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.
The final performance of the festival, a chamber opera and dance concert by the Bard East/West Ensemble, will take place on October 5 at 3 pm at Jazz at Lincoln Center.
Dual Milestone Event Honors Bard College Conservatory’s 20th Anniversary and Leon Botstein’s 50th Year as President, Highlighting a Half-Century of Classical Music and Higher Education
A respected performer of the Shanxi Zheng genre, Zhou Wang is a Professor of Guzheng at the China Central Conservatory of Music, and the Director of the Chinese Music Department of CCOM. She also serves as Vice President of the China Guzheng Society. Zhou Wang learned from her father, the world class musician in the Qin Zheng Shanxi genre Zhou Yanjia. She then studied with Maestros Zicheng Gao, Zheng Cao, Sihua Xiang, Xiuming Yang, Shange Fan, and Zhaoyuan Shi, combining north-south flavors and inheriting the true art of Zheng playing from different genres. Joining the Central Song and Dance Troupe in 1977, Zhou Wang has been an active performer in China and abroad. She was invited by the National Record Association to record The Tune of Qin Mulberry, a classical masterpiece of Shanxi genre. As a musical ambassador and a soloist, she has toured internationally on behalf of the Ministry of Culture on many occasions. As a scholar of musical exchange, she has given lectures at institutions including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2014, she held a Zheng recital at Carnegie Hall. Zhou Wang has served as judge and chairperson for many national and international competitions: the Golden Bell Award, Mandarin Award, Central China Television, National Chinese Instrument Competition, and Hong Kong International Zheng Competition. In over forty years of teaching, she has been dedicated to fostering many outstanding young guzheng players, who have won prizes in major competitions around the world. Many of them continue careers as educators to teach the younger generations. In promoting Chinese music, Professor Zhou Wang has published recordings of many core classical repertoires such as High Mountain and Running River and albums featuring traditional guzheng solo works of several traditional genre classic pieces: Famous Melody of the North, Geniuses Traditional Zheng as well as many internal course teaching materials for the China Central Conservatory of Music. Her publication, Qin Zheng Qin Ren Qin Sheng, has been widely cited in Chinese musical journals. Zhou Wang also arranges and composes traditional and contemporary Zheng musical works. She arranged the Shanxi genre Zheng pieces Huan Music, Lao Long Cries the Sea and Ming Fei’s Resentment (a guzheng and erhu duet). Together with Professor Zhenyu Huang, she has composed the contemporary Zheng pieces Fantasia in the West, Reflection, and Slowly Voice ??
Joan Tower
Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts; Composition, Bard College Conservatory of Music
Joan Tower
Joan Tower is widely regarded as one of the most important American composers living today. During a career spanning more than 50 years, she has made lasting contributions to musical life in the United States as composer, performer, conductor, and educator. Her works have been commissioned by major ensembles, soloists, and orchestras, including the Emerson, Tokyo, and Muir quartets; soloists Evelyn Glennie, Carol Wincenc, David Shifrin, and John Browning; and the orchestras of Chicago, New York, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C., among others.
In 1990, Tower became the first woman to win the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for her composition Silver Ladders. She was the first composer chosen for a Ford Made in America consortium commission of 65 orchestras. The Nashville Symphony and conductor Leonard Slatkin recorded that work, Made in America, with Tambor and Concerto for Orchestra for the Naxos label. The top-selling recording won three 2008 Grammy awards: Best Classical Contemporary Composition, Best Classical Album, and Best Orchestral Performance.
From 1969 to 1984, she was pianist and founding member of the Naumburg Award-winning Da Capo Chamber Players, which commissioned and premiered many of her most popular works. Her first orchestral work, Sequoia, quickly entered the repertory. Tower's tremendously popular five Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman have been played by over 500 different ensembles. She is currently Asher Edelman Professor of Music at Bard College, where she has taught since 1972.
Her composer-residencies with orchestras and festivals include a decade with the Orchestra of St. Luke's, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s Composer of the Year for their 2010-2011 season, as well as the St. Louis Symphony, the Deer Valley Music Festival, and the Yale/Norfolk Chamber Music Festival.
Among her recent premieres: White Water (2012), commissioned by Chamber Music Monterey Bay and premiered by the Daedalus Quartet; Stroke (2011), commissioned by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra; White Granite (2009), commissioned by St. Timothy's Summer Music Festival, Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival, and La Jolla Music Society for SummerFest; Angels(2008), her fourth string quartet, commissioned by Music for Angel Fire and premiered by the Miami String Quartet; Dumbarton Quintet (2008), a piano quintet commissioned by the Dumbarton Oaks Estate (their third commission after Stravinsky and Copland) and premiered by Tower and the Enso String Quartet; Chamber Dance (2006), commissioned, premiered, and toured by Orpheus; and Copperwave (2006), written for the American Brass Quintet and commissioned by The Juilliard School of Music. A Gift (2007), for winds and piano, was commissioned by Chamber Music Northwest and premiered by The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (CMS). Other CMS premieres included Trio Cavany (2007) and Simply Purple (2008) for viola, performed by Paul Neubauer.
