About the Department of Music
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Student Accomplishments
Emily Sladek, B.A. ’07, vocal performance, has been accepted in to the Master’s program in vocal performance at Roosevelt University. She is currently teaching musical theatre at community summer camps in Iowa.
Noelle Thorn, B.A. ’05, cello performance, has been accepted into the Steinhardt School of Education and the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University to pursue a M.A. in Performing Arts Administration. The program also incorporates full-time internships in the field of arts administration and a summer abroad program in various locations in Europe.
Kui Min, M.M. ’04, piano performance, is a doctoral candidate and teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music.
Megan Walsh, M.M. ’03, piano performance, has been appointed Director of the Preparatory Piano Program at the University of Miami. She also received her doctorate in piano performance in May 2007 from the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music.
Michael Alan Anderson, (ND’97) is a Ph.D. candidate beginning his sixth year of graduate study in the History and Theory of Music at the University of Chicago. Michael was awarded the prestigious Alvin H. Johnson American Musicological Society 50 Dissertation-Year Fellowship for the academic year 2007-8 to complete his dissertation entitled “Symbolizing the Saints: Theology, Ritual, and Kinship in Music for John the Baptist and St. Anne (1175-1520).” Supplementary dissertation grants include the Whiting Foundation Dissertation-Year Fellowship and the Grace Frank Dissertation Grant (awarded by the Medieval Academy of America). His first article, “The Organization and Complexes of the Bologna Q 15 Hymn Cycle,” appeared in the Italian journal Studi musicali at the end of 2006. He is scheduled to present this summer at the Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference in Vienna, as well as at the national meeting of the AMS this coming fall.
Jacqueline Schmidt, B.A. ‘01, M.M. ’03, piano performance, was selected as a Performing Arts Fellow for the 2007-2008 season at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
Mary Colleen Fitzpatrick, B.A. ’08, music and culture, spent her summer totally engrossed in hip-hop...at the Smithsonian Institution. She is a music intern this summer with the National Museum of American History. The Museum is working on a major collecting initiative called “Hip-Hop Won't Stop: The Beat, The Rhymes, The Life." The proposed exhibit will chronicle the roots and evolution of hip-hop from its origins in the 1970s to the present.
Philip Carl Smith, B.A. ’08, theory and history, is currently in Rome researching the Dominican dialect of Gregorian chant. He will be writing a thesis on this topic this coming fall under the direction of Professor Alexander Blachly.
Patrick D. Quigley, B.A. '00, musicology, is the Executive and Artistic Director of Seraphic Fire, a professional chamber choir in orchestra in Miami, Florida. On September 6, 2007, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation awarded a quarter-of-a-million dollar grant to Seraphic Fire for the purpose of starting a new chamber orchestra in Miami.
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A cymbal of love in Jamaica
April 27, 2007
Three years ago Kenneth Dye, director of Notre Dame Bands, sent musical instruments to a crime- and drug-infested ghetto in Kingston, Jamaica, to help occupy the time of children living in poverty and very much in danger of falling prey to gangs.
He took on the project after traveling to the Caribbean island at the request of former Notre Dame provost Nathan Hatch, who asked him to assess how the University might be able to get involved and help the inner-city neighborhood. What he found was a struggling community center trying to operate a marching band with almost nothing for the kids to play, so he knew what he had to do.
Dye wasn't able to secure any funding to buy instruments, so he switched gears and convinced Yamaha in Grand Rapids, Mich., and Woodwind and Brasswind in South Bend, as well as a group of Notre Dame Band alumni to donate to the project. The two music stores sent him 50 brand new instruments, many of which were of better quality than what Dye's own students were playing, and the alumni offered about 20 gently used instruments.
It took several months to collect everything and, in the spring of 2005, some 70 instruments were sent to western Kingston's St. Patrick's Foundation, which runs community centers and hospitals and seeks to empower people to develop into responsible citizens through education and skills training.
The foundation supported the rag-tag Sea View Gardens Band that Dye had witnessed through Christ the Redeemer Human Resource Center, one of its three area community centers. Its young members were using broken down instruments and pom-pons made from shredded plastic trash bags scavenged from a nearby landfill.
Junior energized by disabled at Camp Friendship
November 27, 2006
The celebrated days of summer camp - swimming, hiking, arts and crafts, and campfires - run through the memories of our youth. But often times, we might take these simple summer activities for granted. Many children with disabilities have never had the opportunity to partake in these bouts of fun.
"It was sad to see some of the older campers, see how happy they were, and to wonder what they had to go through when they were younger when they didn't have these opportunities," said Carolyn Shivers, a junior psychology major and music minor at Notre Dame, who worked at Camp Friendship this summer as a camp counselor to hundreds of children and adults with developmental disabilities.
