Tag: Music

  • Arts & Culture

    Handel’s ‘Saul’ to be performed in memory of John Raymond Ferris

    The Harvard University Choir and the Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra will present Handel’s magnificent oratorio “Saul” on April 26. The performance is dedicated to the memory of John Raymond Ferris, University organist and choirmaster from 1958-1990, who passed away last summer.

  • Arts & Culture

    Seniors Buzney, Barron win Mellinger Award

    Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra (HRO) members Catherine Buzney ’09 and Christine Barron ’09 have been named recipients of the Rachel Mellinger Memorial Award.

  • Arts & Culture

    Yannatos retires after 45 years, concert planned

    With music filling his ears, the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra (HRO) Conductor James Yannatos will retire after 45 years by giving his final concert on April 17.

  • Arts & Culture

    Creativity through cerebration

    Contemporary composer Kay Rhie hasn’t had many watershed musical moments. The romantic ideal of a composer “deeply entrenched in creative epiphanies,” she admitted on a recent damp spring afternoon, is “not my story.”

  • Arts & Culture

    Scholar plucks composers out of the dark

    Wielding a viola da gamba almost as tall as she, Laury Gutiérrez plays with the assurance and animation of a rock star. She is, after all, one in a select club of artists who hold a National Interest Waiver from the U.S. government, granted to noncitizens “who because of their exceptional ability in the sciences,…

  • Arts & Culture

    Aykroyd honored, student groups featured

    Dan Aykroyd has got Cultural Rhythms and blues. As celebrity emcee of the 24th annual Cultural Rhythms Festival and the Harvard Foundation’s Artist of the Year, a bespectacled Aykroyd dazzled the audience.

  • Arts & Culture

    Dance, music, literature celebrate human rights

    Human rights are all about history, politics, and the law — right? Not entirely. The arts have a role to play. Literature, music, dance, and other forms of creative expression often convey oblique stories of injustice and trauma. They also inspire humans to embrace the human rights implicit in every act of creation.

  • Campus & Community

    Elliot Forbes

    At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on December 9, 2008, the Minute honoring the life and service of the late Elliot Forbes, Fanny Peabody Professor of Music, Emeritus, was placed upon the records. Forbes is well known for his revision and critical annotations of Alexander Wheelock Thayer’s Life of Beethoven.

  • Arts & Culture

    Rubén Blades donates papers, recordings

    He’s attained fame as an award-winning actor and musician, founded a political party and run for president of his native Panama and served as the Panamanian minister of tourism, but now Rubén Blades LL.M. ’85 will add another credit to his resume: Harvard College Library benefactor.

  • Campus & Community

    ‘Symbiotic’ Web archive launched

    A new Web archive created by faculty, students, and librarians at Harvard brings original research on Leonard Bernstein and his Boston roots to the public for the first time. The material, which went live on the Web on Jan. 23, was collected during undergraduate seminars and over the course of an international Bernstein Festival at…

  • Arts & Culture

    A visit with musician Hans Tutschku

    Up in the eaves of Paine Music Hall, professor of music Hans Tutschku is hard at work composing in a setting that would make Mozart’s head spin. The space is small but packed with equipment: computer monitors, eight loudspeakers, a turntable, and several mixers and synthesizers with enough levers to land a 747.

  • Campus & Community

    Dunster House composer-in-residence ‘Charley’ Kletzsch dies at 82

    Charles F. “Charley” Kletzsch, Dunster House composer-in-residence for more than 50 years, died Jan. 15.

  • Health

    Art and science: Healing in harmony

    What do Julie Andrews and Mozart have in common? And what links Hillary Clinton, Che Guevara, and Cameron Diaz? The former have absolute or perfect pitch; the latter are tone-deaf. How our brains differ to create these disparities was one of the subjects of “Crossing the Corpus Callosum,” a first-of-its-kind symposium held Jan. 10 at…

  • Arts & Culture

    Isolating creativity in the brain

    How — exactly — does improvisation happen? What’s involved when a musician sits down at the piano and plays flurries of notes in a free fall, without a score, without knowing much about what will happen moment to moment? Is it possible to find the sources of a creative process?

  • Arts & Culture

    Scholar asks: ‘How can we know the spectator from the dance?’

