Music, like all art, engages the mind and the heart.
The mission of the Bard College Conservatory of Music is to provide the best possible preparation for a person dedicated to a life immersed in the creation and performance of music.
Bagwell was recognized by both organizations for the role he has played over the past two decades in creating a consistent record of excellence in choral performance.
The three-day program brought together renowned guzheng masters from China, musicians from across North America, and young student performers for a gathering of artistic exchange, collaboration, and performance.
A dual opera performance featuring Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amelia Goes to the Ball and Giacomo Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, performed by the Bard College Conservatory of Music and Graduate Vocal Arts Program, was reviewed in the Millbrook Independent. “Both witty operettas celebrate skillful women in a male-dominated society,” wrote Kevin McEneaney.
Zhang Hongyan is an outstanding contemporary Chinese pipa performer and educator. She is a professor and doctoral supervisor at the Central Conservatory and serves as dean of the Department of Traditional Instruments and the Cultural Heritage Protection and Research
Center. She is a guest professor at the Art Institute of Beijing University, honorary academician of Beijing Normal University–Hong Kong Baptist University United International College (UIC), and director of the Central Institute of Vocational and Technical Education in China. She has
also been a visiting scholar at Columbia University.
Zhang studied under Zhang Shijun, Sun Weixi, and Lin Shicheng, beginning her studies when she was seven years old. In 2011, she created a weeklong pipa festival, presenting four concerts of solo, chamber, ensemble, and concerto performances, essentially summarizing all of classical pipa music. In connection with the festival, Zhang also published a research paper, “Boat Against the Current: The Feeling of a Musician Today.” This festival and her paper were among
the most important musical events at the start of the 21st century in China. Zhang, also known as Pipa Walker, has performed at such venues as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, Berlin Philharmonic Hall, Vienna’s Golden Hall, St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre, and Suntory
Hall in Tokyo. As a soloist, she has played with world-class orchestras such as the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic, Brazilian Symphony, and Tokyo Philharmonic. In recognition of her contributions to traditional Chinese music, her album House of Flying Daggers is part of the permanent collection at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
Zhang founded the national orchestra of the Central Conservatory of Music, and has won many awards in China and internationally for music education, including the Yang Xuelan Music Education Award, Baosteel Education Fund Outstanding Teacher Award, and more.
Tara Helen O'Connor
Flute
Tara Helen O'Connor
Tara Helen O'Connor is a charismatic performer noted for her artistic depth, brilliant technique and colorful tone spanning every musical era. Recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant and a two-time Grammy nominee, she was the first wind player chosen to participate in The Bowers Program (formerly CMS Two) and is now a Season Artist of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. A Wm. S. Haynes flute artist, Tara is a regular participant in the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Music@Menlo, Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass, Spoleto Festival USA, Chamber Music Northwest, Mainly Mozart Festival, Music from Angel Fire, Rockport Music, Bay Chamber Concerts, Manchester Music Festival, the Banff Centre, the Great Mountains Music Festival, Chesapeake Music Festival and the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival. Along with her husband Daniel Phillips, she is the newly appointed Co-Artstic Director of the Music From Angel Fire Festival in New Mexico.
A much sought-after chamber musician and soloist, she has premiered hundreds of new works and has collaborated with the Orion String Quartet, St. Lawrence Quartet, Emerson String Quartet, Jaime Laredo, Dawn Upshaw, Eliot Fisk, Jeremy Denk, Ida Kavafian, Peter Serkin and David Shifrin. Tara is a member of the woodwind quintet Windscape, the legendary Bach Aria Group and is a founding member of the Naumburg Award-winning New Millennium Ensemble. A passionate advocate of new music, she is a member of the Talea and Cygnus Ensembles. Tara has appeared on A&E's Breakfast with the Arts and PBS' Live from Lincoln Center. She has recorded for Deutsche Grammophon, EMI Classics, Koch International, CMS Studio Recordings with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and Bridge Records. She has just released a solo CD of American flute works entitled The Way Things Go on Bridge Records with pianist Margaret Kampmeier.
Tara holds a DMA from Stony Brook University where she studied with the late Samuel Baron. Her other teachers include Julius Levine, Thomas Nyfenger, Robert Dick and Keith Underwood. Her yearly summer flute master class at the Banff Centre in Canada was legendary. She is Associate Professor of Flute, Head of the Woodwinds Department and the Coordinator of Classical Music Studies at Purchase College School of the Arts Conservatory of Music. Additionally, Tara is on the faculty of Bard College Conservatory of Music, the Contemporary Performance Program at Manhattan School of Music and is a visiting artist, teacher and coach at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. She lives with her husband, violinist Daniel Phillips and their two miniature dachshunds, Chloé and Ava on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
For more information about the flute studio at Bard, please visit: https://bardconservatoryfl.wixsite.com/my-site.
