Online newsletter for the Duke University Department of Music • Summer 2007
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back to ContentsFeaturesTom Moore appointed head of the Music Library, director of Collegium Musicum
A singer and flutist, Dr. Moore is very excited about the breadth of musical opportunities that exist at Duke. “Duke has an excellent reputation, and this is a music library that serves faculty who are engaged in many different activities. It’s used by musicologists, composers, performers—each group has a set of needs and it will be interesting to support work in so many areas,” he says. “My personal interests are eclectic and inclusive. I’ve always been very interested in musicology and living in Brazil has given me insight into ethnomusicology. As a performer, I was involved in the contemporary music scene in Brazil, so I have an ongoing commitment to support the work of today’s composers. Dr. Moore feels that his wide range of musical interests and experiences will serve him well as the new music librarian. “This is a very interesting moment for libraries,” he says. “The last twenty years have seen a complete revolution in what they are and how they work.” He pauses, considering the changes he’s witnessed in the course of his career. “When I began working in libraries in 1989, I didn’t even have a desktop computer. I had to go to the computer lab to read email. Faculty members preferred to listen to recordings on LPs. After all, CDs were only eight years old. The Internet was barely there, and certainly there was no file trading going on over it. The thing we have to grapple with,” he stresses, “is that the facility for transmitting information has dramatically increased, but our mindset is slower to adjust. The librarian’s job is to know how to access this mass of information, and the successful library will be able to respond to the challenge of mediating the increase of digital information that’s available. In music libraries,” he says, “I think it will be especially important in the coming years to deal with the greater availability of scores in digital format. How will we find what’s out there and organize it so that our faculty can access these scores with some degree of ease? That’s one of the challenges I’ll be tackling.” In the music library, Dr. Moore will be dealing with questions about the newest technology and information, but in the concert hall he’ll be interpreting some of the oldest music heard on campus. As the new director of Duke’s Collegium Musicum, he will draw on his experiences as a singer and flutist to grapple with questions about historical performance practice as he leads the group in concerts that range from Gregorian chant to the music of the baroque period. “The Collegium is important to the intellectual life of the department because it makes available music that falls outside the standard repertoire, giving people a chance to hear music that isn’t usually performed. Early music can pose questions that aren’t addressed in later music, such as how to realize a continuo part. There are instrumentation choices to make. Do you use a harpsichord, a harpsichord and viola da gamba, or some other combination? These are questions that students benefit from considering.” Dr. Moore says that he views Collegium as a workshop, where the performers bring their skills and he helps shape the musical direction they take. He has no particular plans for the overall direction of the group, preferring to leave that to the members, but he does say that he’s interested in performing a balance of vocal and instrumental music. This is no surprise, coming from a musician who has recorded five CDs as a flutist, as well as sung and recorded as a choral basso with the Symphonic Chorus of Rio de Janeiro, as well as Concert Royal and Pomerium Musices of New York. “It’s good to be able to combine my musical interests,” he says. “Being Music Librarian at Duke gives me the opportunity to continue to learn and expand. That’s an important thing for both musicians and librarians.” Discography for Tom Moore • Sergio Roberto de Oliveira. Sem Espera. Rio de Janeiro: A Casa Discos, 2006. (chamber music for flute)
Jacqueline Waeber, Associate Professor, Musicology. Prof. Waeber received her Ph.D. from the Université de Genève and has been a Lecturer in Music at Trinity College, Dublin, since 2002. Her book, En musique dans le texte. Le mélodrame, de Rousseau à Schoenberg (Paris: Van Dieren Editeur, 2006), is scheduled to be translated into English and will be published by the University of Rochester Press (Eastman Series in Music). A scholar whose research focuses on the 18th and 19th centuries (particularly the French Enlightenment), Prof. Waeber is interested in musical aesthetics and the interrelationship between the visual and performing arts.
Emily Threinen appointed director of the Duke Wind Symphony Emily Threinen received her DMA in conducting from the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance. She has served as Director of the Wind Ensemble at Concordia University (Ann Arbor) and has been Conductor and Artistic Director of the Dodworth Saxhorn Band. Prof. Threinen plans an ambitious year for the Wind Symphony, beginning with a concert on September 27 entitled "“A Kaleidoscopic View of a Wind Symphony,” which will feature a Renaissance antiphonal brass piece by Gabrieli, and large ensemble pieces by Ives, Grainger, Arnold, Chance, and Shostakovich. The group's second formal concert of the season on November 15 will feature a faculty soloist, a piece for chamber winds, and two landmark compositions: Sketches on a Tudor Psalm by Fisher Tull and George Washington Bridge by William Schuman.
