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Society Announces 2011 Israel Award Winners

The 2011 Brian M. Israel winner is Thomas H. Healy for his String Quartet No. 1. The New York Federation of Music Clubs Israel winner is Bret Bohman for his String Quartet No. 1. Both composers will have works performed on the Society's 2011-12 season. Composers receiving Honorable Mention were Thomas Arthur Murphy, Jessica Lynn Rudman, and Evan Antonellis.

Thomas Healy born in 1985 in Sewell, NJ, began studying music at age 17. He attained his B.M. in Music Composition at Syracuse University where he studied under Daniel Godfrey, Andrew Waggoner, and Nicolas Scherzinger and acquired his M.M. at the New England Conservatory of Music under the tutelage of Malcolm Peyton. In addition, he has studied under Ivan Fedele at the Conservatoire National de Strasbourg in France. His work has been read, recorded, and performed by the Buffalo Philharmonic, Cassatt Quartet, Open End, and the Cadeaux Quartet. In 2008 he was the recipient of S.U.'s Brian M. Israel award for outstanding composer and winner of the Buffalo Orchestra Composer's Forum. He currently lives in New York City where he is active as a composer and performer.

Bret Bohman (b. 1982) was born and raised in Rochester, NY. His musical influences range from rock to classical to avant-garde electronica. His music has been performed around the United States at festivals and conferences including the Aspen Music Festival, the SCI and SEAMUS National Conferences, the 3rd Annual TUTTI Festival, the Midwest Composers Symposium, the Heidelberg New Music Festival and more. Recently he was awarded second place in the MMTA Composers Competition. Mr. Bohman is currently finishing his Masters Degree in Composition at the University of Michigan. He has taken private lessons or participated in master classes with Evan Chambers, Brian Bevelander, Syd Hodkinson, George Tsontakis, Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, Mark Olivieri and George Crumb. He currently studies with Michael Daugherty.

Entries for the Israel Prize came from throughout New York State -- Ithaca, Setauket, Baldwinsville, Delmar, Sag Harbor, Pittsford, Hastings-on-Hudson, Brooklyn, Sunnyside, and New York City. The entrants were known only by numbers. This year's judges were Heather Buchman, conductor and performer at Hamilton College; Marc Mellits, a composer based in Syracuse whose music is performed internationally; and Sar Shalom Strong, a pianist at Hamilton College who concertizes extensively.

The Brian M. Israel prize is named for the prodigiously gifted composer/pianist/conductor who died of leukemia at age 35. Brian was a core member of the Society for New Music and a commissioned composer.

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"Future of Music" Coalition Seeks Data from Musicians and Composers

Future of Music is conducting research about revenue for musicians and composers. If you're a composer or musician, learn more about the study here.

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History and art converge in Society for New Music's "Eleanor Roosevelt"

Review by Linda Loomis
Syracuse Post Standard Contributing Writer

"Eleanor Roosevelt," an opera in two acts, garnered a warm reception at the Saturday world premiere produced by Society for New Music. A strong cast, simple but authentic sets, and an excellent chamber orchestra—conducted by Heather Buchman—combined to create uniformly high-quality entertainment and a glimpse into early 20th Century American history through a woman who forged pathways of justice, opportunity and equality.

Composer Persis Parshall Vehar's talent is matched by her wisdom, which she demonstrated by not attempting to cover the entire lifetime accomplishments of Eleanor Roosevelt (18841962). Instead, Vehar's opera about the unconventional wife of America's 32nd president is focused on Eleanor's contributions to the passage of the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights. To illuminate that achievement, Vehar opened with a scene of the 1945 telephone call in which President Harry Truman invited Eleanor, soprano Bridget Moriarty, to serve as delegate to the United Nations.

The action continues in a flashback to 1917 in which Eleanor talks with her contentious, unfaithful husband, Franklin, baritone Steven Stull, in their bedroom. They have been married 12 years, and whatever glow they shared has dimmed, subdued in part by his domineering mother, Sarah Roosevelt, played by mezzo-soprano Lori Larson.

