Author: Mike Rush

“Stars are gearing up for music’s biggest night of the year: The 62nd annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles,” states an article and video on Saturday’s (1/25) Hawaii News Now. “Among them is Honolulu native Kathryn Schulmeister, who has been nominated for the Best Classical Solo Vocal Album award.” Schulmeister plays bass on the Grammy-nominated The Edge of Silence—Works for Voice by György Kurtág with vocalist Susan Narucki and musicians Donald Berman, Curtis Macomber, and Nicholas Tolle. Growing up in Honolulu, “Schulmeister attended Hanahauoli Elementary School and started to learn to play the bass in the third grade. She then went on to play in the orchestra at Punahou School and later in the Hawaii Youth Symphony from 2002 to 2007…. Now, she’s pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Contemporary Music Performance at the University of California, San Diego.” Schulmeister was a member of the Hawaii Symphony Orchestra from 2014 to 2017 and has performed with the Phoenix Symphony, California Chamber Orchestra, Pacific Lyric Opera, Maui Chamber Orchestra, and Hawaii Opera Theater. She earned a Bachelor of Music degree at the New England Conservatory of Music and a Master of Music degree at McGill University in Montréal.

Composer and jazz trumpeter Hannibal Lokumbe has received Americans for the Arts’ 2020 Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities, honoring an artist whose work demonstrates a sustained commitment to advancing community, civic, or social change. The $65,000 award will support him in advancing his community-based work during the fellowship year. Lokumbe, who is based in Bastrop, Texas, recently completed a three-year Music Alive composer residency at the Philadelphia Orchestra, where he composed One Land, One River (2015) and Healing Tones (2019). During the League of American Orchestras National Conference in Nashville in June 2019, Lokumbe led a silent “Walk of Love” through the streets of Nashville, immediately preceding a performance of his work Crucifixion Resurrection: Nine Souls a-Traveling, honoring the nine victims of the 2015 mass shooting at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Lokumbe is currently working on The Jonah People: A Legacy of Struggle and Triumph, commissioned by the Nashville Symphony. He is the founder and director of the Music Liberation Orchestra, which teaches music, genealogy, and writing to incarcerated men around the country.

In Monday’s (1/20) VAN magazine, Zoë Madonna reports that Linda Shaver-Gleason, “a musicologist, mother, and myth-buster who nurtured a vibrant and curious community of music lovers and friends,” died of cancer on January 14 at a California hospice facility at age 36. “Writing on her blog, ‘Not Another Music History Cliche!,’ and standing as a pillar of classical music’s niche on Twitter, Linda elegantly deployed her encyclopedic knowledge, research skills, and quick wit to cut through common classical music anecdote-myths.” Shaver-Gleason trained as a violist and received her PhD in musicology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2016. “After her 2015 diagnosis of terminal stage IV breast cancer … she cultivated a network of music lovers and friends around the world through the blog, Twitter, her program notes, and articles.… Because she was never concerned with the precarity of academic jobs … she told the podcast ‘Are We Okay,’ she felt free to be less guarded with her opinions than other musicologists might have been… Her editor at Clemson University Press, Alison Mero, confirmed that her book [about classical music] was on track for publication in 2021 or 2022.” Shaver-Gleason leaves behind her husband, Chris Gleason, and a son.

“Julia Wolfe (b.1958) was probably too young to have experienced a full dose of the upheaval [of the 1960s] firsthand, but in her new 33-minute symphonic extravaganza Flower Power, she strives to re-create it,” writes Richard S. Ginell in Monday’s (1/21) Musical America (subscription required). “The piece was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic … and featured the Bang On A Can All-Stars (of which Wolfe is a founder) as a kind of a countercultural core group within the orchestra. Designer Jeff Sugg provided the visual element.… Philharmonic Creative Chair John Adams was on the podium, leading what amounted to one big symphonic juggernaut Saturday night in Walt Disney Concert Hall…. The opening … evolved into a long, sustained yet harmonically unstable chord, with stray notes sliding around and the All-Stars in a furious non-stop frenzy.… It seemed an apt metaphor for the 1960s.… A jingling simulated jam session for the All-Stars, easily the most attractive music in the piece, accompanied the famous photo of a war protestor sticking a flower in the rifle of a soldier … It was an emotionally moving conclusion.” Also on the program was Adams’s 1998 Naive and Sentimental Music, which the LA Phil had commissioned.

“Richard Valitutto offered an impressive Piano Spheres program at the Colburn School’s Zipper Hall last week,” writes Mark Swed in Tuesday’s (1/21) Los Angeles Times. “He covered the transgressive keyboard waterfront [and included] a deliciously sentimental six-minute Poulenc closer…. The recital, however, began surprisingly with George Walker’s Piano Sonata No. 5…. Walker, who died in 2018 at age 96, was one of America’s most distinguished composers. He won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1996…. Who among classical music lovers, let alone the general public, even knows who George Walker was, much less has heard his music?… Walker has never been entirely off the radar, and last year the Seattle Symphony … gave the first live performance of Walker’s last completed score, ‘Visions.’ … At the time of his death, Walker was working on a piece for the Los Angeles Philharmonic…. His work demands—and magnificently rewards—deep listening. Even so, about the only month in which I ever encounter a piece by Walker on a concert program is February, because that is Black History Month…. This has to change…. Good places to start with Walker are his piano and violin concertos. When you get under their skin, they will get under yours.”

Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra Music Director Daniel Harding “is temporarily leaving his lofty perch in the world of classical music to pursue another dream job: airline pilot,” writes Elizabeth Yuan in Thursday’s (1/16) Wall Street Journal. “The 44-year-old British citizen … will conduct his final concert of the season in Stockholm in June…. Then he will leave the podium for the cockpit of an Airbus A320 for Air France.… His plan is to take a yearlong sabbatical and then resume concerts and gradually achieve a 50/50 split between the two careers. ‘Conductors tend to retire at 95, and pilots at 65,’ he said.… ‘I’ve got another 20 years I can fly.’ … Mr. Harding … had wanted to fly since he was a child…. Not until he was about to turn 40 and seeking a new challenge did he decide to get his pilot’s license…. The next stage was instrument flying. Then pursuit of a multiengine rating, followed by theory exams for the airline transport pilot license … and ultimately A320-type rating certification … ‘I don’t think I had an afternoon off in four years because, if I wasn’t conducting, I was flying or studying,’ he said.”

“Sheku Kanneh-Mason, the award-winning cellist who rose to prominence after performing at Harry and Meghan’s wedding, has called for greater investment in early-stage music education to tackle a lack of diversity in classical music,” writes Polly Bindman in Tuesday’s (1/21) Guardian (U.K.). “The 20-year-old musician, who played to a global audience of 1.9 billion at the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, [says], ‘I’ve benefited from having so much music education.… And the thought that lots of people won’t have something even close to that same level is a real shame. Diversity needs to start way, way before people are auditioning. If actual education is not invested in and supported, then nothing will change.’ The 2016 winner of the BBC Young Musician Award, and the first black musician to win the competition, credits a robust musical education as well as supportive parents for his success…. Kanneh-Mason is an ambassador for London Music Masters, a charity that offers musical support to state primary school children in London….He regularly visits schools to perform with young musicians. He … is the third of seven siblings, all of whom are skilled classical musicians.”

Daniel Harding’s yearlong conducting sabbatical—in an airplane cockpit