The Duke University Musical Instrument Collections announces the launch of its *catalog website*: www.dumic.org. The site has information about DUMIC news and events, directions to Biddle from any USA zip code, and a place to sign up for our mailing list. Soon we will be posting sound clips from our past concerts. Catalog data is still being added; not all items are included yet. Each item is keyword and date searchable. The site itself was designed and built by graduating senior David Wehrs who was curator Brenda Neece’s advisee and dorm resident. In a collaborative venture with the Duke University Libraries, DUMIC launched its first season of the very successful Rare Music series. Additional support for Rare Music was provided by the Carrabina Endowment, the Office of the President, and the Office of the Dean of the Humanities in Arts and Sciences. Curator Brenda Neece and Director of Communications for the libraries, Ilene Nelson, organized eight concerts, one per month during the academic year held in the Rare Book Room on West Campus on Friday afternoons at 4PM, followed by refreshments. Programs are designed to encourage audience-artist interaction and inspire learning about music and musical instruments. Last season’s artists included Rebecca Troxler, early flute; Randal Guptill, serpent; Deborah Hollis, early piano; the Ciompi Quartet; Elizabeth Linnartz, soprano; Tian Yun Si Yu, playing Chinese string instruments; Neece on the 5-string cello; and Joseph Robinson, oboe. Nelson and Neece are planning this year’s concerts that will include a program by Bill Michal on the history of the banjo; another by Grammy-nominated musician Mamadou Diabate about koras; Randall Love on early piano; Don Eagle on cornet; Ioana Sherman on Romanian woodwind instruments; Bob Talton on violin making; and our new music librarian, Tom Moore, on early flute. DUMIC is also very pleased to announce the arrival of a new collection of musical instruments: The Robert D. Miller Collection. Miller was an M.D. / Ph.D. from Duke University who donated all of his instruments to DUMIC upon his death. His instruments include beautiful, playable replicas of Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque instruments as well as a collection of music, memorabilia, and several wooden music stands. A number of his instruments have been on display in the upstairs lobby of the Biddle Building. For more information, please contact Dr. Brenda Neece, DUMIC Curator. Duke alumnus Mikhail Krishtal summons Glenn Gould's ghost There are more than 17,000 individual notes in Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Mikhail (Misha) Krishtal (Ph.D. 2005, Duke University) knows each one intimately. Since February 2006, Krishtal has been Director of Music Research and Production at Zenph Studios, a unique software company located in Raleigh, NC.
Unlike remastering, re-performance (a term coined by the Zenph team) creates a completely new performance identical to the original. “It is a new genre with its own implications, with its own controversies,” says Krishtal. “This process requires expertise both in music and in computer science. Establishing connections between computer data and musical qualities is not trivial. It is a very involved communication between two totally different languages -- perhaps, even, between two different worldviews -- but ultimately, both are speaking about the same phenomena: great musical artworks.”
