In April 2021, soprano Laura Strickling (MM ’06, Voice) celebrated her 40th birthday by announcing her 40@40 project to commission 40 new art songs for voice and piano from 40 composers. A few months later, she received a 2022 GRAMMY nomination in Best Classical Vocal Solo Album for Confessions, her debut solo outing. Her 40@40, recorded with Daniel Schlosberg (BM ’00, MM ’01, Piano; KSAS BA ’00, History) and released by the upstart Bright Shiny Things label earlier this year, includes the first 20 of those commissions, debuted at the top of Billboard’s Traditional Classical charts, and earned Strickling her second straight Best Classical Vocal Solo Album nomination when the 2024 GRAMMY list was announced in November. 

Strickling and Schlosberg are two of a handful of Peabody alumni nominated for GRAMMYs or who appear on nominated projects. John Wilson’s (BM ’10, MM ’12, GPD ’14 Piano Performance) Rachmaninoff & Gershwin: Transcriptions By Earl Wild, produced by Elaine Martone, was nominated for Producer of The Year, Classical. Faculty Jazz saxophonist Tim Green and Dontae Winslow (BM ’97, MM ’99, Trumpet) performed on Adam Blackstone’s Legacy: The Instrumental Jawn, which was nominated for Best Jazz Instrumental Album. And Awadagin Pratt (PC ’89, Piano; PC ’89, Violin; GPD ’92, Conducting) performed Jessie Montgomery’s Rounds, which was nominated for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. Congratulations to all Peabody alumni who were nominated or involved with nominated projects and recordings.

A few thoughts about current and future students at Peabody. Every other year, I have been teaching a course I call So You Want to Run an Arts Organization, an arts leadership seminar. I enjoy teaching this for two reasons—it’s an important subject in our field where good leadership is critical, and it gives me an opportunity to get to know a group of our students in a way that I normally would not. I am teaching this course for the third time this fall. What I am most happy about is that each year I have seen an increased awareness from our students around the flexibility and adaptability required of artists today, and the need to be proactive and creative in how students think about their careers and future as performing artists. Through our Breakthrough Curriculum and the unique career development center that is LAUNCHPad, Peabody is certainly challenging its students today to both develop all the core skills needed to be top-flight musicians and dancers, and to surround those skills with an understanding of what is required to motivate and generate diverse and vibrant audiences for the future. And I am especially pleased to see this thinking manifested in my class in the final capstone projects that our students present to culminate the semester.

Turning our attention to the future, it is hard to believe we are already well into a new admissions cycle. And as of the December 1st deadline, applications to Peabody are up 4% this year, largely driven by graduate applications. This bodes well as we are already building on the current academic year’s cohort of 815 students enrolled this fall, the largest number in our history, and well above the 760 students in the prior year. We look forward to seeing these students on campus for our February auditions as we select a talented, competitive, and diverse group of new students to welcome to Peabody in fall 2024. More to come on that later this spring!

Sincerely,

Sunday, December 10, 4:00 pm EST

Antonio Vivaldi’s cherished Gloria has become an annual holiday season tradition at Baltimore’s oldest Presbyterian congregation, the First&Franklin Presbyterian Church. Director of Music and organist Jason Kissel (DMA ’07, Organ) leads the First&Franklin Sanctuary Choir through this soaring work along with Baroque chorale music and carols. Jacqueline Pollauf (MM ’07, Harp) joins the choir for this free candlelight concert at First&Franklin.

Monday, December 11, 6:30 pm EST

Before Tania León was a Pulitzer-prize-winner and Kennedy Center honoree, the Cuban-American composer was a young woman from Havana training to be a concert pianist. Now a professor emerita at CUNY, she is honored by the public university with a free concert featuring her in conversation with radio host Terrence McKnight and performances of her works, including her Esenica string quartet by the Bergamot Quartet: Ledah Finck (BM ’16, MM ’18, Violin); Sarah Thomas (BM ’17, MM ’19 Violin); Amy Huimei Tan (GPD ’20, Viola); and Irène Han (MM ’18, Cello). The event will be livestreamed.

Wednesday, December 13, 12:30 pm EST

South Korean pianist HieYon Choi joined the Peabody Conservatory’s already formidable piano faculty this academic year, bringing with her a strong advocacy for new music as well as a deep knowledge of the classical piano canon. For her debut solo performance as a Peabody faculty artist, she performs a keyboard masterpiece: Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations, BMV 988, a towering work of technical dazzle and intense emotional range that she discusses in the 30 Bach: The Goldberg Variations podcast from earlier this year. Choi performs the Goldberg Variations at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C. and the performance will be livestreamed.

