What role should government play in society? In religion? These enduring questions are at the heart of Opera Notre Dame’s upcoming performance of The Dialogues of the Carmelites, April 25-28 at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center.

On April 1, 2013, Stephen Lancaster, assistant professional specialist in the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Music, was named the male winner at the Nico Castel International Master Singer Competition. Held annually in New York City at Carnegie Hall, the competition is sponsored by Distinguished Concerts International New York (DCINY) and the New York Opera Studio. By an audience vote, Lancaster was also declared the “favorite” among all the competitors.

Will Sievern, piano performance '14, won third prize in the American Fine Arts Festival competition, resulting in a solo performance at Carnegie's Weill Hall in New York in May 2013. Will was also the first prize winner of the 2013 Skokie Valley Symphony competition in Chicago, and will be performing a concert with this orchestra at the North Shore Performing Arts Center on their 2013-14 season. Sievern studies with piano professor John Blacklow.…

Finding and publishing long-forgotten musical compositions by classical composers is usually a project reserved for Ph.D. and master’s students. But don’t tell Samantha Osborn that. Last summer the Notre Dame music and pre-med major spent two weeks in Rome at the Conservatory of Saint Cecilia, where she was able to locate and duplicate eight of Baroque composer Alessandro Scarlatti’s handwritten cantatas. She will perform one of them this spring as part of her senior thesis recital.

MurphyKate Montee, a senior honors mathematics and music double major at the University of Notre Dame, has received the 2013 Alice T. Schafer Mathematics Prize, an honor awarded to only one undergraduate woman in the U.S. each year.

The Winston Churchill Foundation of the United States has selected MurphyKate Montee as a Churchill Scholar for the academic year 2013-2014. Montee, a senior mathematics and music (voice) double major in the Glynn Family Honors Program, is one of just 14 students in the United States to receive this honor.

With a $400,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University of Notre Dame has announced the launch of the Sacred Music Drama Project, a four-year, cross-disciplinary initiative designed to engage people more deeply with the power of shared creativity, performance and scholarship.

The project will draw on humanistic, artistic and sacred topics from a variety of musical traditions to develop new coursework and to stage the production of a major dramatic performance each year. The Mellon grant will also bring both eminent and emerging guest artists to campus and will fund the commission of a new work of sacred music drama at the end of the project.

MurphyKate Montee

MurphyKate Montee, a senior honors mathematics and music double major at the University of Notre Dame, has received the 2013 Alice T. Schafer Mathematics Prize, an honor awarded to only one undergraduate woman in the U.S. each year.

Montee is a member of the Seminar for Undergraduate Mathematical Research (SUMR), a program designed for the most talented mathematics students at Notre Dame. Montee is completing a senior honors thesis, titled “On the Construction of the Chern Classes of Complex Vector Bundles.” Montee has already authored or co-authored three research articles, two of which have been submitted for publication and have appeared on the Mathematics ArXiv.

More than 100 musicians gathered last week on the campus of the University of Notre Dame for its inaugural Sacred Music Conference.

The University of Notre Dame’s Department of Music will celebrate Franz Schubert’s 215th birthday on Friday, February 3, with an afternoon of music by the famed Austrian composer. The event, called Schubertiade, will take place from 12:30 to 5 p.m. in the O’Shaughnessy Great Hall and features performances from faculty and students, as well as readings chosen by J.W. Van Gorkom Professor of Music Susan Youens, an expert on Schubert’s work.