YSM partners with Stauffer Center for Strings, in Cremona, Italy
In March 2022, several School of Music string players will travel to Cremona, Italy, where artisans like Stradivari, Guarneri, and Amati built the instruments for which so much of the classical music repertoire has been composed. The YSM students will work with a distinguished faculty of international artists at the recently established Stauffer Center for Strings—the natural institutional outgrowth of the Accademia Stauffer and its umbrella organization, the Fondazione Stauffer, which “aims to promote and support advanced musical training for string players, traditional Cremonese violin making and musicological research,” according to its website. The Accademia will become the performance-focused component of the Center, which, according to its website, is “the first international music center for higher education, research, composition, production, management and innovation, entirely dedicated to stringed instruments.”
The School of Music has entered into a three-year partnership with the Center for Strings, which will open on October 1 in the Palazzo Stauffer, a newly restored and renovated palace acquired by the Fondazione Stauffer in 2015. Through the partnership, string students from YSM will study on full scholarship with some of the field’s most accomplished musicians.
The Center’s faculty includes violinists Salvatore Accardo, Lisa Batiashvili, Daniel Hope, Viktoria Mullova, and Julian Rachlin; violists Bruno Giuranna, Lawrence Power, and YSM alum Antoine Tamestit ’01MM; cellists Sol Gabetta, Steven Isserlis, Mischa Maisky, Antonio Meneses, and Alisa Weilerstein; double bassists Uxía Martínez Botana, Franco Petracchi, and Ödön Rácz; and string quartet-in-residence Quartetto di Cremona. The Center’s programming will also feature a “string composition workshop" with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and YSM alum Caroline Shaw ’07MM, according to the organization’s press release.
“The collaborative partnership the Yale School of Music is forging with the Stauffer Center for Strings (in Cremona, Italy) is one that embraces a new artistic vision that lifts music as a source of hope, healing, and joy for all humankind through the distinctive musical voices of the world's emerging artists,” YSM Dean Robert Blocker said.
“This is going to be a very rich experience for your [YSM] students,” Paolo Petrocelli, Director General of the Stauffer Center, said. “The experience of the Center is also the experience in Cremona.” The program, Petrocelli said, will also introduce students in Cremona to the excellence that Yale has to offer.
Learn more about the newly established Stauffer Center for Strings here.
