Headliners

Inspired by the richness of Baroque music and close friendships, ALAN CHOO (MM ’14, Violin, Early Music; GPD ’16, Violin), BRENDA KOH (MM ’19, Violin), GABRIEL LEE (MM ’17, Violin), CHERYL LIM (DMA ’14, Flute), JOACHIM THEODORE LIM (MM ’16, Percussion), QIN YING TAN (MM ’10, Piano; MM ’12, Harpsichord; MM ’13, Musicology), DMA candidate TZU-JOU YEH (MM ’15, GPD ’17, Cello), CHEN ZHANGYI (MM ’11, DMA ’15, Composition, MM ’15, Music Theory Pedagogy), and RACHEL HO, who was a flute exchange student, have formed Singapore’s first Baroque orchestra, Red Dot Baroque.

OPERA America has announced that nine companies will be awarded $100,000 in grants for commissioning operas by female composers. The recipients include Beth Morrison Projects for Composition Professor DU YUN’s In Our Daughter’s Eyes, a one-man opera featuring baritone Nathan Gunn. It is slated to appear in the 2021 PROTOTYPE Festival followed by a West Coast premiere with LA Opera.

Assistant Professor of Musicology DAVID GUTKIN and Assistant Professor of Composition FELIPE LARA are 2020 awardees of the Johns Hopkins Catalyst Awards. Gutkin’s award will support his work to complete a book exploring the New York avant-garde’s influence on opera and operatic form. Lara’s award will support the creation of Chambered Spirals, a new 30-minute work for large mixed chamber ensemble and its premiere, at Peabody, by New York’s Talea Ensemble. The work will be the last remaining piece to complete a largescale cycle titled Ciclo Concertante.

SAHUN SAM HONG (GPD ’15, MM ’17, Piano), a DMA piano candidate, has been awarded a cash prize of $50,000 as one of the finalists of the 2021 American Pianists Awards. Rather than wait for the winner to be crowned in June 2021, the American Pianists Association decided to award the five finalists a year early. The organization saw the need for these artists to receive early assistance since they are not currently performing due to COVID-19. The competition will culminate with a celebratory weekend June 25–27, 2021, in Indianapolis, at which time the winner of the Christel DeHaan Classical Fellowship will be announced.

AMY BETH KIRSTEN (DMA ’10, Composition) was selected as one of four composers to receive a $10,000 Arts and Letters Award in Music, which honors outstanding artistic achievement and acknowledges composers who have arrived at their own voice.

Commencement 2020: A Virtual Ceremony

Like so many institutions, the Peabody Conservatory saw its plans for an in-person graduation ceremony disrupted by the coronavirus and therefore held the event online on May 20. The Peabody Virtual Orchestra opened the ceremony with a performance of Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance, which was later aired on CBS Evening News with Norah O’Donnell as part of a segment highlighting graduation celebrations across the nation.

Author Alex Ross (above), winner of a 2008 MacArthur Fellowship and longtime music critic for The New Yorker, addressed the graduates and received the George Peabody Medal for Outstanding Contributions to Music in America in honor of his impact as a chronicler of our art and times.

Ross noted that music is often in the background, but said, “As musicians and composers of high accomplishment, you deserve to be in the foreground. Music can comfort, can elevate, but it is, above all, a human art, captive to the entire vast, complex range of human intellect and emotion.” Although the event was not held on the Miriam A. Friedberg Concert Hall stage, graduating students performed as usual — just from their homes. Gavin Horning (GPD ’20, Jazz Guitar), Hanna Hyunjung Kim (MM ’17; AD ’20, Piano), and Ruoying Pan (BM ’20, Violin) performed works by Thad Jones, Alfred Grunfeld, and Eugène Ysaÿe.

Several notable awards normally given at graduation were announced after the virtual event. Melody Leung (BM ’20, Harp, Music Education) received the Peabody Alumni Award for the undergraduate with highest overall GPA, and the Azalia H. Thomas Prizes, for undergraduates with highest theory GPA, were given to Leung, Audrey Maxner (BM ’20, Violin), Téa Mottolese (BM ’20, Saxophone), and Lauren Redditt (BM ’20, Voice).

For the first time, a student was invited to speak during the ceremony. CJ Hartung (BM ’20, Voice) (above), who was instrumental in reenergizing Peabody’s student government and served as its president in 2019– 20, was inspired during quarantine by a lyric from Funny Girl: “People who need people are the luckiest people in the world.” “So as the world begins to heal from COVID-19 and as you begin the next stages of your careers, I charge you all with the responsibility of being an artist who needs people — a person who champions what it truly means to create art, to be an advocate for the arts, and to be a friend and a colleague to those around you,” Hartung said in his speech.

