orchestrating John Williams's music for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Pope taught music and composition at Brandeis University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received a Leonard Bernstein Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship and won the Pacific Composers Forum Composition Competition.

Alfred Savia is music director of the Evansville (Indiana) Philharmonic Orchestra and artistic director of the Orlando (Florida) Philharmonic Orchestra. He has been a guest conductor of the Detroit, Rhode Island, and Korea Philharmonic Orchestras, Denmark's Aalborg Symphony Orchestra, and the Presidential Symphony Orchestra of Ankara, Turkey. He recorded Russell Peck's The Thrill of Orchestra with London's Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in 1997.

James Setapen is music director of the Amarillo (Texas) Symphony. He has been a guest conductor with the Denver, Indianapolis, and Omaha Symphony Orchestras as well as the Hagen Philharmonic in Germany. He also has an active career conducting opera, including the Cleveland Opera Theatre, the Des Moines Metro Opera, the Mississippi Opera, and the Amarillo Opera. Setapen won first prize in the Oakland Symphony's American Conductors Competition in 1978.

Joan Tower is Asher B. Edelman Professor of Music at Bard College and is one of the most highly regarded composers in the United States today. In 1998 she celebrated her sixtieth birthday with more than twenty concerts given in her honor throughout the country; received the Delaware Symphony's Alfred I. Dupont Award for Distinguished American Composers; and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and in 1990 was the recipient of the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. Tower's orchestral works have been commissioned and performed around the world by orchestras including those of New York, Dallas, Chicago, Louisville, San Francisco, Minnesota, Kansas City, Tokyo NHK, Toronto, the National Symphony, the London Philharmonic, the Berlin Radio, and St. Louis, where she was composer-in-residence from 1985 to 1988. She is currently composer-in-residence with the Orchestra of St. Luke's in New York City.

This event was last updated on 03-02-2001

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