Richard Alleshouse, B.S.’63, has had the honor of being inducted into the 2012 Class of Norwalk High School Hall of Fame, academic division. Richard has been on the faculty of BGSU and UT and taught orchestra students for 33 years, most recently retiring as Director of Orchestras in Sylvania, Ohio, schools. He is in his 48th year as Principal Double Bass of the Toledo Symphony Orchestra and his first season with the orchestra was 1961.
Category Archives: music-education-alumni
Prof. Bruce Moss conducts Wheaton Municipal Band at Midwest Conference
The Wheaton Municipal Band, under the direction of BGSU professor, Dr. Bruce Moss, will perform for the 66th Annual Midwest Clinic on Saturday, December 22, 2012 at 8:30 a.m.at McCormick Place in Chicago, IL.”This is a huge honor” says maestro Dr. Bruce Moss. “We are one of only two adult/community bands to have been invited to perform at this prestigious event.”
The Midwest Clinic – the world’s largest instrumental music conference – attracts thousands of instrumental music directors and performers from around the world. The invitation to perform is determined through a rigorous screening process. Acceptance to perform is a distinct honor at the highest level.
Going deeper into the music
Music education and performance reached a crescendo the week of Nov. 5 when the College of Musical Arts was visited by two nationally known professionals plus the Toledo Symphony Orchestra.
Seated in a small room in the Moore Musical Arts Center on Nov. 7, a group of student composers and faculty sat listening to a recording of an orchestral composition, each intently following along on the large scores before them.
What was unusual about the day was that the compositions were those of four of the students, and they had been performed the previous day by 72 members of the Toledo Symphony Orchestra in Kobacker Hall.
For student composers, having their work recorded by a full orchestra is a “golden ticket” to auditions and interviews, said composition faculty member Chris Dietz, who organized the orchestra’s visit. “It can be used to advance their careers.”
Furthermore, critiquing the pieces was none other than Bill McGlaughlin, a conductor, composer, musician and national radio personality. Perhaps best known for his work in broadcasting, as host of Peabody Award-winning “St. Paul Sunday” and “Exploring Music” (heard daily on Toledo’s WGTE-FM), as well as programs from Wolf Trap and the Library of Congress, he spent 25 years as an orchestral conductor, receiving numerous awards for adventurous contemporary programming.
The fact that the McGlaughlin’s residency as part of the annual Hansen Series coincided with the visit from the symphony was a happy coincidence, said Dietz. “It’s made the learning experience even more profound.”
Now McGlaughlin was listening to portions of works by graduate students Evan Williams, Corey Keating, Mark Witmer and Zachary Seely, offering comments and advice from the most practical (from “Have them warm up the tamtam (gong) so when it comes in it’s not so harsh,” to adding additional notation to make “conductors’ lives easier” and not writing notes that are too difficult for the musicians to reach) to the most aesthetic (“I love the way that dissolves,” and “That’s a great line, reminiscent of Sibelius,” “That’s a slinky chromatic” and “Don’t feel you have to rush it; give people time to get to where you are and let them luxuriate in that.”)
Interspersed with his critiques and questions, McGlaughlin shared a lifetime’s worth of musical memories, from driving in a car with the pioneering composer John Cage through the mountains of California to his difficulty in getting composer William Bolcom to say anything about his work even when they were to appear on a program. Thus he was understanding when trying to draw out Seely about his composition “Work for Orchestra 1.b.”
A first-year graduate student from New York, Seely said that while his composition sounded quite close to how he had heard it in his head, listening to it performed by the symphony was “pretty surreal.
Having that experience plus the input from McGlaughlin was an “extraordinary opportunity and something students at our level don’t often get,” said Keating, a second-year graduate student from California.
In contrast to Seely and Keatings’ compositions, which called for textural variations and unusual percussion effects and rhythms, Williams’s “Prelude in Tempore Belli (Music in a Time of War)” took a more traditional approach and contained several musical “quotes” from American military ballads.
“Overall, (McGlaughlin’s input) was really helpful. I see now there are several parts that I have to go back and work more on,” he said.
Also in the room was the couple who made McGlaughlin’s visit to BGSU possible. DuWayne and Dorothy Hansen, who funded the annual series dedicated to bringing top-level musicians to the college and the community. This year’s series also brought well-known jazz vocalist Karrin Allyson to campus for intensive work with the University’s jazz lab bands and vocal groups. Both McGlaughlin and Allison also gave public performances during their campus stay, he conducting the Wind Symphony and she singing with Jazz Lab Band 1.
The Toledo Symphony visit was thanks to the generosity of longtime supporter Karol Spencer, combined with funding from several areas of the University.