This year marked the Peabody Conservatory’s 138th graduation exercises with 72 Bachelor of Music degrees, 95 Master of Music degrees, eight Master of Arts degrees, 32 Graduate Performance Diplomas, two Artist Diplomas, and 16 Doctor of Musical Arts degrees conferred.

‘Let’s Go Find Them’

It has been nearly five years since Elijah Wirth (BM ’99, Tuba; MM ’02, Wind Conducting and Music Education), chair of winds, brass, percussion, and music theory at Peabody Preparatory, set out on an audacious quest — to recover, arrange, and disseminate the finest works of musical luminaries who, because of gender, race, or ethnicity, never made it into the musical canon. His ultimate goal: to revolutionize the country’s high school music curriculum.

“It was after the Freddie Gray uprising, because it had such a powerful impact on the city and the students I care about,” says Wirth, who is director of the Peabody Preparatory Wind Orchestra and helps run Peabody’s Tuned-In program for gifted musicians from Baltimore City’s public schools.

“I felt so powerless and wanted to do something, even if it was a small something, to bring about change,” he says. “And, on a personal level, my wife, who works as a lawyer in D.C., is Dominican, and she’d be out pushing our baby — who looks very white, and she does not — in the stroller, and people would ask if she was the nanny. So, I wanted to do something to counter the ignorance out there.”

Wirth found his inspiration in his Preparatory Wind Orchestra students, including the Tuned-In members. “Looking at them, I realized I had to diversify my programming,” he says. “And then Aaron Dworkin came to speak.” Dworkin is a Peabody Preparatory alumnus and MacArthur Fellow who founded the Sphinx Organization to promote diversity in the arts. “Someone asked him about Black composers, and he said, ‘They’re out there, they’re just not being performed.’ So I thought, ‘Okay, if they’re out there, let’s go find them.’”

Wirth scoured the internet, pored over repertoire lists, and devoured biographies of African American composers. “Then I stumbled on the fact that Scott Joplin, the ragtime pianist, also wrote operas, and

I thought, ‘Wow, there’s got to be something in there I can arrange for my Preparatory Wind Orchestra.’” There was, and he did.

It was Joplin’s vibrant overture to Treemonisha, the tale of the adopted daughter of former slaves Ned and Monisha, who is named Treemonisha because she was found under a tree. It was the first opera about life, post-slavery, by a Black composer, and is just one of a growing list (16 to date) of works by Black and female composers Wirth has already arranged and edited for his students, and one of eight they have recorded.

Jonah Lassiter, a talented flute player and Tuned-In alumnus who recently graduated from the Baltimore School for the Arts, says it was “amazing to record those pieces. As an African American musician, I am so proud of [Wirth] for wanting to change the music we play by bringing out these Black and female composers and giving them the credit and recognition they deserve, but haven’t always received.”

In the beginning, Wirth did most of his research online, often with the help of kind librarians who would send him scores to download. But in 2017 he applied for his first Dean’s Incentive Grant and was awarded a $5,000 stipend from Peabody that allowed him to travel to places like the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University and The British Library in London, where he spent long days photographing rare scores by some of the most influential African American composers of the early part of the 20th century. These included W.C. Handy, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Florence Price, and James Reese Europe, whose band was the first to play ragtime in Europe and who was so iconic a musician that Fats Waller kept a huge photograph of him above his piano.

Isolating with his family at home because of the pandemic and inspired by the worldwide uprisings that resulted from the murder of George Floyd, Wirth started making all of the edited scores and recordings available online, beginning with Europe’s triumphant “Castle Walk” and followed quickly by the Joplin overture, Coleridge-Taylor’s “Danse Nègre,” and works by female composers, including Louise Farrenc’s Overture No. 2. As more arrangements and recordings are produced, they will be added to this rich and readily accessible cache.

“JW Pepper, a huge online distributor of sheet music, has a self-publishing option, so I am putting all of the arrangements on their website, with the proceeds going directly to the Tuned-In program,” Wirth says.

Marin Alsop, director of Peabody’s Graduate Conducting Program and music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, has been a major inspiration, Wirth says, and invited him to the BSO archives to view her papers, including priceless orchestral scores she long ago unearthed and arranged by the great James P. Johnson. Known as the king of stride piano, Johnson was a key figure in the evolution of ragtime to jazz, and his most famous composition, “The Charleston,” became an anthem of the 1920s. There were also female performing artists like Mary Howe, who studied piano at Peabody and later in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. But Howe was also a prolific composer, including for orchestra, which was rare for women at the time. “Women who composed for large orchestras weren’t really taken seriously until the end of the 20th century,” Wirth says.

