The Composer’s Voice: Virgil Thomson
“Composition isn’t something you decide. Composition is something you have a compulsion about.”
Listen to Virgil Thomson speak these words and many others in a netcast featuring excerpts from historic interviews. Over a period of three years, Vivan Perlis of Yale’s Oral History of American Music project interviewed Thomson in his historic apartment in New York’s Chelsea Hotel. This netcast intersperses highlights of those interviews with an outline of Thomson’s life and career.
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The Composer’s Voice: Aaron Copland
Listen to Aaron Copland talk about his life and music. In interviews with Vivian Perlis between 1975 and 1978, Copland discussed Nadia Boulanger, jazz , Koussevitzsky, Stravinsky, twelve-tone methods, film music, Martha Graham, and artistic inspiration. This netcast interweaves excerpts from these conversations with short musical excerpts. Perlis is the founder of the Oral History of American Music project at Yale.
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Oral History of American Music: Charles Ives
The Oral History of American Music (OHAM) project at Yale offers a netcast on Charles Ives. The 20-minute netcast features historic interviews with Ives’s family members, friends, and colleagues – including Henry Cowell, John Kirkpatrick, Lou Harrison, Nicolas Slonimsky, Elliott Carter, and even Ives’s barber. A highlight is a rare clip of Ives himself at the piano, raucously singing “They Are There!”
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Yale School of Music Commencement to stream live
The Yale School of Music is pleased to announce that both the Commencement Concert on Sunday, May 24 and the Commencement ceremonies on Monday, May 25 will be streamed live online.
Among Yale’s many concerts commemorating the past year, the Yale School of Music’s commencement concert features some of the most accomplished young musicians of the current generation. These outstanding performers from the YSM Class of 2009 include pianists Helen Huang, Reinis Zarins, Jeannette Fang, and Wei-Jen Yuan; violinist Nicholas DiEugenio, cellist Hannah Collins, clarinetist Paul Cho, oboist Merideth Hite, bassoonist Sam Blair, composer Fernando Buide, and mezzo-soprano Emily Righter in a varied program featuring works of Debussy, Schumann, Rachmaninoff, Buide, and others.
The free concert takes place on Sunday, May 24 at 4pm in Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Hall. The live stream will be available here.
The School of Music’s Commencement exercises will also be streamed live beginning at approximately 12 noon on Monday, May 25. Visit our media page at that time to tune in. The processional and recessional will be performed by a brass ensemble of faculty, students, and alumni, and the School will continue the tradition of singing Schubert’s song “An die Musik.” Dean Robert Blocker will give the Commencement address. Degrees awarded by the School of Music include the Master of Music, Master of Musical Arts, Artist Diploma, Certificate in Performance, and the Doctorate of Musical Arts.
Video of Jesse Levine Memorial Concert
Video of the Jesse Levine Memorial Concert is now available online. Held on February 22, 2009 in Battell Chapel, the concert featured spoken tributes, a photo slideshow, and performances of music by Villa-Lobos, Schubert, Kreisler, Ravel, Mendelssohn, and Bach.
Performers from the Yale School of Music community included the Yale Cellos, conducted by Aldo Parisot; Syoko Aki, violin; Frank Morelli, bassoon; pianists Joan Panetti and Elizabeth Parisot; and several violists who have studied with Levine both recently and in past years. Pianist Morey Ritt, Levine’s longtime friend and musical colleague, also performed.
View the video of the memorial concert here, or read a preview of the event. This video streams on demand with CD-quality audio as part of the Yale School of Music’s series of netcasts.
Live from Sprague Hall:
Frankl, Blocker, and the Yale Philharmonia
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October 14, 2005
Horowitz Piano Series
Mozart: Concerto for Two Pianos, K. 365
Peter Frankl and Robert Blocker, piano
Shinik Hahm, conductor
Members of the
Philharmonia Orchestra of Yale
Live from Sprague Hall: The Yale Philharmonia Plays Bruckner
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October 19, 2007
Philharmonia Orchestra of Yale
Bruckner: Symphony No. 4 in E-flat, “Romantic”
IV. Bewegt, noch dich zu schnell
Peter Oundjian, guest conductor
Live from Sprague Hall: The Yale Philharmonia Plays Tchaikovsky
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December 7, 2007
Philharmonia Orchestra of Yale
Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 in E minor
IV. Andante maestoso – Allegro vivace
Shinik Hahm, conductor
Live from Sprague Hall: Yale Percussion Group
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Yale Percussion Group
February 7, 2003
James Wood: Village Burial with Fire
The internationally-acclaimed Yale Percussion Group performs James Wood’s exhilarating Village Burial with Fire. Founded in 1997 by renowned faculty percussionist Robert van Sice, the Yale Percussion Group is an ensemble that composer Steve Reich has called “something truly extraordinary.” James Wood, one of England’s leading young composers, is also a virtuoso percussionist in his own right. Evoking a Hindu funeral ceremony, Village Burial with Fire explores the topics of death and the afterlife from an earthly perspective.
Percussionists Lawson White, Adam Sliwinski, Robert Bishop, and Javier Alonso Sota
Robert van Sice, director
Live from Sprague Hall: Faculty Performers Play Beethoven Quintet
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Five stellar faculty from the Yale School of Music – Stephen Taylor, oboe; David Shifrin, clarinet; Frank Morelli, bassoon; William Purvis, horn; and Peter Frankl, piano – perform the Andante cantabile movement from Beethoven’s quintet for winds and piano. The second movement is the high point of this youthful work, which was composed in 1796 with the same key and scoring as Mozart’s mature quintet, K. 452, written twelve years earlier.
January 18, 2008
Horowitz Piano Series
Beethoven: Quintet for Piano and Winds in E-flat, Op. 16
II. Andante antabile
Stephen Taylor, oboe
David Shifrin, clarinet
Frank Morelli, bassoon
William Purvis, horn
Peter Frankl, piano
Interview: Ezra Laderman on his own music
Ezra Laderman, professor of composition, talks with Susan Hawkshaw, assistant director of the Oral History American Music Project, about the program of his music on the Yale in New York series presented March 3, 2008 at Weill Recital Hall.
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The concert of chamber works spanned the broad range of Laderman’s career, from his 1954 Bassoon Concerto (performed with string quartet) to the New York premiere of Interior Landscapes II for two pianos (2007). Interior Landscapes I opened the program, which also featured June Twenty-ninth (1986) and June Thirtieth (2004) for solo flute as well as the Violin Duets from 1998.
Laderman came to the Yale School of Music in 1988 as a visiting professor and served as Dean from 1989 to 1995. He is now a professor of composition and artistic director of the New Music New Haven series. The recipient of three Guggenheim fellowships and a Rome Prize, in 2006 Laderman was elected the president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Yale Opera: Fledermaus Gallery, 2008
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
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DIE FLEDERMAUS
at the Shubert Theater
Feb 15 – 17, 2008.
Yale Opera’s Managing Director Grant Meachum talks about the production with Artistic Director Doris Yarick-Cross, stage director Marc Verzatt and conductor Jeremy Silver, with musical examples provided by Samantha Talmadge as Rosalinde and Zach Borichevsky as Eisenstein, accompanied by faculty pianist Mikhail Hallak.
Interview: Boris Berman on Prokofiev
Pianist and Prokofiev expert Boris Berman talks with Yale piano student David Kaplan about Prokofiev and performances of his music by Yale musicians in New York and New Haven. In 2008, the Yale School of Music presented two all-Prokofiev performances featuring Berman and the Philharmonia Orchestra of Yale in Carnegie Hall and Woolsey Hall. The program included the Symphony No. 1 and Romeo and Juliet and featured Berman in the thorny, rarely-heard Fourth Piano Concerto for the left hand.
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Berman is professor of piano and chair of the piano department at the Yale School of Music, and one of the world’s leading authorities on the life and music of Sergei Prokofiev. He is the author of Prokofiev’s Piano Sonatas, published by Yale University Press, 2008, and he has recorded all nine sonatas as well as three of the piano concerti for the Chandos label. He is also the author of Notes from the Pianist’s Bench, published by Yale University Press, which was selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Title in 2001.
