“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
Post Date: 06-04-2024
Bard Conservatory Faculty Lucy Fitz Gibbon Wins a 2024 Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship
Soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon, visiting faculty in vocal arts at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, has been awarded a 2024 fellowship from the Borletti-Buitoni Trust (BBT) in support of her professional projects. The BBT Fellowship Program rewards musical excellence demonstrated by outstanding young musicians—for individuals and ensembles that have been selected from over 32 countries—with fellowships in 2024 being given to seven artists, including Fitz Gibbon. BBT winners are awarded between £20,000 and £30,000.Bard Conservatory Faculty Lucy Fitz Gibbon Wins a 2024 Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship
“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
Bard Conservatory Student Hannah Park-Kaufmann ’24 Awarded Knight-Hennessy Scholarship
Hannah Park-Kaufmann ’24, who is graduating with dual degrees in piano performance and mathematics, has won a Knight-Hennessy Scholarship for graduate-level study at Stanford University. Park-Kaufmann will pursue a master's degree in computational and mathematical engineering at Stanford University School of Engineering. Upon completion, she will matriculate into the PhD program in applied mathematics at Harvard University.Bard Conservatory Student Hannah Park-Kaufmann ’24 Awarded Knight-Hennessy Scholarship
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
More Conservatory News
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Bard Composer in Residence Missy Mazzoli Featured on NPR
Bard Composer in Residence Missy Mazzoli Featured on 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
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
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
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
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“Opera Does Not Need to Be Repackaged”: Stephanie Blythe Profiled in The Daily Catch
“Opera Does Not Need to Be Repackaged”: Stephanie Blythe Profiled in The Daily Catch
Post Date: 02-01-2024
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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)
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 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.
Post Date: 01-22-2024