School Notes: School of Music
July/August 2007

Trumpeting for Yale

This spring, trumpet professor Allan Dean and his six Yale School of Music students premiered a new work they commissioned from Joan Panetti ’74MusAD, the Sylvia and Leonard Marx Professor of Music. The resulting work, Panetti's three-minute "Fanfare," was performed first at the school's commencement on May 28 and then June 1 at the 32nd annual conference of the International Trumpet Guild at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. A reviewer at the conference had praise for both the piece and the performance: "Featuring imitative textures, bold sonorities, and intriguing complexity, this fine work received a superb performance from these fine players. Bravo, Yale Trumpets!" The performers were Daniel Beck ’07MusM, Thomas Bergeron ’08MusM, Joel Brennan ’07MusAM, Aaron Hodgson ’07MusM, Chih-Hao Lin ’08MusM, and Olivia Malin ’07MusM.

Trio of Fulbrights

For the first time in the school's history, three students have been awarded Fulbright grants to study abroad in the same year. Eric Beach ’07MusM will study percussion and the organization of contemporary music in Freiburg, Germany. Trumpeter Joel Brennan ’07MusAM will be based in Utrecht, The Netherlands, working with a member of the Rotterdam Philharmonic on contemporary Dutch brass music; Brennan plans on giving recitals throughout the Netherlands of new music for trumpet by both Dutch and American composers. Claire Happel ’07ArtA, a harpist, will study with the renowned harpist Jana Bouskova in Prague, Czech Republic.

YSM at Arts and Ideas Festival

On June 14 in New Haven, the Martha Graham Dance Company performed at the Shubert Theater with a live orchestra from the School of Music. The program, part of the city's International Festival of Arts and Ideas, featured Graham's 1954 masterpiece, Ardent Song, danced to music by Alan Hovhaness; Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring; and Wallingford Riegger's Chronicle. After the performance, the Yale ensemble recorded the Hovhaness work in Sprague Hall for the Graham company to use on tour.

The festival's presentation of Yale Opera on the Green continued this year with Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld. First performed in Sprague Hall in April, the production, under the Italian director Pier Francesco Maestrini, brought the outrageous satirical operetta into the world of National Lampoon's Animal House. While the Sprague production offered only piano accompaniment, the festival performance featured the New Haven Symphony.