Campus Stories - Music
Unexpected intersections
Far-flung collaborations flourish at Stanford: Physicists create dance performances, biologists and musicians expand our understanding of epilepsy, and engineers speed environmental research. This interdisciplinary environment springs from having strong science and humanities departments adjacent to a thriving arts district and is aided by research institutes that cross school and department lines. These collaborations blur traditional…
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…
Stanford Live expands its mission with 2015-16 season
“The Arts and Social Change” and “War: Return and Recovery” are the two key themes at the core of Stanford Live’s 2015-16 season. The program will offer a full spectrum of classical, contemporary and multimedia performances, as well as talks, panels and seminars that build on the intellectual depth and breadth of this past season’s…
Choices!
It’s May at Stanford and that of course means – an exciting smorgasbord of arts activities. Every weekend is packed with an abundance of arts options. Make some difficult choices – or attend them all! Here is just a sampling of what each weekend brings: May 1-3: Musical Happy Hour with Fleet Street and Chanticleer…
Students draw parallels between civil rights movement in the 1960s and today in “Hairspray”
Stanford’s oldest and largest theatrical organization, the Ram’s Head Theatrical Society, explores civil rights and today’s world in its upcoming Hairspray production. Hairspray will take the spotlight in Memorial Auditorium for five performances: April 10–11 and 16–18. The theatrical society sets the scene for the production: Tracy Turnblad is a high school student in 1962…
Music scholarship and dance performance come together in Stanford scholar’s study of interwar music
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,…
Stanford performance reimagines Doug Engelbart’s historic computer demonstration in a new multimedia work
Stanford Live’s world premiere of The Demo on April 1 and 2 at Bing Concert Hall reflects on a pivotal moment in Silicon Valley’s history with one of its most influential figures. Douglas Engelbart’s egalitarian vision for how technology could expand human intelligence set the world on its head and, ultimately, led to many of…
Students and professionals join forces in the recording studio at Stanford’s Bing Concert Hall
This fall, anybody and everybody will have the opportunity to enjoy the St. Lawrence String Quartet and the Stanford Chamber Chorale‘s commercial release of Lord Nelson Mass (Nelsonmesse)by Joseph Haydn, recorded in Stanford’s Bing Concert Hall. The recording presents the best performances possible; both live in concert and in recording sessions. The SLSQ’s recording of…
Stanford students discover an 18th-century music treasure in Green Library
This week, Marie-Louise Catsalis and her music students will present what is likely the first performance in over 300 years of Neapolitan composer Francesco Durante’s Stabat Mater. Last spring, Catsalis and her students discovered an incomplete Latin music manuscript by Durante in Stanford Library’s Special Collections and undertook the challenge of finishing the work, editing…
Art and Ideas at Stanford Live
An in-depth look at the composer Joseph Haydn and his era – coupled with performances of some of his most iconic works. An evening of music by 11 different cultures along the Nile River – combined with conversations about geography, cultural policy, and environmental sustainability. These were the first two programs in a new series…
The Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra from China
The 2015 Stanford Pan-Asian Music Festival will showcase the China Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra will be in residency at Stanford University from February 18th to 22nd, 2015. During this period, it will give two symphonic concerts on February 20 and 21 in the Bing Concert Hall, focusing on music by Chinese composers. One of…
For 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…
Stanford’s ‘Live Context’ series explores art and its ideas
Compared with Mozart and Beethoven, “Haydn gets the short end of the stick,” says violinist Geoff Nuttall of the celebrated Stanford-based St. Lawrence String Quartet. He will make his passionate case for Haydn’s greatness – playing and talking about the composer’s music – throughout the weekend of Feb. 13–15 as part of the campus-wide Haydn:…
A Scene, A Song, A Number – Game On!
In this whirlwind of a weekend, small teams were given the challenge of creating a musical theater piece (one song, one scene, and one dance) – all over the course of only 72 hours! Three days of intense creative endeavor culminated in a live cabaret- style performance where teams presented the results of their hard…
Kronos Quartet visits the Graduate Composers Forum
On Jan. 20, the Graduate Composition Forum at the Department of Music welcomed the Kronos Quartet – David Harrington and John Sherba, violins; Hank Dutt, viola; and Sunny Yang, cello – for an in-depth question and answer session. Kronos is a leading proponent of new music for string quartet, nurturing long-standing relationships with composers throughout…
Rare Haydn materials in the Stanford Libraries
Over the past several months, I have been blogging about rare Haydn materials held in the Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library of Music, including one autograph manuscript, one important letter, and nine first or early score editions. Each item was digitized for deep storage in the Stanford Digital Repository, and high-quality, downloadable images have…
