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.
Jack Ferver is a New York–based writer, choreographer, and director. Their genre defying performances, which have been called “so extreme that they sometimes look and feel like exorcisms” (New Yorker), explore the tragicomedy of the human psyche. Ferver’s “darkly humorous” (New York Times) works interrogate and indict an array of psychological and sociopolitical issues, particularly in the realms of gender, sexual orientation, and power struggles. Their visionary direction blurs boundaries between fantastic theatrics and stark naturalism, character and self, humor and horror.
Ferver’s works have been presented in New York City at the New Museum; New York Live Arts; The Kitchen; The French Institute Alliance Française, as part of Crossing the Line; Abrons Arts Center; Gibney Dance; Performance Space 122; the Museum of Arts and Design, as part of Performa 11; Danspace Project; and Dixon Place. Domestically and internationally, Ferver has been presented by the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College; American Dance Institute (Maryland); Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (Illinois); Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (Oregon); Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA (Maine); Institute of Contemporary Art (Massachussets); Diverse Works in collaboration with the Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston; and Théâtre de Vanves (France).
Ferver’s work has been critically acclaimed in the New York Times, La Monde, Artforum, New Yorker, Time Out NY, Modern Painters, Financial Times, Village Voice, and ArtsJournal. Ferver has received residencies and fellowships from the Maggie Allesee National Center of Choreography at Florida State (2012); Baryshnikov Arts Center (2013); Watermill Center (2014); Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art (2014); and Live Arts Bard, the commissioning and residency program of The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College (2014); and Abrons Art Center (2014-2015). They are a 2016 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant.
Ferver teaches at Bard College in the Theater and Performance Program and for the graduate Vocal Arts Program. They have also taught at NYU Tisch, SUNY Purchase, and have set choreography at The Juilliard School. As an actor they have appeared in numerous films and television series and plays. They are currently working on a solo work to be presented in collaboration with the visual artist Marc Swanson at Mass MoCA and a new play with the playwright Jeremy O Harris.
Jindong Cai
Director, US-China Music Institute; Graduate Conducting Program, faculty
Jindong Cai
Conductor Jindong Cai is the director of the US-China Music Institute and professor of music and arts at Bard College. He is also an associate conductor of The Orchestra Now (TON). Prior to joining Bard he was a professor of performance at Stanford University. Over the 30 years of his career in the United States, Cai has established himself as an active and dynamic conductor, scholar of Western classical music in China, and leading advocate of music from across Asia. Cai started his professional conducting career with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, where he held assistant conducting positions and worked closely with Music Director Jesús López-Cobos, Conductor Keith Lockhart, and Cincinnati Pops Conductor Erich Kunzel. He has worked with numerous orchestras throughout North America and Asia. Cai maintains strong ties to his homeland and has conducted most of the top orchestras in China. He has served as the principal guest conductor of the China Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra since 2012. In 2015, he led the Shenzhen Symphony on its first tour to the American West Coast, performing in Palo Alto, San Jose, Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Diego. The concerts included collaboration with the San Francisco Opera on the premiere of a scene from Bright Sheng’s much anticipated new opera, Dream of the Red Chamber. Cai is a three-time recipient of the ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music. He has recorded for the Centaur, Innova, and Vienna Modern Masters labels. He has close relationships with many Chinese composers and has premiered or performed new works by Tan Dun, Zhou Long, Chen Yi, Bright Sheng, Ye Xiaogang, and Wang Xilin, among others. In recent years, a number of professional orchestras have approached him to create special programs of works by Chinese and other Asian composers, including the “Celebration of Asia” concert with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra in 2016. Cai has received much critical acclaim for his opera performances. In 1992, his operatic conducting debut took place