School Notes: School of Music
May/June 2007

String ensemble wins competition

The Alianza Quartet, formed at the School of Music two years ago and now the fellowship quartet-in-residence, won the Grand Prize at the prestigious 2007 Plowman Chamber Music Competition in Columbia, Missouri. In the semifinals, they competed against 25 other groups from around the country that had been chosen through a tape round; in the finals on April 1 they prevailed over a string quartet and piano trio, both from Juilliard, and wind groups from Northwestern University and the University of Colorado-Boulder. The quartet can be heard on the Web: their performance of Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" quartet is the school's first musical podcast on iTunes. The members of the Alianza Quartet are violinists Sarita Kwok ’06AD and Lauren Basney ’06AD, violist Ah-Young Sung ’05AD, and cellist Dmitri Atapine ’06AD.

Royal partnership

A collaboration with London's Royal Academy of Music is the School of Music's latest international musical partnership. Six student composers -- three from Yale and three from the Royal Academy -- created new works using Gyorgy Ligeti's Chamber Concerto as a template. All six compositions, along with the Ligeti concerto, were performed in London on April 24 and in New Haven on May 3. For the April performance, Professor Martin Bresnick and the Yale composers -- Matthew Barnson ’07MusM, Yoshiaki Onishi ’07MusM, and Edward Hearne ’08MusM -- traveled to London, where Bresnick presented a seminar and the student composers attended the final rehearsals and performance of their works. The three student composers from the Royal Academy came to New Haven for the May 3 concert, along with Simon Bainbridge, head of composition at the Royal Academy. Over the past few years, YSM has engaged in partnerships with such international musical institutions as the Central Conservatory of Music (Beijing, China); Korean National University of the Arts-School of Music and Seoul National University-College of Music (Seoul, Korea); Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory (Russia); and the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music (Budapest, Hungary).