Yale School of Music Performs 'Voices of American Music', 4/8

On Thursday, April 8 at 7:30 p.m., the Yale School of Music continues its third annual Yale in New York series with Voices of American Music. The works of some of America's most important composers will be heard in a rare program that joins music with audio and video interviews from the archives of the Oral History of American Music (OHAM) project at Yale. Founded by Vivian Perlis, one of the foremost historians of American music, OHAM is dedicated to collecting and preserving audio and video memoirs of notable figures in American music.

As musicologist H. Wiley Hitchcock said, "Vivian's archive is an incomparable resource, the most extensive ongoing oral history project in America."

Historic video and audio interviews and photographs relating to each composer on the program will be presented as fascinating entr'actes between performances of their music. In the opening segment, Vivian Perlis recalls her first interview forty years ago with Charles Ives' business partner, Julian Myrick. This interview was the inspiration for her Ives oral history project, a groundbreaking look at the Connecticut iconoclast and Yale graduate. The Ives project, in turn, was the cornerstone of the magnificent collection of interviews that would later become the Oral History of American Music project.

Voices of American Music continues with words, images, and music of eight other prominent composers from the archive, which today boasts over 2,000 interviews. While interviews with and about American composers form the core of the collection, OHAM has specialized collections to preserve the voices of those associated with Duke Ellington, Aaron Copland, and Paul Hindemith. The musical selections by Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, Eubie Blake, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Steve Reich, Jacob Druckman, and John Cage reflect the breadth of the archives, and will feature performances by artist faculty from the Yale School of Music along with students, alumni, and special guest artists. Among the performers are clarinetist Richard Stoltzman, a graduate of the School of Music, and faculty artists Willie Ruff (French horn and bass), Wei-Yi Yang (piano), Allan Dean (trumpet), William Purvis (horn), and Scott Hartman (trombone).

Yale in New York is the acclaimed series in which distinguished faculty-many of them famous soloists-share the limelight with exceptional alumni and students on Carnegie's stages, capturing the intense collaboration found on every level at the Yale School of Music. The 2009-2010 season has showcased the classical legacy of Benny Goodman and undiscovered Prokofiev works; upcoming events include Penderecki conducting Penderecki. The series is curated by David Shifrin.

Music and Performers

Charles Ives '1898 BA: From the Steeples and Mountains
Yale Brass Ensemble
Yale Percussion Group

Aaron Copland: Piano Variations
Wei-Yi Yang '04 DMA (Yale faculty)

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich: Lament for Cello and Piano
Lachezar Kostov '08 MM, cello
Viktor Valkov, piano

Eubie Blake: Memories of You
Duke Ellington: Black and Tan Fantasy
Willie Ruff '54 MM, French horn and bass (Yale faculty)
Dwike Mitchell, piano

Steve Reich: New York Counterpoint
Richard Stoltzman '67 MM, clarinet

Jacob Druckman: Dance With Shadows
Yale Brass Ensemble (mixed faculty and students)

John Cage: Third Construction
Yale Percussion Group
Robert van Sice, director

Aaron Copland: Fanfare for The Common Man
Yale Brass Ensemble
Yale Percussion Group

ORAL HISTORY OF AMERICAN MUSIC

Oral History of American Music (OHAM) is the preeminent organization dedicated to the collection and preservation of recorded memoirs of the creative musicians of our time. OHAM's origins can be traced back to 1969 when Vivian Perlis, then a reference librarian at Yale's Music Library, started to conduct interviews with those who had known and worked with the composer Charles Ives. Her award-winning book resulting from those interviews, Charles Ives Remembered (Yale University Press, 1974), was quickly hailed as an exemplar of how oral history could illuminate the activities of musicians and their place in society.

Following the Ives project, it was evident that no systematic scholarly research was documenting creative musical figures via tape-recorded interviews. Several composers - among them Arthur Berger, Elliott Carter, Lou Harrison, Bernard Herrmann, Nicolas Slonimsky, and Dane Rudhyar - had spoken about Ives, and in so doing, about themselves. These interviews formed the nucleus of the Oral History of American Music project, which over four decades has continued to focus on composers. To date, OHAM holds over 2,000 interviews with over 900 subjects.

In addition to documenting contemporary American music, OHAM functions as an archive and provides primary source materials to scholars, arts presenters, and media producers. Several highly regarded musicological publications have come directly from OHAM interviews, including Copland: 1900-1942 and Copland Since 1943, both co-authored by Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, and Composers' Voices from Ives to Ellington, a book and CD publication co-authored by Perlis and OHAM Associate Director Libby Van Cleve. OHAM has recently produced three podcasts on the composers Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Charles Ives.

OHAM operates under the aegis of Yale's Irving S. Gilmore Library, one of the preeminent music research collections in the United States.

VIVIAN PERLIS

Vivian Perlis is an historian in American music, specializing in twentieth century composers. She is widely known for her publications, lectures, and recording and film productions. On the faculty of the Yale School of Music, Perlis is the founding director of Oral History of American Music.

Her book publications include Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), for which she was awarded the Kinkeldey Prize of the American Musicological Society, and "An Ives Celebration" (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976). With composer Aaron Copland, Perlis is co-author of Copland: 1900 Through 1942 (New York: St. Martin's/ Marek, 1984), which garnered a Deems Taylor/ ASCAP award, and Copland: Since 1943 (New York: St. Martin's, 1989). Her most recent book, Composers' Voices from Ives to Ellington, co-authored with Libby Van Cleve, includes two CDs and is derived from interviews in the OHAM archive. Perlis has also published numerous articles and reviews. She has produced recordings of the music of Leo Ornstein and Charles Ives, as well as television documentaries on Ives, Eubie Blake, Aaron Copland, and John Cage.

Among her honors and awards are the Charles Ives Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1972); a Grammy nomination for "Charles Ives 100th Anniversary" (1974); the Harvey Kantor Award for excellence in the field of oral history (1984); a Guggenheim Fellowship (1987); and the Irving Lowens Award for distinguished scholarship in American Music from The Sonneck Society (1991).

THE YALE SCHOOL OF MUSIC

The Yale School of Music, established in 1894 and one of four graduate schools in the arts at the University, has a long tradition of leadership in the training of performers and composers. It is a graduate-professional school and the only school of music in the Ivy League. The school is highly selective, with approximately 200 students who come from the finest American and international conservatories and universities to study with a distinguished faculty. The school's alumni are found in major positions in virtually every sphere of music making and administration. Yale graduates perform in most of the major American symphony orchestras, and voice alumni have enjoyed great success in joining professional opera companies throughout the world, with over a dozen Yale graduates on the artist roster of the Metropolitan Opera. The list of composition alumni, faculty, and guest professors is a virtual Who's Who of the creators of new music of the past century. Along with artistic accomplishment, Yale School of Music graduates have demonstrated strong leadership in guiding the course of numerous academic and cultural institutions. The Yale School of Music engages in cooperative partnerships with several leading international conservatories and schools, including: the Central Conservatory of Music (Beijing, China), Korean National University of the Arts-School of Music and Seoul National University-College of Music (Seoul, Korea), Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory (Russia), Royal Academy of Music (London), and the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music (Budapest, Hungary). The Yale School of Music offers the Doctor of Musical Arts, Master of Musical Arts, and Master of Music degrees, as well as the Artist Diploma and the Certificate in Performance. In Fall 2005, the Yale School of Music received an unprecedented gift of $100 million, allowing the school to solidify its international position of leadership by expanding programs, renovating facilities, and offering full-tuition scholarships to all students.

 

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