Wednesday, December 20, 7:30 pm CST

Since band directors and music educators started convening in Chicago to share best practices in 1946, the Midwest Clinic has become an essential annual conference filled with workshops, clinics, and performances. The Peabody Jazz Ensemble, led by Richard and Elizabeth Case Chair of Jazz Studies Sean Jones, performs at the McCormick Place convention center in Chicago as a featured ensemble at this year’s Clinic. Jones also leads a jazz improv workshop during the clinic, and alums Viet Cuong (BM ’11, MM ’12, Composition) and Henry Dorn (MM ’20, Wind Conducting, Composition) are featured speakers. Register online.

Sunday, December 31, 7:00 pm EST

Mezzo-soprano Taylor Hillary Boykins (MM ’14, Voice) caps a busy 2023—Opera Baltimore, Northern Neck Orchestra, and Annapolis Opera productions, performing Julia Wolfe’s Her Story as a member of the Lorelei ensemble with the San Francisco and Boston symphony orchestras, debuting with the chamber vocal ensemble Third Practice—with one final first on the last evening of the year. She makes her debut with the Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra, led by Music Director Michael Repper (DMA ’22, Conducting), through a festive evening of arias and arts song. The performance takes place at Christ Church in Easton, Maryland, and tickets are available online.

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Peabody Notes highlights select off-campus performances featuring Peabody performers. For other events, please visit our Peabody events page.

L’Aprèsi Midi Romantique

In fall 2022 the Flano Duo of Yoon Jung Huh (GPD ’13, Flute) and Choah Kim (MM ’13, Piano) performed a recital in New York spotlighting the Romantic period’s expressive flute and piano repertoire, particularly by French composers. For their second Flano Duo album, Huh and Kim recorded Gabriel Fauré’s Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 in a Major, Philippe Gaubert’s Romance for Flute and Piano, Darius Milhaud’s Sonatine for Flute and Piano, and Erik Satie’s Je Te Veux for L'Après-Midi Romantique, which is available online. 

Für Claire

Mofan Lai (BM ’20, MM ’21, Voice) recorded his Für Claire EP with pianist Yin Zhu (MM ’17, GPD ’19, Vocal Accompanying) and recording engineer Yang Xu (MA ’12, Audio Sciences). The result is an intimate five-song collection that spotlights Lai’s supple tenor, including an arrestingly mysterious version of Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again.” Für Claire is available to stream or purchase online.

Harmony at the Piano: Using Keyboard Harmony to Learn Advanced Piano Music

Educational publishing has been a part of Associate Professor of Keyboard Studies Ken Johansen’s (MM ’89, Piano) practice for his entire career, from his From the Ground Up study editions series published on the British pedagogy site Practising the Piano to the Read Ahead site-reading app he co-invented. Harmony at the Piano (Routledge), his latest book, is designed to support a full college/conservatory course in keyboard harmony, and includes a complementary host of online resources. 

Into the Beyond

Mary Matthews (MM ’10, Flute), a Florida State University assistant professor of flute, follows her 2021 book of extended flute techniques Beatboxing & Beyond: An Essential Method for the 21st Century Flutist with Into the Beyond, a second volume of multiphonics, pitch blends, whistle tones, jet whistle, and flutter tongue exercises and examples. Into the Beyond is available online.

Mere Mortals

Composer Ahmed Alabaca’s “Mere Mortals” is a majestically plaintive four minutes of piano and violin that inspires introspection. It provides both the title and emotional landscape of violinist Caitlin Edwards’ recent album with Daniel Schlosberg (BM ’00, MM ’01, Piano; KSAS BA ’00, History) featuring works by composers of marginalized identities. In addition to Alabaca’s haunting creation, Mere Mortals (Novana) includes sonatas by David Baker, Jonathan Bailey Holland, Irene Britton Smith, and Ethel Smyth, the English suffragette who spent her 1870s through 1930s career marginalized as a “lady” composer. 

Return to Archive

To commemorate the 75th anniversary of the founding of Folkway Records and its archive of field recordings, now housed at the Smithsonian, electronics artists Matmos went in search of strange sounds to sample, such as Sounds of North American Frogs, Speech After the Removal of the Larynx, and Sounds of Insects, which includes the gurgling tone of a mud-dauber wasp’s wings in flight. The duo of Hopkins English Professor Drew Daniel and recent Computer Music faculty addition Martin Schmidt transform that sound into the dance-floor twitching “Mud-Dauber Wasp” on Return to Archive (Smithsonian Folkways), an album of nine dizzying, hypnotic tracks crafted entirely from such non-musical sources that is available to stream or buy online.