Innovation & Entrepreneurship
Stanford student group reshapes music-making hierarchy
Twenty-four musicians experiment with collaborative leadership in their new conductorless ensemble, SCOr.The goal was to create an opportunity for students to develop their skills and become better communicators, listeners and facilitators who will apply what they’ve learned to future personal and professional settings. These are not business school students, but they are entrepreneurial, and they are experimenting with an alternative organizational model, albeit in the music…
Read More Eva Perón, icon and spirit, is reimagined on the Stanford stage
Students perform the musical Evita while artifacts from Hoover's Juan Domingo Perón papers, Eva memorabilia and contemporary video interviews of Porteños are featured in a companion exhibition.
Stanford junior Sammi Cannold is a great admirer of fem-icon Eva Perón, Argentina’s first lady from 1946 until her death in 1952. It all started with Evita. After seeing the 2012 Broadway revival in New York several times during her senior year of high school (it was at the top of her gift wish list…
Read More Stanford students celebrate release of graphic novel American Heathen
The graphic novel, which Stanford students researched, wrote and illustrated, focuses on the life and times of a Chinese American man who dedicated much of his life to improving the lives of Chinese immigrants in 19th-century America.At a recent book launch on campus, six young Stanford artists sat at a long table in the Terrace Room of Margaret Jacks Hall with copies of American Heathen, the graphic novel they had written and illustrated, propped up in front of them. The event marked the highly anticipated culmination of a two-quarter English course…
Read More Emerging String Quartet Program musicians find an audience behind bars and beyond
The silver metal walls of the cavernous industrial gymnasium reflected orange-clad women, staff members and corrections officers who came together to hear the Cecilia String Quartet perform Mendelssohn’s Opus 44, No. 2. Any nervousness the musicians felt going through the security check transformed into energy, encouraged by more than 60 incarcerated women at the San…
Read More First student cohort chosen for Stanford in New York
Students in the new program will live, works as arts interns and study in the city for one academic quarter.Stanford has chosen the first cohort of 20 undergraduate students for Stanford in New York, established a home for the pilot program in a Manhattan high-rise, and signed an agreement with a student residence hall in Brooklyn. In addition, Stanford has created a suite of courses tailored to the program’s focus and location, including “Divided…
Read MoreGroundbreaking theater technology in the making
When Stanford’s Ram’s Head Theatrical Society presented Les Misérables last year, it wasn’t just the telling of a tale of love and the power of the human spirit. It was a demonstration of ingenuity. Lighting designer MATT LATHROP ’16, developed a digitally operated remote control follow spot for the production. “Rather than using a typical…
Read MoreMusic scholarship and dance performance come together in Stanford scholar’s study of interwar music
Through a study of the relationship between music and dance in ballets produced between the two world wars, Stanford graduate student and conductor Anna Wittstruck illustrates how composers sought to bring audiences together.Music graduate student Anna Wittstruck is a unique combination of performer and scholar. The orchestral cellist currently conducts the Stanford Wind Ensemble and has conducted the Summer Stanford Symphony Orchestra for the past five years. She has also conducted in the Orchestral Studies program at Stanford. In the midst of all this conducting and performing,…
Read MoreFor Stanford Symphony Orchestra, The Planets align
For two nights, the Stanford Symphony Orchestra took center stage at Bing Concert Hall to perform The Planets by Gustav Holst. However, this was no ordinary production. An enormous projection screen, featuring images from around the solar system, accompanied the orchestra. The piece is broken into seven movements, with each movement corresponding to a particular…
Read MoreWhat would you ask Tony Award-winning choreographer Bill T. Jones? Stanford students get their chance, twice
Jones and his dance company perform on campus and the choreographer carves out time to engage with students in writing before his visit and in person once he arrives.In a rare performance appearance, choreographer, dancer, director and writer Bill T. Jones will narrate 70 one-minute vignettes performed by his company dancers on Friday, Jan. 30, in Memorial Auditorium. Story/Time is a multidisciplinary work about family, lovers and others drawn from his life. “Bill T. Jones and his great company of dancers are one…
Read MoreBlooming Fibonacci
John Edmark's 3D printed sculptures.These 3-D printed sculptures, called blooms, are designed to animate when spun under a strobe light. The placement of the appendages is determined by the same method nature uses in pinecones and sunflowers. The rotation speed is synchronized to the strobe so that one flash occurs every time the sculpture turns 137.5º – the golden…
Read MoreStanford d.school students ‘humanize’ a truck for a good cause
Stanford students get their hands dirty designing and rebuilding a truck to serve the specific needs of San Jose's Tech Museum of Innovation.The well-used delivery truck came with seats for two. Now it needed sturdy, safe seats for three people and a dog. And the passenger seat had to be removable so mechanics could maintain and repair the engine. That’s just one of dozens of design challenges that must be solved by Stanford students in the Humanize…
Read MoreStanford scholar reveals the surprising cultural history of four-hand piano playing
German studies professor Adrian Daub examines the social mores of 19th-century Europe through a study of "four-handed monsters" – when the hands of two players intermingled on the same piano. It was a phenomenon that both fascinated and repelled.In 19th-century Europe – long before LPs, CDs or mp3s – there were only two ways to listen to, say, the latest Beethoven symphony: either you were lucky enough to hear it performed at the local concert hall, or you played it at home yourself. Not with a full orchestra, of course, but in a…
Read MoreFernando Lopez-Lezcano to receive 2014 Marsh O’Neill Award
Lopez-Lezcano, the systems administrator at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, has won the annual prize given to staff members who have made outstanding contributions to Stanford's research mission.Keeps the lab humming. Faces daily crises with stellar aplomb. Constantly innovating. Intimately “groks” and practices the very science and art that is the research mission of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Increases the creative capacity and artistic agency of all who work there – students, faculty and visiting researchers…
Read MoreMatthew Billman, “Bring Him Home”
Stanford+Connects is a 16-city world tour that brings the best of Stanford University to alumni around the world. Designed as a full afternoon of learning and connecting, attendees meet up with new “classmates” then head to the classroom for micro lectures and seminars taught by top Stanford faculty. Each event offers a broad program with…
Read MoreA trio of Stanford Art Spaces exhibitions
Advanced Geometry: Katie Hawkinson, Joe Slusky and Stephen WilmothStanford Art Spaces is pleased to announce its November-December 2014 art exhibitions: Elementals, oil paintings by Katie Hawkinson; Steel Dreams, painted, welded sculptures, along with drawings and collages, by Joe Slusky; and Sacred Geometry, paintings of geometric polyhedrons by Stephen Wilmoth. Hawkinson (who, incidentally, teaches at Stanford Continuing Studies) and Slusky are a well-known Berkeley…
Read MoreBritish puppetry theater group Blind Summit teaches master class at Stanford
Speaking to members of the Stanford community at the Bing Concert Hall Studio, the celebrated Blind Summit Theatre group demonstrated its unique take on ancient Japanese Bunraku puppetry. At one point, three audience members tried their hand at puppeteering – each controlling a separate part of a single puppet’s body. This weekend, Blind Summit will…
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