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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.

More About Us
  • Visiting Bard
    Interested in visiting Bard for a campus tour or performance? 
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A singer in front of an orchestra in Olin Hall
Photo by Karl Rabe

Offering Unique Undergraduate and Graduate Programs

  • Undergraduate Double Degree in Liberal Arts and Music Performance (BA and BM)
  • Graduate Degree in Vocal Arts (MM)
  • Graduate Degree in Conducting (MM)
  • Graduate Degree in Instrumental Studies (MM)
  • Master of Arts in Chinese Music and Culture (MA)
  • Advanced Performance Studies 
  • Postgraduate Collaborative Piano Fellowship
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The Bard Conservatory also offers a Preparatory Division for students ages 3–18.

News

A professional photo of Composer in Residence Missy Mazzoli.

Composer in Residence Missy Mazzoli Profiled in the New York Times

“We want the field to expand,” said Mazzoli, “and so bringing in [diversity] helps the field survive and thrive.”
 

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a man in a black t-shirt stands in front of a hallway of gothic stone arches

James Bagwell Named Principal Conductor of the Tulsa Symphony Orchestra and Berkshire Bach Society

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.

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a man conducts an orchestra

US-China Music Institute's Conference on Chinese Music in the West Featured in China Daily 

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.

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Meet Our Faculty

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  • David Sytkowski
    Aural Skills, Undergraduate Vocal Coaching, Undergraduate Opera Workshop

    David Sytkowski

    David Sytkowski, pianist and vocal coach, is a Visiting Artist in Residence at Bard College, where he is Director of Music for Opera Workshop, coaches singers, teaches private piano, and teaches Aural Skills.



    In September 2019, he made his Joe’s Pub debut in Under The Influence with legendary cabaret artist Justin Vivian Bond. This led to Auntie Glam’s Happy Hour, a weekly livestream during the initial COVID-19 shut down that New York Times critic Zachary Woolf proclaimed one of “The Best of the Year’s At-Home Divas” in December 2020.



    As principal music coach for the Bard SummerScape festival for six years, he has prepared Korngold’s Die tote Stadt and Das Wunder Der Heliane, Rubenstein’s Demon, Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tsar’s Bride, Dvorak’s Dimitrij, Mascagni’s Iris, Smyth’s The Wreckers, and Weber’s Euryanthe.



    Other recent engagements include the New York premiere of Gregory Spears’s Fellow Travelers for the PROTOTYPE festival in January 2018, Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s The Mother of Us All for the reopening of the Hudson Opera House in Fall 2017 with R.B. Schlather, Berkshire Opera Festival’s inaugural production of Madama Butterfly, Hindemith's The Long Christmas Dinner and Von Schillings's Mona Lisa with American Symphony Orchestra. He frequently appears as a symphony pianist and collaborator at venues such as Carnegie Hall, Weill Recital Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.
  • Mariko Anraku
    Harp

    Mariko Anraku

    Harpist Mariko Anraku is hailed as "a manifestation of grace and elegance" (Jerusalem Post) and has enchanted audiences through numerous appearances as soloist, as well as chamber and orchestral musician. The New York Times has hailed her as a "masterful artist of intelligence and wit".

    Since 1995, she has held the position of Associate Principal Harpist of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. Since her debut as soloist with the Toronto Symphony led by Sir Andrew Davis, Ms. Anraku has appeared with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the Vienna Chamber Orchestra, New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra, Tokyo Symphony, Yomiuri Symphony Orchestra, Concerto Soloists of Philadelphia, among others. As a recitalist, she has performed in major concert halls on three continents, including Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall and Markin Concert Hall in New York, Jordan Hall in Boston, Bing Theater at the LA County Museum, The Opera Comique in Paris, the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, the Casals, Kioi and Oji Halls in Tokyo, The Shanghai Oriental Arts Center among many others.

    Ms. Anraku's impressive list of awards include First Prize at the First Nippon Harp Competition, First Prize, the Channel Classics Recording Prize and the ITT Corporation Prize at the Concert Artists Guild Competition in New York, and the Pro Musicis Foundation International Award. She was also awarded Third Prize and the Pearl Chertok Prize for the best performance of the required Israeli composition at the 11th International Harp Contest in Israel.

    Ms. Anraku's strong commitment to contemporary music and the expansion of boundaries of the harp repertoire has included an invitation to premiere works by T oshio Hosokawa at the Donaueschingen Musiktage in Germany, the Wien Modern in Austria, and festivals in Tubinger and Cologne, Germany, collaborating with traditional Japanese musicians and monks. Ms. Anraku also gave the USA premiere of Jean-Michel Damase's Concerto "Ballade" with the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra at the American Harp Society Conference. She has also collaborated in a ''Tribute to Takemitsu" performance at Markin Concert Hall in New York.

