School Notes: School of Music
January/February 2024

Music in Schools Initiative ensemble performs in New York

In September, the All-City Choir, an ensemble of the School of Music’s Music in Schools Initiative, performed Geoffrey Hudson’s Seeds of Peace at the UNICEF House in New York City. The choral group, comprising students from New Haven Public Schools and conducted by NHPS music educator Alysoun Kegel ’05, was joined by tenor soloist Kyle Pruett ’65, a founder of the Early Childhood Peace Consortium. The consortium, whose mission is “to create an inclusive movement for peace, social cohesion, social justice, and the prevention of violence through using early childhood development strategies,” hosted a reception following a discussion at the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly that morning called “Early Childhood Development: Pathways to Sustainable Peace.” 

Students perform Pierrot lunaire in Vienna

Adjunct Professor Emeritus of Music Michael Friedmann taught a first-semester course called Analysis and Performance of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire that in January presented the piece at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna, in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth. The program for each performance also included Berg’s Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, Op. 5, and Webern’s Four Pieces for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 10. Friedmann called Pierrot lunaire, which was composed and premiered in 1912, “one of the core works of Austro-German expressionism.”

Faculty harpsichordist earns prestigious honor

Lecturer in harpsichord Arthur Haas, a School of Music faculty member since 2012, received Early Music America’s 2023 Howard Mayer Brown Award for Lifetime Achievement. “Since my earliest days,” Haas told Early Music America, “I have sought to uncover the glorious secrets of early music and combine that with my own twentieth- and twenty-first-century sensibilities.”