In conducting the level of exacting analysis necessary to achieve these startling results, Krishtal’s expertise, honed at Duke, comes to the fore. For many years, both at Duke and previously at the Moscow Conservatory, Krishtal focused on “bringing together the latest electronic resources and the musical qualities inherent in the art of instrumental performance.” For his dissertation, Music for an Ensemble of Old Fortepianos, Enabled and Enhanced by Computer Processing, Krishtal conducted his research on 18th and 19th century pianos in the Duke University Musical Instrument Collections. These were not ‘computerized’ pianos like Zenph’s Disklavier Pro, but Krishtal explained that a computer enabled him to “join them into a virtual ensemble, a ‘fortepiano network,’ as well as helped extend their physical capabilities.” “Misha has such insight, such understanding of mapping a performance with what the audience hears,” says Walker. “He’s invaluable to our work because he’s an expert on Gould and also an expert on how people play.” As I sit in Zenph’s empty recital hall, listening to the Disklavier Pro play an excerpt from the Goldberg re-performance, I’m struck by the sheer audacity of the project. I’m struck by the hours of work that are represented in a few moments of music. And I’m amazed, watching the keys of the piano rise and fall as Gould’s ghost plays them, that it is possible to achieve this. Krishtal knows the best is yet to come. “With time,” he says, “every musical discipline will be able to benefit from the new technology – composition, musicology, theory, performance practice. When the electronic technology is truly integrated in the musical world, it will change profoundly; music education will also be very different. One can reasonably expect that in twenty or thirty years a computer – an advanced and highly musically trained computer -- will be just as normal a part of a piano as air conditioning is a part of a passenger car today. If we are successful, Zenph performance files and Zenph software will be installed on most of them. But seriously speaking, this is an inevitable development in the field, and we are working to make it happen sooner.” * * * Sony Classical released Zenph’s re-performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations in spring 2007. For its next project, Zenph is stretching into the realm of jazz with re-performances of Art Tatum’s April 2, 1949 concert and March 21, 1933 studio session. On September 23, 2007, these classic performances will be re-performed in a recording session before a live audience at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. The resulting CD (and iTunes downloads) will be released by Sony. For more information, see zenph.com. Elizabeth Thompson, Publicist for the Department of Music A week-long residency gives jazz composer and bandleader Maria Schneider time to work with graduate student composer Todd Hershberger
Maria Schneider, who maintains a busy schedule recording (her newest CD, Sky Blue, was released in July) and performing (appearances include the Tanglewood Jazz Festival and Juilliard), formed the Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra in 1993. Much of her music is written for big band, including Concert in the Garden, which won a Grammy Award in 2005. Hershberger walked away from his lunch with Schneider with concrete suggestions about his concerto, and a lot more. “Most of Maria's suggestions centered around orchestration. She had many wonderful ideas stemming from her 10+ years of experience writing for this ensemble. But,” he says, “I think the most valuable part was getting to hear her perspective of what it's like to be a jazz band composer/band leader today….” “Each experience I've had with visiting composers has been unique. Maria was very open and kind without holding back any criticism. The nice thing about this visit is that we really had time to delve into my music and even into some of hers as well. We had the luxury of time.” * * * Todd Hershberger’s Concerto for Free Improvising Alto Saxophonist and Jazz Orchestra won the 2006-07 William Klenz Prize in Music Composition, awarded by the Duke University Department of Music. To hear the piece, visit http://www.duke.edu/~tbh5/. A Ph.D. candidate, he will defend his dissertation this fall. Hershberger was profiled in the July/August issue of Duke Magazine. Maria Schneider has been invited to return to Duke in Spring 2008 for another artist residency. Upgrades in the Music Media Center Last year the Music Media Center underwent some extensive hardware and software upgrades. There are now several Macintosh machines as well as PCs. All of the machines have the capability to play CDs, DVDs, and streaming audio. Some of the machines can also play audio and video cassettes as well as laser discs. The machines have also been enhanced with the addition of productivity software such as Microsoft Word and tools to create and manipulate audio files, and there is a MIDI keyboard available for checkout as well. The Media Center continues to house LP players and a large plasma screen that can be used for group viewing and instruction. Maria Schneider photo credit: Dani Gurgel Comments or suggestions about this newsletter? |
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“There are ten parameters we analyze for every note,” says Walker. “We have to think about how the artist—Gould, in this case-- plays the notes: the attack, how loudly the note is sounded, how it is released. Then we have to consider the original instrument and its timbre, and the way its sound reverberated in the hall. We analyze this data for every note and pedal, then play it back through an acoustic grand piano, a Yamaha Disklavier Pro, recreating the original performance. The first challenge facing music software of this type was to make it sound as if a human is playing, rather than a computer.” He smiles conspiratorially, enjoying the accomplishment he’s about to reveal. “The real breakthrough at Zenph has been to develop a way to analyze and capture the unique qualities of individual performers. When you listen to our Goldberg Variations, it isn’t just anyone playing the piano. It’s a specific person-- Glenn Gould. To achieve this, we had to ask what differentiates one performer from the next. The notes are the same, so what makes each performance different? How do we comprehend, and quantify, the genius of great artists?”
Artist residencies in the