Wrapping up the reading session, Dietz asked McGlaughlin his opinion about the prospects for orchestras. “There’s a tremendous future for orchestras and I think the country is ready to come back. You’ve got the future in your hands. You’ll do really well,” the veteran musician predicted.
By offering opportunities like this, the College of Musical Arts is doing its part to make sure that happens.
BGSU Alum, Marine Staff Sgt. Ryan Nowlin, Conducts Kansas State Wind Ensemble
CMA alumnus and Marine Band staff arranger Staff Sgt. Ryan Nowlin will conduct the Kansas State Wind Ensemble and Concert Band at 3 p.m., Sunday, Oct. 14, in McCain Auditorium at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. Nowlin will lead the Wind Ensemble and a 200 member chorus in his own composition, It Is Well, written in honor of Nowlin’s mentor Dr. Vincent J. Polce. He will also conduct both the Wind Ensemble and Concert Band in several Sousa marches.
http://www.marineband.usmc.mil/whats_new/index.htm#story3
Festival Series: What is klezmer music all about?
Festival Series: KLEZMER MADNESS ! Saturday, September 29, 2012 – 8:00 p.m. – Kobacker Hall – For tickets, visit bgsu.edu/arts
Reflections on Being a 21st Century Klezmer Musician by David Krakauer, clarinetist with Klezmer Madness!
For those of you who are among the uninitiated, klezmer music is the traditional celebration music of Eastern European Jewry. This is the music that was played at weddings (and other festive events) for the Jewishcommunities of Russia, Poland, Byelorussia, Moldavia, Rumania, the Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Hungary,among other countries. Klezmer (which means music in Yiddish) was brought to the U.S. during the great waveof Jewish immigration between 1880 and 1920, and is primarily known to us today through recordings made inNew York beginning in the early 1920s by musicians who came to America during this time period. Because theHolocaust was to eradicate most of Eastern European Jewish culture, klezmer music in America exists as aprecious and important vestige of a varnished world.
It is an incredibly interesting time to be playing klezmer music — with a rise in Jewish consciousness, withEuropeans examining an aspect of the soul of their continent that was destroyed during World War II, with thetremendous excitement of the “world beat” phenomenon, and simply with the joyous “danceability” of this music.In fact, klezmer music has gone through two revivals since the mid-1970’s, and I believe we are now in a tremendously creative post revival period. While those of us playing klezmer today are still constantly studyingold recordings and other source material to retrieve what was almost lost to us there is, at the same time, a new sense of freedom and playfulness with the music that has given rise to a diverse repertoire, tremendousinternational participation and a wide variety of approaches. In my own work, as a 21st century American, I freely incorporate influences of funk, jazz and, most recently through my collaboration with sampling wizard Socalled, hip hop.
For me personally it is important to do two things in playing klezmer. One is to preserve the Jewishness — the inflection of the Yiddish language in the music (that I recognized in the speech inflections of my grandmother),the melodic shapes, the ornaments, the phrasing, the traditional repertoire, and the flavor of the cantor. But the second is to keep klezmer out of the museum — to write new klezmer pieces and to improvise on older forms in a way that is informed by the world around me today. My colleague Alicia Svigals, former violinist of the group The Klezmatics, talks about tradition always being in flux — that there is no such thing as static “tradition.” For example, when I write a more extended composition, I try to keep the feeling of a klezmer melody or ornament –but at the same time abstract that into a single gesture. Or, when I write a new tune, it has tobe danceable, yet full of quirky and weird aspects — in short, Klezmer Madness!
In both brand new pieces and re-interpretations of older standard repertoire, everything I play adheres to (or refers to) the basic forms of klezmer music: the Doina — rhapsodic, cantorial improvisation; the Chosidl — a kind of walking slower dance; the Terkish — a dotted-rhythm dance form from Rumania via Turkey (“oriental” in flavor); the old Rumanian Hora — a slow dance in a limping 3/8; and the Bulgar or Freylekh — an up-tempo dance tune for circle dancing and lifting honored guests up in chairs. This is a music that has been played from a time way before the earliest memories of my great great grandparents in Eastern Europe; and I’m honored to continue this great tradition. So all I can say now is . . . ENJOY!!!
September 2006
Thomas Darlington awarded Trumpet Scholarship
Tom Darlington has been awarded a scholarship through the International Trumpet Guild to attend the 2012 ITG conference in Columbus, Georgia. Students auditioning for a scholarship were required to submit a recording of the following works (18-22 year old category):
1. L.J. Vannetelbosch: Twenty Melodic and Technical Studies for Trumpet, Etude #15 (Alphonse Leduc)
2. E. Ewazen: Sonata for Trumpet and Piano, mvmt. 3 (Southern Music Co.)
Tom is a Junior Music Education major.