Her compositions cross many genres: Can I (2007) for youth chorus and percussionist; Copperwave (2006), written for brass quintet; DNA (2003), a percussion quintet commissioned for Frank Epstein and the New England Conservatory Percussion Ensemble; Fascinating Ribbons (2001), her foray into the world of band music, premiered at the annual conference of College Band Directors; Vast Antique Cubes/Throbbing Still (2000), a solo piano piece for John Browning; Tambor (1998), for the Pittsburgh Symphony under the baton of Mariss Jansons; and her ballet Stepping Stones (1993), commissioned by choreographer Kathryn Posin for the Milwaukee Ballet and revisited by Posin with the Bulgarian Ballet in June 2011.
Joan Tower's music is published by Associated Music Publishers.
Photo by Cynthia Del Conte.
Carmit Zori
Violin
Carmit Zori
Violinist Carmit Zori is the recipient of a Leventritt Foundation Award, a Pro Musicis International Award, and the top prize in the Walter W. Naumburg International Violin Competition. She has appeared as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic, the Rochester Philharmonic, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, among many others, and has given solo recitals at Lincoln Center, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C., the Tel Aviv Museum and the Jerusalem Center for the Performing Arts. Her performances have taken her throughout Latin America and Europe, as well as Israel, Japan, Taiwan and Australia, where she premiered the Violin Concerto by Marc Neikrug.
Ms. Zori enjoys a prolific career as a chamber musician. After ten years as artistic director at Bargemusic, she founded the Brooklyn Chamber Music Society in 2002. In addition to her own series, she has appeared with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and has been a guest at chamber music festivals and concert series around the world, including the Chamber Music at the Y series in New York City; Festival Casals in Puerto Rico; Chesapeake Bay Music Festival; Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival; Bard Music Festival; Chamber Music Northwest; Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival; La Jolla Chamber Music Festival; Seattle Chamber Music Festival; Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival; Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society in Wisconsin; Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival; Peasmarsh Chamber Music Festival in the UK; Philadelphia Chamber Music Society; Sarasota Music Festival; and is a regular participant at the Marlboro Chamber Music Festival in Vermont.
Ms. Zori has played for Music for Food, a concert series that helps relieve food insecurity in cities all over the United States. She has also participated in Project: Music Heals Us, a nonprofit organization that aims to educate and heal marginalized communities through music. Carmit is also a member of the Israeli Chamber Project, an ensemble that performs chamber music and conducts educational outreach in the US, Israel, and various other countries throughout the world.
Ms. Zori can be heard on the Arabesque, Koch International, and Elektra-Nonesuch labels. In addition to teaching at the Bard Conservatory, she is professor of violin at Rutgers University and SUNY-Purchase.
At the behest of violinists Alexander Schneider and Isaac Stern, Ms. Zori came to the United States from her native Israel at the age of fifteen to study at the Curtis Institute of Music with Ivan Galamian, Jaime Laredo and Arnold Steinhardt.
Edward Carroll
Visiting Instructor of Music
Edward Carroll
Edward Carroll’s long and distinguished career has taken many twists and turns. It began as an orchestral musician at age 21 with his appointment to the Houston Symphony, detoured back to Juilliard (BM, MM) and New York City as a trumpet soloist making over 20 recordings on the Sony, Vox, MHS, and Newport Classic labels and performing with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, matured as he conducted his first concerts, detoured once again as he fulfilled a lifelong dream of moving to Europe assuming the position of principal trumpet of the Rotterdam Philharmonic, eventually embarked on what has become a distinguished teaching career and now, in the final quarter of his musical journey, returned to his life-long passion of conducting. Mr. Carroll has served on the faculties of the Rotterdam Conservatory, London’s Royal Academy of Music, McGill University, the Bard Conservatory, and the California Institute of the Arts. He has performed with conductors such as Leonard Bernstein, Bernard Haitink, Valery Gergiev, James Conlon, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Simon Rattle in concert halls around the world, listing Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Vienna’s Grosser Musikvereinsaal, Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Hall, New York’s Carnegie Hall, Boston’s Symphony Hall, and Tokyo’s Suntory Hall amongst his favorites. He has appeared as a soloist with the Rotterdam Philharmonic, the Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra, the London Sinfonietta, Virtuosi di Roma, the Gulbenkian Orchestra of Lisbon, the Hong Kong Philharmonic, and a variety of North American orchestras. Edward Carroll’s recordings conducting the Metamorphosis Ensemble of London (Cantoris) and Chamber Soloists of Washington (Sony) have received critical acclaim, as have his many performances conducting the Peruvian National Symphony and National Youth Orchestras. In addition to teaching and conducting, Edward Carroll is currently the director of the Center for Advanced Musical Studies (www.chosenvalemusic.org) where he presents the annual Chosen Vale International Seminars with friends such as Hakan Hardenberger, John Wallace, Markus Stockhausen, Mark Gould, Colin Currie, and Steve Reich. Author Alexander McGrattan states in his book THE TRUMPET (Yale University Press) that “the work of Ed Carroll has been seminal to the creation of a new generation of adventurous young trumpet players since his work at the Rotterdam Conservatory and the establishment of the Lake Placid Music Seminars in the mid-1990s in New York State.” Mr. Carroll feels otherwise but perhaps that can be left for another biography.