Avshalomov/Bernstein 1: Introduction

Posted on January 28, 2019

Bernstein: 1918-1990

Avshalomov: 1919-2013

Leonard Bernstein and Jacob Avshalomov: one shot like a rocket into the international classical music stratosphere; the other wound his way through the world and built his reputation year by year.  A year apart in age, both were part of the legendary post-WWII mid-twentieth-century American composers’ “circuit,” as Avshalomov put it.  Both their similarities and their differences informed their different... Read More ›

Avshalomov/Bernstein 2: Bernstein’s early years

Posted on January 28, 2019

As a young man, Leonard Bernstein’s Orthodox Jewish father emigrated from a shtetl in the Ukrainian area of the “Pale of Settlement”, where the Imperial Russian government allowed Jews to live, to New York and eventually to Lawrence, Massachusetts.  Leonard grew up in a tightly disciplined, observant Jewish family with two siblings, was drawn to piano before he could walk, and... Read More ›

MEET HANAMI FROOM, RUNNER-UP OF PYP’S 2018-19 CONCERTO COMPETITION

Posted on January 21, 2019

Hanami Froom is the runner up for the 2018-19 PYP Concerto Competition. She will perform the first movement of Jean Sibelius’s Violin Concerto with PYP’s Conservatory Orchestra on Sunday, February 10, 2019, in the Skyview Auditorium in Vancouver, WA.

Hanami Froom is a twelve-year-old violinist. She has been studying violin from the age of two, and is currently a student of Carol Sindell.... Read More ›

WILLIAM GRANT STILL (part 1 of 5)

Posted on October 12, 2018

William Grant Still (with instrument case) with his friends at Wilberforce University, 1915. Photo from the holdings of the University of Arkansas Libraries’ Special Collections.

William Grant Still (1895-1978) is known as “The Dean of African-American Composers”, for good reason.  The standard sites and survey history books cite the same litany of impressive firsts:

—the first African-American to conduct a major American symphony orchestra,—the... Read More ›

WILLIAM GRANT STILL: EARLY ADULT YEARS (part 2 of 5)

Posted on October 10, 2018

Company photo, “Shuffle Along” on tour in Boston, 1921; Still is second from far left. Photo from Broadway Collection.

Even though William Grant Still never completed his Bachelor’s degree, in his twenties he managed to cobble together an astoundingly broad and deep musical education that was probably more multifaceted and multicultural in its outlook than any other single composer of his era.  Even... Read More ›

WILLIAM GRANT STILL: CRYSTALLIZING THE DREAM (part 3 of 5)

Posted on October 8, 2018

William Grant Still in rehearsal.  From Houston Public Media.

Still’s self-identified second period took its shape, as his wife Verna Arvey later related, from a “dream dating back to 1916 when as a young man, he went to Memphis to work with W.C. Handy” (Arvey, Memo to Musicologists).  Once he learned about the Blues in their original context, he resolved that he someday he... Read More ›