Of Note
Student Accolades Honors and awards from 2012-13 Gregory Wang ’13 and Chelsea de Souza ’15, piano students of Peter Takács, both took prizes at competitions this academic year. Wang won an impressive second prize at the 2013 Music Teachers National Association Young Artist National Competition in Anaheim, Calif. De Souza won first prize at Akron’s Tuesday Musical Association Scholarship Competition, a state-level award known as the Marguerite Thomas and Gertrude Lancaster Scholarship for Piano. • Pianist Lishan Xue ’15 won second prize at the 40th National Arts Piano Competition in Midland, Texas, in January. Last fall she traveled to Venezuela to perform with the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra under the direction of José Antonio Abreu in Caracas. The concert was held in Simón Bolivar Hall and organized and presented by the Fundación Musical Simón Bolivar, commonly known as “El Sistema.” • Katelyn Emerson ‘15 was one of three winners of the North American Round of the Mikael Tariverdiev International Organ Competition, which took place at the University of Kansas at Lawrence in April. Katelyn received a stipend to cover her travel to the finals of the competition in Kaliningrad, Russia, to be held in September 2013. • All of Oberlin’s organ majors who competed this spring in the American Guild of Organists (AGO)/Quimby Regional Competitions for Young Organists took first prize in their chapter-level competitions. They will compete this summer in their AGO regional competitions. Congratulations go to Jennifer Bower ‘14 (St. Louis 10
Chapter), Nick Capozzoli ‘15 (Pittsburgh), Alcee Chriss ‘15 (Dallas), Jillian Gardner ‘15 (Buffalo), Jennifer McPherson MM ‘15 (Boston), Mitchell Miller ‘16 (Cleveland), Justin MurphyMancini ‘13 (Hartford), and Jessica Park ‘14 (Minneapolis/St. Paul). • Soprano Emily Peragine ’14 performed the role of Mabel in Gilbert & Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance in March 2013 with the Glacier Symphony and Chorale in Kalispell, Mont. • Eli Stine ’14, a TIMARA and computer science doubledegree student with a minor in music composition, submitted his work, Life, to the 60x60 Voice project, which was created for the International Sound Art Festival in Berlin. His piece was chosen for the concert, which took place in October 2012 at the Mitte Museum in Berlin. Stine’s new commission from the Akropolis Reed Quintet was premiered on May 17 in Detroit as part of the Detroit Chamber Winds and Strings concert season. To round out a stellar year, Stine was selected for an artist residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida. He spent three weeks in May composing and studying with electroacoustic composer Judith Shatin. • TIMARA major Paulus Van Horne ’16 was selected as one of four composers for the 2013 Young & Emerging Electronic Music performance with Verb Ballets and the Cleveland Chamber Symphony. Young composers and students throughout Ohio submitted original electronic works to be considered for inclusion; once the four compositions were selected, Verb Ballets choreog-
raphers were assigned to craft companion dance pieces to the chosen works. Van Horne’s piece started out merely as an experiment with FM synthesis, but once he started time stretching and manipulating shifting polyrhythms, the experiment turned into a fully-realized composition with changing, varying speeds— allowing freedom and flexibility in tempo rates for the dancers and choreographers to follow. The performances were held in March at Cleveland Public Theatre. • Violists Aaron Mossburg ’13 and Daniel Orsen ’16 both won their divisions at the 2013 American String Teachers Association National Solo Competition, sweeping the viola category. The final round was held in April at the Kaufman Center’s Merkin Hall in New York City. Oberlin was the only conservatory to have finalists in two divisions. Mossburg (in the senior division) and Orsen (junior division) were each among three viola finalists. Orsen and Mossburg are both students of Peter Slowik. • Justin Murphy-Mancini ’13 (BA in philosophy, BMUS degrees in composition and organ performance, and a MM in historical performance ‘14) is this year’s Oberlin recipient of the Theodore Presser Graduate Music Award, which provides funds for an ambitious summer project. He will study organ, harpsichord, and composition with a variety of wellknown composers, both privately in England and Germany, and at the prestigious Schloss Solitude Summer Academy near Stuttgart, Germany. A further aspect of this project involves a performance tour in the Netherlands
with fellow composer and pianist Eugene Kim ‘12. At Oberlin, Murphy-Mancini studies composition with Joshua Levine, organ with James David Christie, and harpsichord with Webb Wiggins. • Rachel Grandstrand ’13 and Asher Butnik ’13 traveled to Cincinnati with Jennifer Fraser, conservatory associate professor of ethnomusicology and anthropology, in April to present papers at the Midwest Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology conference. Presenters included renowned faculty, independent scholars, graduate students, and a select few undergraduates. Grandstrand, a cello and music history double major, presented a version of her music history honors project, “The Performance and Perception of Identities in Country-Rap Music,” on the sociological reading of countryrap and the ways in which the subgenre negotiates and incorporates concepts of “authenticity” and “genre” as related to country and hip-hop music. Butnik, a double major in gender, sexuality, and feminist studies and musical studies with a concentration in ethnomusicology, focused on the uses of queer theory and Peircean semiotics, or theory of signs, to read several popular hits. This was a version of his senior capstone project “Heard and Not Seen: The Child in Euro-American Pop Music.” The event was an impressive feat by both, being accepted as undergraduates among professionals in the field. Both received excellent feedback from senior colleagues at the conference, and Butnik’s experience solidified his interest in pursuing graduate study.