at Lincoln Center’s Mozart Bicentennial Festival in New York, when he appeared as a last-minute substitute for his mentor Gerhard Samuel in the world premiere of a new production of Mozart’s Zaide. The New York Times described the performance as “one of the more compelling theatrical experiences so far offered in the festival.” Cai serves as the principal guest conductor of the Mongolia State Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet in Ulaan Baatar. Since 2011, he has visited Mongolia a dozen times to conduct opera and ballet performances, and led the theater’s historical first tour to China in 2013. Cai joined the Stanford University faculty in 2004 as director of orchestral studies and conducted the Stanford Symphony Orchestra for 11 years. He led the Stanford Symphony Orchestra on three international tours—to Australia and New Zealand in 2005; China in 2008, as part of the Beijing Olympic Cultural Festival; and Europe in 2013. In 2013, Cai launched “The Beethoven Project,” for which the Stanford Symphony Orchestra performed all nine Beethoven symphonies and all five of the composer’s piano concerti—featuring Van Cliburn Gold Medal–winning pianist and Stanford alumnus Jon Nakamatsu—in one season. Cai is also the founder of the Stanford Pan-Asian Music Festival. Over its 11-year history, the festival—which is dedicated to promoting an appreciation of music in contemporary Asia through an annual series of concerts and academic activities—has become one of the most important platforms for the performance of Asian music in the United States. As a scholar and expert on music in contemporary China and Asia, Cai is frequently interviewed by news media around the world, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BBC, and NPR. Together with his wife Sheila Melvin, Cai has coauthored several New York Times articles on the performing arts in China and the book Rhapsody in Red: How Western Classical Music Became Chinese. Their latest book, Beethoven in China: How the Great Composer Became an Icon in the People’s Republic, was published by Penguin in September 2015. Born in Beijing, Cai received his early musical training in China, where he learned to play violin and piano. He came to the United States for his graduate studies at the New England Conservatory and the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati. In 1989, he was selected to study with famed conductor Leonard Bernstein at the Tanglewood Music Center, and won the Conducting Fellowship Award at the Aspen Music Festival in 1990 and 1992.
Daniel Phillips
Violin
Daniel Phillips
Violinist Daniel Phillips enjoys a versatile career as an established chamber musician, solo artist, and teacher. A graduate of Juilliard, his major teachers were his father, Eugene Phillips, Ivan Galamian, Sally Thomas, Nathan Milstein, Sandor Vegh, and George Neikrug. He is a founding member of the 32-year-old Orion String Quartet, long time artist members of The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Available on recording are the complete quartets of Beethoven and Leon Kirchner. Since winning the 1976 Young Concert Artists Competition, he has been an up and coming soloist , including engagements with many orchestras, like the Pittsburgh, Boston, Houston, New Jersey, Phoenix, San Antonio, and Yakima symphonies. He appears regularly at the Spoleto USA Festival, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Chamber Music Northwest, Chesapeake Music Festival, Music@Menlo, and has participated in the International Musicians Seminar in Cornwall, England since its inception. He also has served on the summer faculty of the Heifetz Institute , St. Lawrence String Quartet Seminar at Stanford, the new Vivace online festival. He was a member of the renowned Bach Aria Group, and has toured and recorded in a string quartet for SONY with Gidon Kremer, Kim Kashkashian, and Yo-Yo Ma. A judge in the 2018 Seoul International Violin Competition, he is a professor at the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College and on the faculties of the Mannes College of Music, Bard College Conservatory, and The Juilliard School. And his wife, flutist Tara Helen O'Connor, are newly appointed artistic directors of Music from Angel Fire in New Mexico, They live on Manhattan's upper west side with their two adorable dachshunds.
Jenny Q Chai
Piano Masterclasses; Chinese Admissions Ambassador
Jenny Q Chai
An artist of singular vision, pianist Jenny Q Chai is widely renowned for her
ability to illuminate musical connections throughout the centuries. With radical
joie de vivre and razor-sharp intention, Chai creates layered multimedia
programs which explore and unite elements of science, nature, fashion, and art.
The New Yorker describes Chai as “a pianist whose dazzling facility is matched
by her deep musicality.”