Wirth’s vision for the project keeps expanding — to include contemporary composers, Latin American and Asian composers, and to produce educational videos to accompany the Wind Orchestra’s recordings and tell the artists’ stories. “I love those stories, and I love sharing them with my students,” he says. “I am trying to create four years of programming that actually reflects our demographic makeup, and also balances the traditional canon of wind ensemble music. It has forced me to think hard about why I program what I do. Do I perform this ‘classic’ because it’s great, or because another piece wasn’t given an opportunity to take its place?”

The project seems overwhelming at times, he says, but also enormously compelling. “We have been missing the very specific artistic qualities that women and different ethnicities bring to music,” he says, “and it’s a thrill and a privilege to reclaim their voices.”

Podcast Series Makes a Powerful Debut

If LAUNCHPad is the perfect name for the dynamic reincarnation of Peabody’s career office, Max Q — the title of the career team’s new podcast — is a playfully apt extension of the metaphor.

“Max Q” is the moment, about a minute into a rocket launch, when the vehicle is subject to the most stress, just before it lifts victoriously out of the dense lower atmosphere. “My LAUNCHPad colleague Robin McGinness (MM ’17 Voice), who is a rocket aficionado, came up with the name, and it was such a great fit because we wanted to focus on the incredibly stressful, but also incredibly exciting first few years after graduation,” says Assistant Director of LAUNCHPad Christina Manceor (MM ’17 Percussion).

Audio edited by Greg Hays (MM ’20, Guitar) with intro music by junior Music for New Media student Vincent Fasano and hosted by McGinness, Manceor, and LAUNCHPad Director Zane Forshee (MM ’01, GPD ’03, DMA ’11, Guitar), the podcast features inspirational conversations with recent alumni about the many ways in which their paths have unfolded since Peabody. Max Q debuted at the end of January and posts monthly. But then came COVID-19, the abrupt end of in-person classes and performances, and a new and unprecedented uncertainty for Peabody students, faculty, and staff members. “There was a lot of fear,” says Manceor. “Students suddenly couldn’t do live performances, they couldn’t go into classrooms and teach, they couldn’t get together to practice. So we immediately launched an additional series of special COVID-19 podcasts, with Dr. Forshee interviewing distinguished artists about the impact of the pandemic on the industry and how students might make the best use of an incredibly disorienting time.”

The COVID series has included interviews with Marin Alsop, director of Peabody’s graduate conducting program and music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra; Joseph Young (AD ’09, Conducting), the Ruth Blaustein Rosenberg Artistic Director of Ensembles; Sean Jones, the Richard and Elizabeth Case Chair in Jazz Studies; and danah bella, chair of Peabody Conservatory dance. They talk about the sometimes difficult impact of the pandemic on their own lives, but also about the unprecedented opportunities — to create, innovate, practice, explore, compose, and even to study online, often for free, with teachers around the world, many of whom were all but inaccessible to most students before they, too, were sidelined by the virus.

“The interviews have been so powerful, so full of inspiration and hope,” says Manceor. “So we would really like to promote Max Q even beyond Peabody, because it could be a valuable resource for art students and recent graduates everywhere.”

Rowe Appointed to Top Post in External Relations

Courtney Rowe has been appointed associate dean for external relations at the Peabody Institute, following an intense national search over the past year.

Rowe comes to Peabody from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she served as assistant dean for the college of music advancement team, the senior development officer supporting the College of Music and the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. During her tenure at CU Boulder, she led the College of Music’s $50 million campaign to support the school’s people, programs, endowment, and a major facilities renovation.

Rowe previously held development and program implementation roles at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Girls in the Game, and DePaul University. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Colorado Boulder. The New Leaders Council selected her as a fellow in 2013, and she has participated in leadership development training through The Fundraising School at the Indiana University Lilly School of Philanthropy. In fall 2020, she is completing her Master of Public Policy from DePaul University.

“I am thrilled to join Dean Bronstein’s leadership team to develop and nurture meaningful relationships with our volunteers, donors, alumni, and patrons in support of Peabody’s outstanding programs and people,” says Rowe. “It is a privilege to stand at the intersection of world class education and the arts in a culturally rich setting like Baltimore. I have long believed, and personally witnessed, how the pursuit of higher education can improve an individual’s circumstances, if not completely change their lives. Similarly, the opportunity to drive growth and excitement for the performing arts and the next generation of artists is more important than ever at this moment in time.”