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Tag Archives: Nashville
Vanderbilt Music & Mind Kickoff
Ingram Hall lobby during a break at the Vanderbilt Music & Mind Kickoff to the Society for Music Perception and Cognition 2015 Conference, August 1, 2015
This week (August 1-5) Vanderbilt University hosted the biennual Conference of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition. Many scientists and researchers from around the world descended on Music City to attend the five-day meeting, attending lectures, presentations, symposiums, and other events. The week’s activities are a means for scientists, musicians, and others to share and learn about the many facets of current research in music understanding from a far-flung collection of fields including music theory, psychology, psychophysics, linguistics, neurology, neurophysiology, ethology, ethnomusicology, artificial intelligence, computer technology, physics, and engineering.
On Saturday, August 1, Kelley Bell (Nashville Symphony Education & Community Engagement Program Manager) and I attended the Music & Mind Kickoff event on the opening day of the conference, which was held at Blair School of Music’s Ingram Hall.
Registration for 2015-16 Education Programming Opens July 27
Music Director Giancarlo Guerrero works with a student during Side-by-Side Concert rehearsals, May 20, 2015
Registration for many of the Nashville Symphony’s education programs for the 2015-2016 season will open on Monday, July 27 at 11 a.m.
Summer Education Internship at the Nashville Symphony
from my instagram feed, May 18, 2015: Nashville Symphony Education & Community Engagement Staff and Interns, Summer 2015
“The internship experience at the Nashville Symphony has been a dream come true.” says Margie Way-Kiani, one of our summer interns. “I’ve aways wanted a behind-the-scenes view of how the Nashville Symphony functions so successfully, and now I’ve had a small taste of that through the Education & Community Engagement Department.”
One of the Nashville Symphony’s many education programs, our internships provide opportunities for college students to gain experience working at not only a major American orchestra, but also the largest performing arts nonprofit in the state of Tennessee. Typically, an internship lasts a semester and is offered in the Fall, Spring, and Summer, following the usual academic calendar. This summer, the symphony is hosting an intern each in our Operations, Development, and Human Resources departments, and four interns in Education & Community Engagement.
Chris Squire 1948 – 2015
Chris Squire circa 1972 – from Fragile
Chris Squire, who laid down the bass line for much of the soundtrack of my adolescence, died yesterday of leukemia. He was 67.
Chris and Jon Anderson founded Yes in 1968. The band has gone through many permutations in personnel and evolution in style since then, but Chris has always been at the heart of the group. His unique sound, approach to playing bass, and contribution to crafting the group’s compositions have been an integral part of what makes Yes Yes. When Billy Sherwood joins the band on stage as bassist at the beginning of their North American Summer Tour in August, it will be the first time that Yes has ever performed without Chris since the band was formed 47 years ago.
Nashville Symphony: Your Community. Your Orchestra.
music director Giancarlo Guerrero speaks about the symphony’s role in the community in Nashville Symphony: Your Community. Your Orchestra.
I’m pleased to be able to share with you the music education advocacy video that was produced by our Communications team and Mogulboys this Spring – it is now publicly available on Youtube (see below). The video has already been viewed by thousands of symphony patrons since the beginning of May, including screenings at the annual Fashion Show on May 5 and before our many movie concerts in the hall during the month of June.
Nashville Symphony: Your Community. Your Orchestra features the symphony’s conductors and musicians both describing our organization’s commitment to music education as well as sharing personal anecdotes about the importance of music education in the life of the community.
The End of the Season
The Nashville Symphony Chorus assembled moments before a performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, Op. 66, May 29, 2015
For months the chorus met to learn their parts,
Taking time from family, work, and school;
Bolting a snack on the way to rehearsal
To arrive in their seats in time for the downbeat.
The orchestra’s sound only imagined,
Or for those to whom this weekly work has come
To hold a place of honor in their lives,
A memory of previous performances.
Side By Side 2015
Nashville Symphony Concertmaster Jun Iwasaki & CYS Principal Second Violin Maggie Kasinger backstage before the annual Side-By-Side concert, May 21, 2015
This week the Nashville Symphony was joined by students from Curb Youth Symphony, Carol Nies, director, for our annual Side-By-Side Concert, featuring a truly massive combined orchestra on stage in Laura Turner Hall for a day of rehearsals on Wednesday and the performance on Thursday night. The orchestra was conducted by Nashville Symphony Assistant Conductor Vinay Parameswaran on performances of Rossini’s Overture to William Tell, the third movement of the Violin Concerto No. 3 by Camille Saint-Saëns featuring 2015 Curb Competition winner Kaili Wang, and the Finale from Symphony No. 2 by Jean Sibelius. The concert closed with a performance of Tchaikovsky’s masterful Romeo and Juliet Overture, conducted by Nashville Symphony Music Director Giancarlo Guerrero.
Spirits were high in the hall as symphony musicians were joined by teenagers from throughout Middle Tennessee – for many of our musicians this annual event is nostalgic and special as so many of them played in youth orchestras themselves when they were in high school.
Nashville Symphony Formalizes Partnership With NSA
from my Instagram feed: NSA dancers wait for their cue during a performance of Swan Lake with the Nashville Symphony at Schermerhorn, February 11, 2015
This week Nashville Symphony Education staff met with Oceana Sheehan, Assistant Principal of Nashville School of the Arts, and Bob Kucher, Director of Secondary Partnerships and Programs at the PENCIL Foundation, to formalize the partnership between the symphony and the school. It was a relatively simple process and in fact a pleasant one: we filled out some paperwork and discussed our plans for the ongoing collaboration between the two institutions next season.
Although not existing “on paper” until now, the symphony and NSA have in fact had a rich and dynamic partnership for several years now: both institutions collaborate on many events and projects throughout the year that occur both at Schermerhorn and at the school’s campus on Foster Road.
How Anna Joined The Symphony
This is the story of how Anna joined the Nashville Symphony.
Nashville Symphony Principal Keyboard Robert Marler takes Anna for a test drive on the stage of Laura Turner Hall
It’s a bit of a convoluted tale – like many stories, some unexpected things happened, one thing led to another, and once you start trying to find all the threads in the fabric you realize that the real beginnings probably go back a lot further than you originally thought.
Anna is a ten year old double-manual Franco-Flemish harpsichord.
One on a Part
Or, Making Lemonade at the Symphony
When the ice storm hit Nashville in February 2015, schools were closed for more than a week. Two weeks later – at the beginning of March – schools were closed again for a snow storm. As a result, the Nashville Symphony had to cancel three mornings of Young People’s Concerts at Schermerhorn and a run-out concert to a local high school: we missed 7 performances, which would have put the orchestra in front of around 10,000 students total.
When the weather had passed and all the staff were able to get back in the hall at the same time we held a meeting to comb the calendar for the possibility of making up these canceled events – our Young People’s Concerts (YPCs) are the symphony’s flagship education program, an important component in the execution of our education mission. Usually these concerts are scheduled more than a year in advance, due to the difficulty in finding times when the availability of the orchestra, the conductor, scheduled guest artists, the MNPS school calendar, and the hall all line up and allow time not only for performances but rehearsals also. Young People’s Concerts are written into the initial schedule for the orchestra each year for this reason – it’s nearly impossible to find adequate dates and times when all these elements align mid-season.
And so it proved.
Walter Bitner 