Chai’s instinctive understanding of new music is complemented by a deep
grounding in core repertoire, with special affinity for Schumann, Scarlatt
Beethoven, Bach, Debussy, and Ravel. She is a noted interpreter of 20th-century
masters Cage, Messiaen, and Ligeti, and her career is threaded through with
strong relationships and close collaborations with a range of notable contemporary
composers, including Tan Dun, Jarosław Kapuściński, Andy Akiho, Pamela Z,
Lukas Ligeti, Cindy Cox, Annie Gosfield and György Kurtág. With a deft poeti
touch, Chai weaves this wide-ranging repertoire into a gorgeous and lucid
musical tapestry. Chai is also a vital champion and early tester of the groundbreaking
synchronous score following software program, Antescofo. Developed at IRCAM by
scientist Arshia Cont, the software offers a real time computer and animation respons
to live performance elements, enabling performers to create multimedia presentations
of AI sophisticated and expressive fluency. Chai explored and helped hone Antescof
in residence at IRCAM alongside frequent collaborator Jarosław Kapuściński, and has
since toured internationally with the software offering multimedia performances i
Shanghai, New York, Havana, and elsewhere. In September 2019, Chai gave a TEDx
Talk titled When Classical Music Meets Technology.
Other notable highlights include her 2024 Shanghai Symphony Hall Audiovisual AI
Concert, 2012 Carnegie Hall recital debut; many
performances at (le) Poisson Rouge, including a 2016 Antescofo-supported
program, Where’s Chopin?; her 2018 Wigmore Hall debut with a program
exploring the relation between color and sound; lectures and recitals at Shanghai
Symphony Hall, Shanghai Concert Hall, and Shanghai Mercedes Benz Arena; a
featured performance at Tan Dun’s International Music Medicine Festival in Qingdao;
the Leo Brouwer Festival in Havana, Cuba; Philippe Manoury’s double-piano concerto,
Zones de turbulences, at the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary
Music with duo partner, pianist Adam Kośmieja and the Polish National Radio
Symphony Orchestra; and much more.
Her immersive approach to music is also channeled into her work with FaceArt Institute
of Music, the Shanghai-based organization she founded and runs, offering musi
education and an international exchange of music and musicians in China and beyond.
In summer 2019, Chai oversees FaceArt’s first ever month-long Co-Creation Summe
Festival, which invites International piano and composition faculty. Additionally, Chai
served on the Board of Directors of the New York City-based contemporary music
organization Ear to Mind, and has published a doctoral dissertation on Marco Stroppa’s
Miniature Estrose which is collected by many schools including Stanford and Harvard
University.
Chai has recorded for labels such as Divine Art, Deutschlandfunk, Naxos, ArpaViva and
MSR. In 2010, she released her debut recording, New York Love Songs, featuring
interpretations of works by Cage and Ives among others, and her most recent
recording, (S)yn(e)sth(e)te, was released by MSR Records in 2017. She can also be
heard on Michael Vincent Waller’s Five Easy Pieces and Cindy Cox’s Hierosgamos. In
2021, her newest album on Bach, Ives and Schumann Kreisleriana received positive
reviews globally. The album was featured by Apple Music as one of its selected best
Classical Music albums.
The recipient of the Yvar Mikhashoff Trust’s 2011 Pianist/Composer Commissionin
Project, the DAAD Arts and Performance award in 2010, Chamber Music America
commissioning award and first prize winner of the Keys to the Future Contemporar
Solo Piano Festival, Jenny Q Chai studied at the Shanghai Music Conservatory, the
Curtis Institute of Music, the Manhattan School of Music, and in Cologne University of
Music and Dance. Her teachers include Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Seymour Lipkin,
Solomon Mikowsky, Marilyn Nonken, and Anthony de Mare.
Academically, Chai has given lecture recitals at universities such as Stanford, Harvard,
University of California Berkeley, NYU, Shanghai Conservatory and more.
Chai is a former piano faculty member of the University of California Berkeley, an
alumni mentor at Curtis Institute of Music and an official career mentor at Manhatt
School of Music. In 2022, Chai became Fazioli Global Piano Ambassador.
Chai is a social activist who works passionately on environmental causes through her
music and runs a personal animal shelter. She has rescued over one hundred small
animals in China since the pandemic and is an active donor to many animal rescue