The title might have been "The Education of Eleanor," for much of the opera, which is based on Rhoda Lerman's play, "Eleanor: Her Secret Journey," addresses the political awakening of Eleanor in 1919, the year she becomes sensitized to the horrors of war by Major Duckworth, tenor Jonathan Howell, and undergoes personal epiphanies that make her determined to live out her destiny as a progressive woman.

"Shocking! Shocking!" declares Sarah, when Eleanor deflects her mother-in-law's criticism of guests by saying she will build her own house and invite whom she pleases to it.

Moriarty, active in every scene, leads a uniformly strong cast, sustaining energy in vocal and dramatic presentation throughout. Her subtle comic lines garnered spontaneous and genuine laughter. She made references to FDR's affair with her former social secretary ("...my excessively social secretary") and, describing herself early in the production, claimed, "I was too tall, too timid...and had twice as many teeth as most people." To Moriarty, also, fall the highly charged emotional lines that show Eleanor's dignity in the face of personal pain as well as her evolving empathy and determination to act in the face of human suffering.

One of the strongest moments was Moriarty's closing solo in Act I after she met three French widows, saw (as the audience sees through projections of WWI images) the trenches and the burial ground of slaughtered men, and understood the ravages of war.

A hospital visitation by Eleanor to her uncle Teddy, Phil Eisenman, was designed to lighten the mood of the opera, and the 26th president did deliver funny quips. But some of the laughter felt strained, as if it was a little embarrassing to laugh at a wheelchair-bound, coughing old man in his pajamas. The upbeat scene did, however, serve as a striking contrast with a later hospital visit in which Eleanor called upon Major Duckworth in a ward at St. Elizabeth's hospital, where he was undergoing treatment for the mental and emotional devastation of his wartime flashbacks. "Nobody won!" he wisely declared. And Eleanor appears stronger after having witnessed and understood his fraility.

In the final scene, back in Hyde Park, 1945, Eleanor tells President Truman she has decided: She will serve at the United Nations. In the closing moments, the cast reassembled and sang the text of Universal Declaration on Human Rights as historical and modern scenes of injustice, genocide and abuse were projected across the backdrop. Vehar's music built throughout this scene to the culminating declaration that "all human beings are born free and equal..."

"Eleanor Roosevelt" is an artistic look at some of the personal struggles of a significant public figure. In exploring and celebrating the vibrant and visionary woman she was, Vehar, her daughter, librettist Gabrielle Vehar, and all who worked on the production, help save Eleanor from the fate of so many other historical personalities: that of being represented as just a name and a few lines in a textbook.

Source

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Society Awarded NEA Grant

Rocco Landesman, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, announced that the Society for New Music has been approved for a grant of $10,000 to support the commission and performance of a collaborative work with music by Gregory Wanamaker and video by Carrie Mae Weems during the Society's 40th anniversary season 2011-2012. The Society is one of 1,057 not-for-profit organizations recommended for a grant as part of the federal agency's first round of fiscal year 2011 grants.

Wanamaker is professor of composition at SUNY Potsdam's Crane School of Music. On receiving news of the NEA grant Dr. Wanamaker said "I am honored to be a part of this project and grateful to live in a country where the creation of new works is supported with both public and private funds."

Carrie Mae Weems is an internationally renowned photographer and visual artist who recently made Syracuse her home. Ms. Weems teaches at Syracuse University. Holland Cotter in the New York Times wrote that: "Weems has long been one of our most effective visual and verbal rhetoricians. When she tackles complex subjects in complex ways, the results are...deeply stirring."

The Society for New Music's artistic director Neva Pilgrim said that, "Narrative is a common thread in the art of both Ms. Weems and Mr. Wanamaker. This project makes use of that common interest by referencing and celebrating the history of CNY as a hotbed of political activism, social justice (Underground Railroad), and where the women's rights movement began."

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