sonorities

The Transition Continues…

This fall, the School of Music welcomed ten new full-time faculty. Combined with last year’s hires, more than 20% of the faculty (15 members) is new, having a profound positive effect on the School. I remind my faculty often that not a single student decides to matriculate at the UI School of Music because Karl Kramer is the director*; they come because of the unique talent, energy, and expertise of each individual faculty member. After all, when the computers are shut off for the night and our amazing library closes, we’re still a medieval apprenticeship—one on one.

I should mention several performance highlights scheduled for this year, beginning with a combined performance of the Marching Illini and Florida A&M’s Marching 100 (whose two directors, by the way, are UI alums) at the first game of the season in Memorial Stadium…what a hoot! In October, the UI Symphony Orchestra opened its season with Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, and the New Music Ensemble, now firmly woven into the fabric of the ensemble program, welcomed its new music director and conductor, Eduardo Diazmuñoz. November 6-7 marked the sesquicentennial commemoration of John Philip Sousa’s birth, which was celebrated by a weekend-long symposium spearheaded by Jim Keene and the Wind Symphony. In February, we welcome back alum and Grammy-winning artist Jerry Hadley to star in our spring semester production of Candide. You’ll probably remember that Jerry won his first Grammy Award for his recording of Candide with June Anderson and Bernstein himself conducting. Jerry will be with us for a full month of rehearsals during which time he will be giving master classes, coachings, and voice lessons. Call and get your tickets now; this is an excellent reason to come back to campus, to reconnect and see this rarely staged gem of American opera/musical theater.

Administratively, we have completely reorganized and restructured our admissions and outreach operations into one integrated division of enrollment management and public engagement. The result is a lean, mean recruiting machine, if you will, to facilitate our national and international recruiting efforts and to serve our state-wide constituencies for both degree-granting collegiate programs as well as our pre-college summer programs and workshops. Two new staff members, David Allen and Lynwood Jones, join this operation headed by Joyce Rend.

The University is still grappling with the issue of what to do about Chief Illiniwek, and, quite frankly, I’m not sure there is an agreeable solution in sight. The dilemma is to keep him and continue to deal with claims of insensitivity or to retire him with honor. My solution, which, by the way, no one embraced, was to cast the chief as the Commendatore in our fall production of Don Giovanni. As the story goes, he would be “retired” in the first act, with honor, of course (I mean how much more honorable can you get than a Mozart opera?), and then make a brief appearance in the finale leading Giovanni to his “final” resting place. Metaphors abound within all that pageantry, and, to top it off, we would do it four times!

My own life is still in transition from New England to the Midwest…I have let my subscription lapse to Yankee Magazine, I have requested that L.L. Bean take me off their mailing list (I’m now getting into REI), and I’m just beginning to trade my baseball frustration from the Red Sox to the Cubs, although my childhood love of the Phillies still continues to be first in my consciousness. And a tidbit in the irony department…while living in New Haven, Jean and I owned a house in the city limits which, for some bizarre reason known only to an 18th century surveyor, included an acre and a half of ground. My John Deere tractor came in handy when it was time to mow the grass. When we moved to Champaign, in the heart of the nation’s farm country and only 45 minutes from the John Deere factory in Decatur, I had to sell the tractor because our house here has a lawn the size of a postage stamp…go figure.

Thanks to all of you who keep the checks of support coming; the state of Illinois’ budget isn’t doing the University any favors. Only you can provide that margin of excellence that distinguishes the UI School of Music.

Karl Kramer
Director, School of Music

WINTER 2005