School Notes: School of Music
July/August 2012

Sanford Medal celebrates alumnus

At the school’s 119th Commencement on May 21, Dean Robert Blocker presented the Sanford Medal, the School of Music’s highest honor, to Joseph Polisi ’73MusM, ’75MusAM, ’80MusAD, for distinguished service to music. Polisi, the first bassoonist to earn the DMA degree from the School of Music, has been the president of the Juilliard School since 1984. He has performed as bassoon soloist and chamber musician throughout the United States and has produced several sound recordings, including a solo album of twentieth-century bassoon music on Crystal Records. Polisi, a frequent speaker on arts and education issues, has also written numerous scholarly and educational articles. His most recent book, American Muse: The Life and Times of William Schuman, was published by Amadeus Press in 2008.

Tokyo String Quartet to retire

The Tokyo String Quartet, which joined the faculty of the Yale School of Music as artists-in-residence in 1977, announced this spring that the concert season 2012–2013 will be its last. One of the world’s most distinguished chamber music ensembles, the quartet—Martin Beaver, violin; Kikuei Ikeda, violin; Kazuhide Isomura, viola; and Clive Greensmith, cello—was founded in 1969. The ensemble currently performs well over 100 concerts each year across the globe, and has released more than 40 landmark recordings. The ensemble’s final concert will take place at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, the summer home of the Yale School of Music, in June 2013.

Alumnus wins Pulitzer Prize in Music

Composer Kevin Puts ’96MusM was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his opera Silent Night. The citation for Puts’s award called Silent Night “a stirring opera that recounts the true story of a spontaneous cease-fire among Scottish, French, and Germans during World War I, displaying versatility of style and cutting straight to the heart.” The opera, which is Puts’s first, was commissioned and premiered by the Minnesota Opera in Minneapolis in November 2011.

Another School of Music graduate, Andrew Norman ’09ArtA, was among this year’s finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Music. Norman was nominated for The Companion Guide to Rome,cited as “an impressive musical portrait of nine historic churches, written for a string trio but sometimes giving the illusion of being played by a much larger group, changing mood and mode on a dime.”