School Notes: School of Music
March/April 2010

Music in Schools program continues to grow

The Music in Schools program, inaugurated with funding from the Yale College class of 1957, continues to expand its reach throughout the state. A partnership with the Yale Glee Club will create a New Haven All-City Chorus. The annual instrumental competition will expand to include New Haven, Hartford, and Middlesex counties, with hopes to make it statewide in future years. And several interdisciplinary projects are bringing people from the School of Music together with public school students and professional musicians.

One current project, involving the School of Music, New Haven and Bridgeport public schools, and the Bridgeport Symphony Orchestra, illustrates the program’s reach. Last year, students from seven middle school classes in Bridgeport wrote and illustrated a story. Jordan Kuspa ’10MusM composed the score, which was performed in June by musicians from the Bridgeport Symphony along with live narration. The project continues this year as seniors from New Haven’s Co-Op Arts Magnet High School turn the book into a stop-motion film using LEGO.

Residency by composer Krzysztof Penderecki

The groundbreaking Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, who served on the YSM faculty from 1973 to 1979, returns to the School of Music for a weeklong residency in April. Penderecki will work with students and faculty artists in preparation for a concert of his chamber works. He will also conduct the Yale Philharmonia in two performances, one in Woolsey Hall and one in Carnegie Hall, as the concluding event of the 2009–10 Yale in New York series. The program, which spans nearly 50 years of Penderecki’s career, opens with his landmark work from 1960, Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. Violin professor Syoko Aki will perform the early (1967) Capriccio for Violin and Orchestra, a work that she performed with Penderecki at Yale in 1974, and faculty artist William Purvis will be the soloist in the U.S. premiere of the “Winterreise” horn concerto from 2008. The program will conclude with the Grawemeyer Prize-winning Symphony No. 4, “Adagio.”

School mourns longtime piano professor

Donald Currier ’47MusM, professor emeritus of piano, died on January 7 after a brief illness. In his 38 years on the Yale faculty, he was highly regarded as a teacher and performer. He also served as a resident fellow at Branford College and as associate dean of the School of Music.

Currier began piano lessons at the age of seven and studied piano and theory at the New England Conservatory. After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, he attended the School of Music, then taught for several years at Connecticut College before joining the Yale faculty in 1951. He gave recitals in New York and throughout New England in addition to numerous performances at Yale and the Norfolk Summer School of Music. In 1989 Currier was named a Steinway artist, and in 1989–90 he was visiting professor of piano at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore. In 1998 he and his wife made a CD of piano music and poetry, titled Not to Look Back, and in 2005 he published his book, Why the Piano: Conjectural Writing about the Piano and the People Who Devote Their Lives to It.