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Campus Stories

It’s a Wild Party at Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium

It’s spring, so it must be time for a full-scale Broadway musical in Memorial Auditorium. This year Ram’s Head Theatrical Society presents The Wild Party. The production brings together approximately 70 undergraduate and graduate students in its cast, production team and orchestra. Ram’s Head intends the show to be a rallying place for students from…

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Campus Stories

Stanford Live features world-class artists, integrates them into campus life

When the Danish String Quartet visited campus this past October, the members didn’t simply drop in for a public performance of Wallin, Janácek and Beethoven at Bing Concert Hall and head home. They also joined in a chamber music reading session with students and the St. Lawrence String Quartet, Stanford’s ensemble-in-residence. “They all read together…

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Campus Stories

Stanford hosts Rolston String Quartet

“Where words fail, music speaks.” This simple adage, attributed to 19th-century Danish author of children’s fairy tales Hans Christian Andersen, still rings true today. His words get to the heart of why we listen to music – for its ability to express what we would otherwise never know how to say. The music of the…

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Campus Stories

“The Tempest” behind the scenes

Stanford Theater & Performance Studies presents William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a vibrant, out-of-this-world tale of romance, revenge and forgiveness. As Shakespeare’s works go, few are more magical than The Tempest, a fantastical and deeply human play about an exiled sorcerer, his budding daughter, a civilization abandoned and a world reborn. This production is presented in…

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Campus Stories

Bringing Baby back at Dinkelspiel Auditorium

Sixty years ago, one of the first successful American operas, The Ballad of Baby Doe, made its West Coast premiere at Stanford’s then brand-new Dinkelspiel Auditorium. The opera, based on the true and tragic story of Elizabeth “Baby” Doe Tabor and her romance with the wealthy silver king Horace Tabor, was commissioned by Colorado’s Central…

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Campus Stories

Commitment to reforms paves way for Stanford Band resumption

Stanford Provost John Etchemendy has accepted proposals from the Stanford Band to address concerns about its organizational conduct. Convinced by the strength of those proposals, the provost is replacing a previously announced Band suspension with a pathway for the Band to resume activities as a student-run organization. In a Thursday letter to Band leadership, the…

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Campus Stories

Carl Weber, Stanford professor emeritus of drama and a protégé of director Bertolt Brecht, dies at 91

Carl Weber, the eminent director who brought German experimental theater to America, died in his sleep in Los Altos on Dec. 25. The Stanford professor emeritus of drama was 91. During the 1950s, the German director had been a protégé of Bertolt Brecht, one of the leading theatrical innovators of the 20th century. Weber was…

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Campus Stories

Stanford Symphony Orchestra tours Catalina Island

In an annual tradition, 18 members of the Stanford Symphony Orchestra traveled down the California coast and then 26 miles across the sea to arrive at Catalina Island last month. This is the fourth year that the ensemble has made the trip to perform at the Catalina Island Museum’s Annual Holiday Symphony Concert at the…

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Campus Stories

The NEA announced that Edgar Kunz, Stegner Fellow in Poetry, is to receive an individual creative writing fellowship

Dec. 13, 2016 — Today, the National Endowment for the Arts announced that Edgar Kunz, a second-year Stegner Fellow in Poetry, is one of 37 writers to receive an FY 2017 individual creative writing fellowship of $25,000. “The NEA has an excellent record of supporting writers who have gone on to have impressive literary careers,”…

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Campus Stories

60 Years of Abstraction: Frank Stella at the Anderson and the de Young

During his visit to the Anderson Collection at Stanford, the celebrated artist Frank Stella led a small group of students around the galleries while reflecting on his career, his art, and the works on display at the Anderson. In 1959, Stella stunned a New York art world dominated by Abstract Expressionism with his Black Paintings,…

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Campus Stories

Green Library exhibition highlights 125 years of student life at Stanford

Stanford’s first major student demonstration occurred during the so-called “Liquor Rebellion.” In 1908, 300 students marched to rebel against a new alcohol ban on campus. A suspension letter, addressed to a student who partook in the Liquor Rebellion, is one of thousands of archival treasures on display at a new exhibition at Green Library celebrating…

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Campus Stories

Gaieties marks its 105th year

As Stanford celebrates the year that it turns 125, Ram’s Head Theatrical Society is celebrating a Stanford tradition almost as old: Big Game Gaieties is turning 105. Gaieties is an original, student-written, student-produced musical parody thatPoster for Gaieties is performed in Memorial Auditorium the week before Stanford’s Big Game against Cal. This year, Gaieties is…

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Campus Stories

First-year student’s nature photographs earn international prize

First-year student DAVID ROSENZWEIG‘s photograph of two leopards has won the Youth Category of Nature’s Best Photography Windland Smith Rice International Awards Exhibition for Animal Conservation. Rosenzweig will be honored along with other winners of the photography competition at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History on Nov. 17, where his picture will be…

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Campus Stories

Stanford Philharmonia conductor orchestrates a set of challenges

Each of the four works to be performed in Stanford Philharmonia’s first concert of the academic year presents a challenge of one sort or another, which is all part of Anna Wittstruck’s plan. Wittstruck, the acting assistant professor and interim music director and conductor of orchestral studies in the Department of Music, conducts Stanford Philharmonia,…

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Campus Stories

Stanford in New York: arts, architecture, design and urban studies; media and finance; the global city

As thousands of Stanford students settle into the rhythm of a new academic year on the Farm, 21 juniors and seniors are establishing their autumn quarter routines – seminars, internships and field trips – in the Big Apple through the Stanford in New York program. Under the program, which the university launched last autumn, students…

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Campus Stories

Photo book celebrates Center for African Studies’ 50th anniversary

For 50 years, Stanford’s CENTER FOR AFRICAN STUDIES has been a hub for rigorous inquiry and a welcoming home for all Stanford students and scholars with an interest in Africa. On Sept. 29, the center highlighted its 50th anniversary by debuting a book of remarkable photos by ALEX NANA-SINKAM, ’13, MA ’14, spiced with reflections…

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