    When Yvonne Rainer and her fellow dancers took to the stage in the early 1960s, their performances were like nothing American audiences had ever seen. First, there were no costumes. Performers wore T-shirts, casual pants, and sneakers. In place of elaborate leaps and twirls, the dancers engaged in everyday movements like running, climbing, and even…

  • Campus & Community

    Hailing an unfulfilled promise

    Harvard marked the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Wednesday (Dec. 10), highlighting both the document’s power and its unfulfilled promise through theater, song, and ideas.

  • Campus & Community

    Making connections: A special evening for Harvard faculty

    “The arts are something we all care deeply about, whether we are artists ourselves, whether we are social scientists, or whether we are scientists,” Senior Vice Provost Judith Singer told an audience of about 120 Harvard faculty of all stripes and ranks gathered at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum.

  • Campus & Community

    In brief

    FAS Supply Swap; HRO plays Weber, Yannatos, Mahler; New lab to open at HKS

  • Arts & Culture

    Achebe celebrates African literature with poetry

    Chinua Achebe, the esteemed Nigerian novelist and poet, delivered this year’s Distinguished African Studies Lecture at the Center for Government and International Studies (CGIS). Greeting the standing-room-only crowd in Tsai Auditorium earlier this week (Nov. 17), Achebe surprised the group by announcing that he had an unusual program in mind.

  • Arts & Culture

    Marla Frederick talks about faith, God, and money

    Not long ago, Harvard cultural anthropologist Marla Frederick sat on a wooden bench in a slum of Kingston, Jamaica. She was interviewing local churchgoers about the Christian “prosperity gospel” often promoted by American televangelists. It offers up a simple (and controversial) idea: The more you give, the more you receive.

  • Campus & Community

    Chaya Czernowin appointed professor of music at Harvard

    Chaya Czernowin, a composer who has received wide acclaim for her sophisticated, emotional operas, has been appointed professor of music in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), effective July 1, 2009.

  • Arts & Culture

    Poetry, music, death take the stage at New College Theatre

    John Adams ’69, A.M. ’72 returned to Harvard on Nov. 17, where he attended a performance of his piece by Harvard’s Bach Society Orchestra (a group he led in the 1960s) at the New College Theatre.

  • Campus & Community

    In brief

    Money Mondays offer help; Harvard Real Estate Services plans home-buying seminar; Fontainebleau Schools info session in Adams House; Global health workshop, Dec. 3; Holiday gifts for those in need; A musical invitation

  • Campus & Community

    Newsmakers

    Carbonari named chair, Fulton named vice chair of Harvard’s JCHS Policy Advisory Board; HSPH presents Q Prize to maestro

  • Arts & Culture

    Falling in love with South Asian music

    As a young boy, Richard Wolf, professor of music, liked to sit at the piano in his grandparents’ home and invent short musical ditties. “My grandfather would listen and shout, ‘Oh! It’s Bach! Oh, just like Mozart!’” Wolf recalled recently, with a laugh. “He was wonderfully encouraging.”

  • Arts & Culture

    How the ‘talking machine’ allowed music and dance to cross oceans

    In the late 1920s, with the advent of new technology, gramophone and “talking machine” companies were able to capture the sounds and rhythms of life in cities across the globe. From New York to Havana, Paris to Honolulu, labels like Victor, Gramophone Company, and Okeh competed to record vernacular music.

  • Campus & Community

    Day of the Dead celebration

    Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnography will come alive in a unique way Nov. 2 when it joins the Consulate General of Mexico in Boston in hosting a celebration of the traditional Mexican holiday Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead).

  • Campus & Community

    Dunster House calls for soloists

    Dunster House seeks vocal soprano, alto, tenor, and bass soloists for its 36th annual Messiah Sing, scheduled for the evening of Dec. 11. One soloist for each voice part will be selected to perform. Auditions are scheduled Nov. 8 from 10 a.m. to noon in Dunster House. To sign up for an audition or for…

  • Arts & Culture

    Judaica Division concert includes world premiere of sax concerto

    As part of its celebration of the 60th anniversary of the founding of Israel, the Harvard College Library’s Judaica Division will host the world premiere of a saxophone concerto composed by an award-winning Israeli composer Nov. 2, at 3 p.m. at Sanders Theatre.

  • Campus & Community

    Peabody Museum to host Day of the Dead celebration

    Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnography will come alive in a unique way Nov. 2 when it joins the Consulate General of Mexico in Boston in hosting a celebration of the traditional Mexican holiday Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead).