The Japanese translation of Professor Boris Berman’s book Notes from the Pianist’s Bench has been released by Ongaku no Tomo in Tokyo. The book has already been published in Chinese (traditional characters) and Korean.

Notes from the Pianist’s Bench, selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Title upon its publication in 2001, draws on Berman’s vast experience as a Russian-trained concert pianist and highly respected educator to explore issues of piano technique and music interpretation. Combining explanations and advice with anecdotes about his students, colleagues, and former teachers, Berman also provides many insights into the psychological aspects of musical performance and the teaching of music.

The book examines such practical matters in piano playing as sound and touch, technique, pedaling, and articulation. He gives tips on choosing editions, selecting the best fingering, memorizing, and making the most efficient use of practice time. He gives equal emphasis to issues of interpretation, discussing ways to decipher the inner content of a piece of music. And he offers suggestions about how to prepare emotionally for a performance, how to confront stage anxiety, and how to adapt teaching approaches to the individual students. Informative and entertaining, this book will be welcomed by piano students, teachers, and anyone else interested in the art of piano playing.

A professor of piano and coordinator of the piano department at the Yale School of Music, Berman has given concerts and master classes around the world and has made numerous recordings. His most recent book, Prokofiev’s Piano Sonatas, was published by Yale University Press in 2008.

The Waterbury Symphony Orchestra will be joined by the NVCC College Choir, under the direction of Dr. Richard Gard, with guest soloists Amanda Hall, soprano; Gala El Hadidi, mezzo-soprano; Michael Paul Krubitzer, tenor; and Tyler Simpson, baritone. The program opens with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 and is followed by the Symphony No. 9, op. 21 in C major.

A free pre-concert lecture will be held at 2:10 in the Mainstage Theater at NVCC. The Waterbury Symphony Orchestra invites attendees to a post-concert reception (tickets $20) where they can meet Maestro Bjaland, NVCC College Choir conductor, Richard Gard, and the guest soloists. For more information, please contact the WSO office at 203 574-4283 or visit www.waterburysymphony.org.

Inaugurated in 1952, the Yale Medal is the highest award presented by the Association of Yale Alumni and is conferred solely to recognize and honor outstanding individual service to the University. Since its inception, the Yale Medal has been presented to 272 individuals, all of whom not only showed extraordinary devotion to the ideals of the University, but also were conspicuous in demonstrating their support of Yale through extensive, exemplary service on behalf of Yale as a whole or one of its many schools, institutes, or programs.

At tonight’s dinner, the Association of Yale Alumni (AYA) will honor a total of five people with the Yale Medal. In addition to Mr. Adams, the recipients are Frances Beinecke ‘71, ‘74 MFS, Charles D. Ellis ‘59, Justice Carlos R. Moreno ‘70, and Eve Hart Rice ‘73.

The AYA citation honoring Mr. Adams reads:

Stephen Adams, long a loyal and active volunteer, has demonstrated enduring devotion and uncommon generosity to his alma mater. While his commitments extend well beyond his Yale College class to a broad range of initiatives throughout the university, it is his sense of vision and purpose that has transformed in particular the School of Music. Adams’ gift to that school — enabling all future generations of students to attend tuition-free — has redefined the role of music at Yale, and will in turn redefine arts education throughout the world. Adams serves on the Board of Visitors to the School of Music, the University Council and as a Sterling Fellow.

International Business Machine, subtitled “an overture for Tanglewood,” was written for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The Boston Globe called the piece “a brisk, elegantly-fashioned work depicting today’s post-industrial computer age.” Grind to a Halt is dedicated to the memory of Jacob Druckman, Lang’s composition teacher and a longtime member of the Yale School of Music faculty. According to Lang, “One of the things that interests me very much is how certain mechanical musical tasks force players – and listeners – into a kind of concentration that can be spellbinding. The intense concentration necessary to coordinate the ensemble in Grind to a Halt is a kind of virtuosity in itself.”

Lang, who won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Music, has said: “The world needs happy tunes. But for me, the interesting ideas are where those happy tunes aren’t. The interesting things are in the dark places, or in the ugliness, or in the noise or the grit.” Listen to audio samples of both Lang pieces at www.davidlangmusic.com.

The program will also feature new orchestral works by several up-and-coming Yale composers: Samuel Adams, Richard Harrold, Robert Honstein, Jordan Kuspa, Polina Nazaykinskaya, and Feinan Wang. The New Music for Orchestra concert is an annual intersection of the Yale Philharmonia (Shinik Hahm, conductor) and the New Music New Haven concert series (Christopher Theofanidis, artistic director).

Admission to the concert is free. For more information or to hear a live stream of the concert, visit the Yale School of Music website.

About the featured composer

The music of DAVID LANG has been performed by major musical, dance, and theatrical organizations throughout the world, including the Santa Fe Opera, New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Kronos Quartet, Nederlands Dans Theater, and the Royal Ballet, to name a few. Lang is well known as co-founder and co-artistic director of the legendary Bang on a Can music festival. In 2008, Lang was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for The Little Match Girl Passion, commissioned by Carnegie Hall. He has also has been honored with the Rome Prize, the BMW Music-Theater Prize (Munich), a Kennedy Center/Friedheim Award, the Revson Fellowship with the New York Philharmonic, a Bessie Award, a Village Voice OBIE Award, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work is recorded on the Sony Classical, Teldec, BMG, Point, Chandos, Argo/Decca, Caprice, Koch, Albany, CRI and Cantaloupe labels. David Lang holds degrees from Stanford University, the University of Iowa, and the Yale School of Music. His music is published by Red Poppy (ASCAP) and is distributed worldwide by G. Schirmer, Inc. David Lang joined the Yale faculty in 2008.

The Yale School of Music will present the complete set of J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, performed by a conductor-less chamber orchestra led by renowned faculty performers. The set of Brandenburg Concertos, first performed in 1721, is regarded by many as the pinnacle of Baroque instrumental composition. Each concerto is scored differently and inventively, and features different instruments or sets of instruments. The impressive cast of faculty performers who will bring these masterpieces to life includes violinists Ani Kavafian, Syoko Aki, Robert Mealy, and Wendy Sharp; violist Ettore Cause, flutist Ransom Wilson, clarinetist David Shifrin, oboist Stephen Taylor, bassoonist Frank Morelli, hornist William Purvis, and harpsichordists Avi Stein and Ilya Poletaev. The fifth concerto will be performed on period instruments with baroque bows, featuring performers from the Yale Baroque Ensemble.

The concert will take place on Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 8 pm in Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Hall (470 College Street, New Haven) and is part of the Chamber Music Society at Yale’s concert series, directed by David Shifrin. The series occasionally expands its programming to present small chamber orchestras that play without a conductor.

Tickets to the performance are $20 to $28, $10 for students. For more information, visit the Yale School of Music website or call 203 432-4158.

According to the Whitney, the artists – though each approaches painting differently – share an interest in light, color, frames of vision, and how we see nature, giving the exhibit the air of a lively conversation on these themes.

Who Knew? inaugurates what the Gallery at the Whitney hopes will be an ongoing occasional series of exhibits highlighting the unsung talents of Yale faculty. The exhibit runs October 28-March 5 at the Gallery at the Whitney, Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall Street. Gallery hours are Mondays and Wednesdays, 3—5 pm, or by appointment at (203) 432-0670.

About the Artists

Hazel Carby, Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies and Professor of American Studies, describes her painting as “a secret pleasure that has allowed me to dwell in the world of light and shade, contrast and texture to be found along the Connecticut shoreline and the pristine lakes and north woods of Vermont.”

Paul Fry, William Lampson Professor of English, grew up inspired by his artist father and majored in both art and English as an undergraduate. He describes his current work from around his house in Nantucket as attempting “to record the disappearance of landscape into abstraction” and seeking “to represent every possible sense of the expression ‘visual field,’ not omitting the field one walks across.”

Richard Lalli, Professor of Music (Adjunct), Artistic Director of the Yale Baroque Opera Project, and a specialist in vocal performance, opera, early and music, music theatre, is drawn to the rhythm of painting and the play of pure colors. His declared subject matter may be the interaction of colors, but he also confesses to “loving nature (wild and unlimited) juxtaposed with buildings (controlled and safe) as ideas to work from.”

John Loge, for nineteen years Dean of Timothy Dwight College and longtime teacher of nature writing, took up painting at the encouragement of a friend. Of his work he says, “I try to capture my ‘felt sense’ of a place and its mysteries and secrets. My paintings are small because I feel the small size has a way of bringing the viewer into the landscape, which seems to happen to me as I paint.”vocal performance, opera, early music, music theatre

Thomas C. Duffy, left, and Stephanie Hubbard, right, with Nora Dannehy, United States Attorney, District of Connecticut

On October 23, 2009, Thomas C. Duffy, director of Yale Bands, and Stephanie Hubbard, business manager of the bands, received special recognition from the United States Attorney’s Office, District of Connecticut for their role in presenting “Rap for Justice” on May 6.

The “Rap for Justice” concert attracted around 1,000 high school students from seven Connecticut cities to Woolsey Hall to hear the concert’s message of non-violence and respect – and to hear raps from Duffy and Robert Blocker, dean of the Yale School of Music. The concert featured performances by the Yale Concert Band, the rap group 4Peace, and three winners of a statewide rap contest, as well as a screening of a film on teen crime.

The film, based on actual events, offered information about the criminal justice system, pointing out, among other messages, that a juvenile record is counted against an adult convicted of a crime. For his first offense as an adult, the protagonist of the movie gets tried in federal court and sentenced to 15 years. The last act of “Rap for Justice” featured performances by the three students who had won a statewide contest for the best rap lyrics promoting peace.

Sponsored by Yale, the concert was an innovative collaboration among Yale Bands, the U.S Department of Justice, and 4PEACE founders Twice Thou and Edo G.

A slideshow of the “Rap for Justice” concert is available here.

Mrs. DeWitt was born November 14th, 1926, in Boston, MA, to Isabelle Hollister Tuttle and H. Emerson Tuttle. She spent much of her childhood in New Haven, where her father was the first Master of Yale’s Davenport College. Mr. and Mrs. Tuttle were artists whose etchings and paintings have been shown and collected worldwide.

Mrs. DeWitt was educated at the Foote School in New Haven, St. Timothy’s School (Catonsville, MD), and the Yale School of Music. She married H. Daniel DeWitt, MD, in 1960. They settled in New York City, where their three children were born, and spent summers on Nantucket, where the couple first met. After Dr. DeWitt died in 1969, Mrs. DeWitt returned with her children to New Haven. There she became the founding editor of both Music at Yale and Foote Prints, alumnae periodicals for her alma maters.

She was the senior accompanist for New Haven’s Classical Ballet Academy during the 1970s and taught piano at various times in her life. Mrs. DeWitt also flourished as a New Haven real estate agent, working with the late Barbara B. Tower and H. Pearce Company. She retired from real estate in 2007 after more than 25 years in the business.

In 1992 Mrs. DeWitt co-founded The Parents’ Foundation for Transitional Living, a private, nonprofit mental health residential community dedicated to the recovery of adults with serious and persistent mental illness. Distinguishing itself from other mental health residential facilities, The Parents’ Foundation is focused not on psychiatric treatment but on rebuilding their clients’ lives in the community.

Mrs. DeWitt was predeceased by her husband, and by her son H. Daniel DeWitt, Jr. She is survived by her daughters, Adele DeWitt and Martitia DeWitt Ornelas, both of New York City, as well as her 3 sisters, Grace Tuttle Noyes and Nancy Tuttle Adam of Nantucket, and Harriet Tuttle Noyes of Arlington, Ma, and numerous cousins, nieces and nephews.

A memorial service will be held at 2:00pm Saturday, November 14th, at Trinity Church on the Green in New Haven. A reception will follow at the Parish House of nearby Christ Church. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be sent to Parents’ Foundation for Transitional Living (100 Broadway, New Haven, CT 06511).

A letter of greeting from DeWitt in the inaugural issue of Music at Yale.

Tickets for the performance, which takes place in Stern Auditorium, are available through Carnegie Hall.

ANGEL LAM

Angel Lam grew up in Hong Kong and Huntington Beach, California. Her compositions have been performed throughout the United States and in many major cities around the world. She is a two-time winner of the Carnegie Hall emerging composer commission and most recently a recipient of a new commission to write a work for solo cello and orchestra, dedicated to solo cellist Yo-Yo Ma. She first received the Carnegie Hall commission in 2005-06, where she worked with Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Project, and then again in 2006-07, where she worked with Grammy Award-winning composer Osvaldo Golijov and renowned soprano Dawn Upshaw. These two collaborations, together with the Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall, culminated in two Carnegie Hall premieres of her work in September 2006 and April 2007. Her composition Empty Mountain, Spirit Rain was selected to be on the touring repertoire of Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble throughout the United States, Britain, Canada, China, Japan, and Switzerland’s Lucerne Festival in 2007-2009. This work was released by Sony/BMG on Silk Road Ensemble’s CD New Impossibilities and will be released again in a brand new recording in their newest CD, Off the Map, in fall 2009.

Upcoming collaborations include commissions and performances by Yale Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Minnesota Orchestra, Hong Kong Arts Festival 2010, the Yale Cellos, and Carnegie Hall. Recent performances include works for Colorado Symphony Orchestra, Greenwich Village Orchestra (New York), NYU Symphony Orchestra, Loyola High Men’s Chorus and Orchestra (Los Angeles), Orange County Women’s Chorus (Los Angeles), Hong Kong Sinfonietta and Grainger Quartet (Australia), Houston Chamber Choir, Symphony of Oak Park and River Forest (Chicago), and Peabody Dance (Baltimore) in a theater composition created under the guidance of renowned theater artist Martha Clarke. She is currently a doctoral candidate at the Peabody Conservatory and an artist diploma candidate at the Yale School of Music. Her mentors are Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis and Christopher Theofanidis.

Klaus Wallendorf, horn

The Yale School of Music is pleased to announce a special Philharmonia session with members of the Berlin Philharmonic on Tuesday, November 10 at 2:30 pm. Nine members of the Berlin Philharmonic will travel to Yale to lead the Philharmonia in sectional coachings, followed by a side-by-side reading of the first movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 in D minor.

School of Music students who are not participating are invited to observe the reading session, which will take place in the Glee Club Room from 4:00 to 5:15 pm.

The guest coaches from Berlin are:

Alessandro Cappone, violin

Violin: Alessandro Cappone, 1st Violin

Viola: Wilfried Strehle, Principal Viola

Cello: Georg Faust, First Principal Cello

Bass: Matthew McDonald, First Principal Bass

Flute: Andreas Blau, Principal Flute

Clarinet: Wenzel Fuchs, Principal Clarinet

Trombone: Stefan Schulz

Horn: Klaus Wallendorf

Timpani: Rainer Seegers