    An active chamber musician, Ms. Anraku has performed at the Spoleto, Tanglewood, Newport and Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festivals in the USA, The Banff Centre and the Festival of Sound in Canada, the Spoleto Festival in Italy, and the Karuizawa and Takefu Music Festivals, among others in Japan. She has also performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Harvard Music Association, and Columbia University, and has collaborated with artists including clarinetist Richard Stoltzman and flutists Emmanuel Pahud, Carol Wincenc, Paula Robison, Emily Beynon, Michael Parloff, Marina Piccinini, Stefan Ragnar Hoskuldsson and Denis Bouriakov.

    Ms. Anraku has recorded exclusively for EMI Classics, including three solo recordings and "Beau Soir" a collaboration with eminent flutist Emmanuel Pahud. "Music for Harp", a compilation from her solo CDs is also available.

    Ms.Anraku is a faculty member of the Manhattan School of Music, Bard Conservatory, and The Pacific Music Festival (PMF). She is a devoted teacher, deeply committed to the mentoring and development of young musicians and has given masterclasses at The Curtis Institute of Music, The Juilliard School, Peabody Institute, The Glenn Gould School, Conservatorium Maastricht, The Central Conservatory and China Institute of Music in Beijing, The Shanghai Conservatory of Music etc. She is often invited to be a jury member at local and international competitions.

    She holds Bachelor's and Master's Degrees from The Juilliard School and is a recipient of an Artist's Diploma from The Glenn Gould School in Toronto. Her teachers have included Judy Loman, Nancy Allen, Lanalee deKant and her aunt Kumiko Inoue. Ms. Anraku also studied Oriental Art History at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan, and enjoys playing community service concerts at hospitals, drug rehabilitation centers, prisons and other venues. 
  • Kayo Iwama
    Associate Director, Graduate Vocal Arts Program

    Kayo Iwama

    American pianist Kayo Iwama has concertized extensively with singers such as Stephanie Blythe, Kendra Colton, William Hite, Rufus Müller, Christòpheren Nomura, Lucy Shelton and Dawn Upshaw throughout North America, Europe and Japan, and has performed in many prestigous venues including the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, The DiMenna Center, Merkin Hall, The Morgan Library, Boston’s Jordan Hall, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood, the Kennedy Center, Tokyo’s Yamaha Hall and the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. The Washington Post has called her a pianist “with unusual skill and sensitivty to the music and the singer” and the Boston Globe has praised her “virtuoso accompaniment…super-saturated with gorgeous colors”.  

    Miss Iwama is the associate director of the innovative Graduate Vocal Arts Program at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, where she works alongside Stephanie Blythe, the Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano and recently appointed artistic director of the program. Miss Iwama has been with the program since its inception in 2006, working in tandem with the founding artistic director, the acclaimed soprano Dawn Upshaw.  Other collaborations with Dawn Upshaw include master classes and a recital at the Britten-Pears Young Artist Program at the Aldeburgh Music Festival, and appearances at the International Vocal Arts Institute in Virginia, the University of Wyoming, Edward Pickman Hall at the Longy School of Music and the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College.  Ms. Iwama has been a faculty member of Songfest, and for over two decades taught at the Tanglewood Music Center, where she also served as the coordinator of the Vocal Studies Program.  There she worked with some of today’s most promising young singers and collaborative pianists, and assisted Maestros James Levine, Seiji Ozawa and Robert Spano in major operatic and concert productions. In addition her teaching has also taken her to some of the foremost universities of the United States and Asia to give master classes and performance/demonstrations. A former resident of the Boston, Massachusetts area, she was a frequent performer on WGBH radio, and performed with such groups as the Florestan Recital Project, the Handel and Haydn Society and Emmanuel Music.  In addition she was the founder, music director and pianist of the critically acclaimed Cantata Singers Chamber Series, creating programs devoted to rarely-heard works of art song and vocal chamber music.  She was formerly on the faculties of the Hartt School of Music, Boston Conservatory and the New England Conservatory of Music.  

    Miss Iwama earned a bachelor of music degree at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and her master of music at Stony Brook University where she studied with Gilbert Kalish.  She also attended the Salzburg Music Festival, the Banff Music Center, the Music Academy of the West and the Tanglewood Music Center, where she worked with such artists as Margo Garrett, Martin Isepp, Graham Johnson, Martin Katz and Erik Werba.  She has served previously on the music staffs of the Steans Institute at the Ravinia Festival and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.  Miss Iwama can be heard on CD on the Well-Tempered label, with baritone Christópheren Nomura in Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin, two ISMM discs devoted to French mélodies and the songs of Schumann with tenor Ingul Ivan Oak, and on the The Reckless Heart with soprano Kendra Colton, a collection of 20th century American and British song.  She will also be heard on a newly released CD with Miss Colton in the vocal music of John Harbison, honoring the composer’s 80th birthday
  • Hongyan Zhang
    Pipa

    Hongyan Zhang

    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.

Preparatory Division Fall Registration Now Open

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Bard College
Bard College
Conservatory of Music
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All photos by Karl Rabe unless stated otherwise.