Campus Stories - Music
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…
Architect David Adjaye tells Stanford audience how he designs civic spaces to create community
Architect David Adjaye is international both in his heritage and in his career. Between his childhood and his working life he has spent considerable time in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the United States. He has built houses for Kofi Annan and, pro bono, for displaced residents of New Orleans’ Ninth Ward; he also…
Stanford scholar reveals the surprising cultural history of four-hand piano playing
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…
Happy 2015!
We are looking forward to everything 2015 will bring in the arts at Stanford – new exhibitions at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford Live performances at Bing Concert Hall and beyond, engagement with the Anderson Collection at Stanford University – and of course the enormous variety of performances, events, exhibitions and programs put on by…
Fernando Lopez-Lezcano to receive 2014 Marsh O’Neill Award
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…
Stanford music scholar explores how Indian traditional folk music fuses the devotional with the political
What happens when religious folk songs are used for political purposes? Stanford ethnomusicologist Anna Schultz explores this question in her latest publication, Singing a Hindu Nation: Marathi Devotional Performance. For centuries people in India have gathered in temples or on pilgrimages to hear kirtan, a form of Indian folk music that praises the divine. Schultz…
Stanford Symphony Orchestra performs Mahler’s Symphony No. 6
The 120 musicians of the Stanford Symphony Orchestra rehearse at Bing Concert Hall for a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 in A minor, “Tragic.” The 90-minute epic transports performers and audience members through Mahler’s world of poetic landscape, sinister visions and profound love. Directed by Jindong Cai, the orchestra features a number of unique…
Matthew 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…
The Shenson Series celebrates 10 years of recitals
The A. Jess Shenson Recital Series will celebrate its 10th anniversary this Sunday by welcoming baritone Stephen Salters to Campbell Recital Hall for a performance featuring Rachmaninoff, Strauss and American, Spanish and Brazilian folks songs. The Shenson Series was founded in 2004 by pianist LAURA DAHL, a lecturer in music, to bring vocalists to campus…
Stanford and Warner make music – leaders
Innovation and entrepreneurial thinking are key factors that make the music business a shapeshifting industry. They are also part of the learning ethos at Stanford – and will drive the Stanford/Warner Music Group Leadership Initiative. The goal of this initiative is to identify and develop a new generation of undergraduate Stanford students from across various…
St. Lawrence String Quartet celebrates 25th anniversary season with three world premieres at Stanford’s Bing Concert Hall
To commemorate its 25th anniversary this season, Stanford’s prized St. Lawrence String Quartet – violinists Geoff Nuttall and Mark Fewer, violist Lesley Robertson and cellist Christopher Costanza – has commissioned a trio of new works from John Adams and Stanford-based composers Jonathan Berger and Jaroslaw Kapuscinski to be premiered at Bing Concert Hall. The series,…
Stanford’s new player piano collection brings sounds of history to life
The Golden Age of player pianos has dawned on the Farm. Stanford University recently acquired the Denis Condon Collection of Reproducing Pianos and Rolls, a private collection of more than 7,500 rolls and 10 player pianos – among the most important of its kind. Experts in the field are working along with faculty and staff…
