Campus Stories - Department of Music

Stanford Humanities Center 2020-2021 Fellows

The Humanities Center offers residential fellowships for the academic year to Stanford and non-Stanford scholars at different career stages, giving them the opportunity to pursue their work in a supportive intellectual community.

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Creative agency during a pandemic

Artists have faced constraints that affected their ability to practice their craft throughout history. The limitations artists currently face due to COVID-19—from a lack of access to concert halls and theaters to the inability to collaborate freely with others in person—are not necessarily new. Yet they also pose an opportunity for creative growth, according to…

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Student winners of the Stanford Concerto Competition play on

Earlier this year, sophomores ADDISON JADWIN and ETHAN CHI won the annual Stanford Concerto Competition. The sophomores planned to perform concertos with the Stanford Symphony Orchestra (SSO) this year, but the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted those plans. Jadwin and Chi. (Image credit: Adriana Ramirez Mirabal) Jadwin was to perform the Walton Viola Concerto this quarter and Chi planned to perform the…

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Department of Music salutes 2020 Deans’ Award winners

We would like to congratulate four winners of the 2020 Deans’ Awards for Academic Achievement, each of whom have included the Department of Music in their Stanford activities while majoring in other areas: Léa Bourgade (upper left) is a senior majoring in Human Biology. Having played the violin for 17 years, she seeks to combine her musical…

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Joshua Redman returns to Stanford for an extended stay

Charismatic jazz saxophonist and composer Joshua Redman returns to Stanford as a visiting artist with the Department of Music in the School of the Humanities and Sciences. Redman was the Mohr Visiting Artist with the Department of Music during winter quarter 2019 and he has a long history with the Stanford Jazz Workshop both as…

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Stanford’s St. Lawrence String Quartet brings Beethoven to the San Francisco County Jail

Music lives and thrives in all sorts of unexpected places: theaters and living rooms, dingy warehouses and brightly lit stadiums. It blasts through car stereos and provides quiet comfort in moments of solitude. Stanford’s ensemble-in-residence, the St. Lawrence String Quartet (SLSQ), brought live music to an unexpected place, far removed from the concert hall. They…

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Welcome to the California Jazz Hall of Fame, Fred Berry

In February, Fredrick Berry, lecturer in Stanford’s Department of Music, was inducted into the California Alliance for Jazz’s Hall of Fame. Berry was one of three individuals chosen by the alliance’s board, which recognizes the best jazz educators and players in California. “I am both grateful and humbled to be considered a member of this…

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A decidedly Stanford take on Leonard Bernstein

The Department of Music and the student-run troupe Stanford Savoyards are combining forces to present a LEONARD BERNSTEIN double feature in Dinkelspiel Auditorium: the satiric operetta Candide and the opera Trouble in Tahiti. Bernstein’s Candide, drawing inspiration from Voltaire’s novella that blends comedy, tragedy and farce, has been transposed to the Farm, using projections of images drawn from the…

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Stanford New Ensemble presents new classical music in new ways to new audiences

Joo-Mee Lee’s vision for the Stanford New Ensemble is as expansive as the “new classical music” genre. Lee, who teaches introductory violin and a course on professional development in music in the Department of Music, said she is taking the Stanford New Ensemble out of the music hall for concerts in untraditional venues around campus….

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Silhouette of man with gun amidst vinyl records.

Stanford scholars spy history of capitalist culture in Bond film songs

In the lead-up to Spectre, the latest film in the decades-long James Bond spy thriller franchise opening this week, much of the recent buzz has centered on another long-running 007 tradition – the title song. Amidst all the speculation about who would sing the new Bond song, Stanford scholars Adrian Daub and Charles Kronengold wrote…

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