Founded in 1964, Camp Friendship is one of three camps run by Friendship Ventures, a non-profit organization based in central Minnesota, offering summer residential camp programs to children and adults with mental and physical disabilities. The campers range between the ages of 5 and 90 and are supervised by camp counselors and program staff.
"Counselors and program staff are mostly college kids, a lot with little or no experience working with people with disabilities," Shivers said. "We had a weeklong orientation crammed with everything from crisis intervention to vulnerable adult laws."
Each week, Shivers was assigned to a cabin with anywhere from two to 12 campers, depending on their individual needs.
Concert Band tour, CD commemorate Mozart's birth
July 31, 2006
"Mozart's 250th: Concert Band Tour of Austria and Czech Republic," newly released by the University of Notre Dame Band, features live recordings from its spring tour commemorating the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
The CD features a wide variety of music including "Fanfare for the Vienna Philharmonic" by Johann Strauss, "On an American Spiritual" by David Holsinger, "Irish Celebration" arranged by Kenneth Dye, director of bands, and "Il Re Pastore," "Ave Verum Corpus," and "Gloria" from the "Coronation Mass," all by Mozart.
All pieces were recorded live in concert sites that included the Great Hall of the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria; Obecni Dum in Prague, Czech Republic; and Votiv Kirche in Vienna, Austria.
Senior's performance, involvement are a tour de force
May 17, 2006
The verdict is in: Nicholas Tonozzi is a bit of a devil.
This may be true of quite a few graduating Notre Dame seniors. But as the music department's reigning tenor, Tonozzi has had one foot in heaven and one foot in hell in a way few other students have accomplished.
This spring, Tonozzi played Pluto, the host of Hades, in the Opera Notre Dame production of "Orpheus Goes to Hell." My, but he looked at home.
"After it was over," he said, "my mother hugged me and whispered in my ear, `Do you feel as typecast as I think you feel?'
He added, gleefully: I most definitely am a youngest child -- I like to be the center of attention."
His presence on stage is considered commanding. Up close, he's more like an energy force waiting to be harnessed. His eyebrows exhibit more expression than most Hollywood idols can muster in an entire film.
Keeping medieval music alive
March 2, 2006
They perform medieval music, and they're so popular they've had to add performances.
Schola Musicorum, a vocal ensemble that performs Gregorian chant from original medieval manuscripts, was founded by Notre Dame music professor Alexander Blachly when he joined the faculty in 1993. A biannual performance, Abend-Musique XXVI, will take place Wednesday, March 8 in the Reyes Organ and Choral Hall in the Marie P. DeBartolo Center for the Performing Arts. Two sessions are scheduled, at 8:30 and 9:30 p.m.
Abend-Musique ("Evening Music"), Blachly notes, is a term 17-century composer Dieterich Buxtehude used to refer to his late-afternoon Sunday concerts. Blachly has numbered the concerts since they began; this will be the group's twenty-sixth.
"It's like the Super Bowl," he says, "but we do two a year."
The last concert in the 100-seat Reyes facility sold out, and people had to be turned away, so back-to-back performances are planned.
The concerts are brief--only 20 minutes to a half-hour in length. "As beautiful a thing as it is," Blachly says, chant doesn't vary much in sound and texture, and doesn't lend itself to a lengthy performance.
Summer Experience to offer opera and song track
February 24, 2006
Summer Experience, a University of Notre Dame study program for academically gifted high school students, will expand this year to offer a new track in opera and song.
Under the leadership of acclaimed tenor Mark Beudert, visiting assistant professor of opera at Notre Dame, the track will introduce students to the vocation of singing through study of technical challenges, theory and history of the art form, as well as the nature of musical performance and its place in society.
An internationally celebrated performer, Beudert is director of the Bel Canto Northwest Vocal Institute at Portland State University. He has performed with prestigious operas around the world, including the Washington and New York City Operas; the Lyric Opera of Queensland, Australia; the Scottish Opera; and the English National Opera. A graduate of Columbia University, he earned his master's and doctoral degrees at the University of Michigan.
Collegiate Jazz Festival to feature all-star band
February 23, 2006
The University of Notre Dame will host its 48th annual Collegiate Jazz Festival from March 1 to 4 (Wednesday to Saturday), co-headlined by the 2006 African American Jazz Caucus/Historically Black Colleges and Universities Student All-star Big Band.
The all-star band, which is organized by the International Association for Jazz Education's African American Jazz Caucus, is composed of some 20 students from historically black colleges and universities who are selected annually through a blind audition process.
In addition to its appearance at the festival, the band also will present a special guest concert at 4 p.m. March 3 at the Notre Dame Downtown office, 217 S. Michigan St., South Bend. Admission is free and the concert is open to the public.
