School Notes: School of Music
November/December 2014

Croatian president speaks on campus

Ivo Josipovic, the president of Croatia, connected music with politics in a talk given on September 22. Elected president in 2010, Josipovic holds degrees in both music and law; he served for several years as the director of Music Biennale Zagreb. Josipovic’s talk explored a broad spectrum of its topic, from drawing parallels between statesmen and musicians to commenting on his own use of music in political campaigning and governing. He also discussed the role of music in war, noting that music has been used both to rally people for war and to protest against it, and that musicians have participated both willingly and unwillingly in war. Josipovic played a wide variety of musical examples, including excerpts from Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer, and Melissa Dunphy’s Gonzales Cantata. Introducing a clip from the song “Imagine” by John Lennon, Josipovic spoke about the power of musicians in society and their role in politics. “Pop musicians are very important. I quite appreciate John Lennon’s approach: he’s dreaming of a better society.”

Prizes and premieres

A new children’s opera by Yale alumna Lori Laitman ’75, ’76MusM, received its world premiere this past October. The Three Feathers, directed by Beth Greenberg and conducted by Scott Williamson, was commissioned by the new Center for the Arts at Virginia Tech to celebrate the center’s opening. Written with librettist Dana Gioia (past chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts), the one-act opera is based on a Grimm’s fairy tale. 

Composer Andy Akiho ’11MusM won the American Composers Orchestra’s 2014
Annual Underwood Emerging Composers Commission with his work Tarnished Mirrors. Chosen from seven finalists during ACO’s 23rd annual Underwood New Music Readings in April, Akiho will receive $15,000 for a work to be premiered by ACO in a future season. 

And Yang Jiao ’12MusM took second place in the fifth International Conducting Competition Bucharest Jeunesses Musicales, which took place in early September in Bucharest, Romania. The three finalists conducted the George Enescu Philhamonic Bucharest in the opening concert of the Enescu International Competition. Yang and the other finalists will conduct future concerts with orchestras in Romania, Poland, and Serbia.