Elaine Douvas
Oboe
Elaine Douvas
Elaine Douvas, oboe, has been principal oboe of the Metropolitan Opera since 1977 and is on the oboe faculty of the Bard College Conservatory of Music. Since 1982 she has also served as oboe instructor at The Juilliard School and Woodwind Department Chairman there since 1997. Her career highlights include the Strauss Oboe Concerto with the MET Orchestra in Carnegie Hall, James Levine conducting, and Dutilleux's Les Citations with the MET Chamber Ensemble. Her three CDs include a solo recital and her quartet project "Pleasure is the Law", issued by Boston Records, and "Oboe Divas" on the Oboe Classics label. One of the most influential teachers in the USA, her students hold important positions in more than a dozen major orchestras and university faculties. In the summers, Ms. Douvas is an artist faculty member of the Aspen Music Festival and School, and she teaches three intensive, one-week oboe seminars: Le Domaine Forget Academy in Quebec, Interlochen (MI) Arts Camp, and the Hidden Valley Music Seminars in Carmel, California. She has given master classes at the Curtis and Cleveland Institutes of Music, the Manhattan and Eastman Schools of Music, the New World Symphony, and the Conservatories of Beijing and Shanghai. Her three albums of demonstration and written commentary for Music Minus One are used by teachers and students across the country. Originally from Port Huron, Michigan, Ms. Douvas trained at the Cleveland Institute of Music, studying with John Mack, at the Interlochen Arts Academy. Her first job was principal oboe of the Atlanta Symphony under Robert Shaw. For many years she has devoted her spare time to figure skating and earned her Gold Medal for Adult "Moves in the Field" in 2006. Photo by John Abbott.
Ryan MacEvoy McCullough
Visiting Lecturer of Music Theory, Vocal Coach, Pianist
Ryan MacEvoy McCullough
Born in Boston and raised behind the “Redwood Curtain” of northern California, pianist Ryan MacEvoy McCullough has developed a variegated career as soloist, vocal and instrumental collaborator, composer, recording artist, and pedagogue. Ryan’s music-making encompasses work with historical keyboards, electro-acoustic tools and instruments, and close collaborations with some of today’s foremost composers. His longstanding collaborative (and life) partnership with soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon has yielded a substantial crop of new art song repertoire, as well as his work in contemporary ensemble and commissioning project HereNowHear, 2017 recipient of a Fromm Foundation award.
Ryan’s growing discography features many world premiere recordings, including solo piano works of Milosz Magin (Acte Prealable), Andrew McPherson (Secrets of Antikythera, Innova), John Liberatore (Line Drawings, Albany), Nicholas Vines (Hipster Zombies from Mars, Navona), art song and solo piano music of John Harbison and James Primosch with Ms. Fitz Gibbon (Descent/Return, Albany), and art song by Sheila Silver (Beauty Intolerable, Albany, also with Ms. Fitz Gibbon). He is also founder of False Azure Records, which released its inaugural album in 2022 featuring music by Katherine Balch and Dante De Silva (The Labor of Forgetting), and will be releasing a second album in 2023 featuring music by Christopher Stark, John Liberatore, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Ryan has also appeared on PBS’s Great Performances (Now Hear This, “The Schubert Generation”) and is an alumnus of NPR’s From the Top.
As concerto soloist Ryan has appeared frequently with orchestras, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Sarasota Festival Orchestra, Colburn Conservatory Orchestra, Orange County Wind Symphony, and World Festival Orchestra, with such conductors as George Benjamin, Gisele Ben-Dur, Fabien Gabel, Leonid Grin, Anthony Parnther, Larry Rachleff, Mischa Santora, and Joshua Weilerstein. Ryan has collaborated frequently with the Mark Morris Dance Group, contemporary ensembles eighth blackbird and yarn/wire, Mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe, and has been a returning artist at the Tanglewood Music Center, Token Creek Chamber Music Festival, and Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice. He will join the roster of senior artists at the Marlboro Music Festival in summer 2023.
As a teacher, Dr. McCullough has worked to cultivate the kind of multidisciplinary training which will be critical for the next generation of musical artists. He has taught masterclasses in piano performance at Bucknell University, New England Conservatory, Notre Dame University, Cal State Northridge, Washington State University, and Humboldt State University, and has served as piano instructor and chamber music coach at Cornell University and Bard College Conservatory. Additionally, he has developed four unique intersectional courses: Musical Technologies and the Natural World (Cornell University), an upper division creative seminar exploring the relationships between culture and conceptions of place; The Active Listener (Bard College Conservatory), a course focused on field recording techniques and aesthetics; Technological Musicianship (Cornell University), a general-access course designed during the Covid-19 pandemic to train musicians with the skills needed to produce high-quality digital content in a changing professional landscape; and FutureSounds, a composition seminar and instrument building workshop designed to explore the fundamentals of musical syntax and creativity.
He holds his Bachelor of Music from Humboldt State University (studying with Deborah Clasquin), Artist Diplomas from the Colburn Conservatory and the Glenn Gould School at the Royal Conservatory in Toronto (John Perry and David Louie), a Masters in Music from University of Southern California (John Perry), and Master of Fine Arts and Doctor of Musical Arts from Cornell University (Xak Bjerken). He currently teaches at Bard College Conservatory.
Ryan currently lives in Kingston, NY, with his wife, soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon, and cat Coquille.