Iowa’s Sioux City Symphony Orchestra has announced the appointment of RYAN HASKINS as music director and conductor, effective July 1, 2009. He served most recently as assistant conductor of the Muncie (Indiana) Symphony Orchestra. A native of Ohio, Haskins holds degrees from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and from Cleveland’s Baldwin-Wallace Conservatory of Music, where he founded the Baldwin-Wallace Contemporary Orchestra. While in Cleveland he also directed the Euclid Orchestra and the Mozart Sinfonietta. He is currently enrolled in conducting studies under Gustav Meier, Marin Alsop, and Markand Thakar at Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, and serves as cover conductor for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.
Posted March 18, 2009
JAMES FEDDECK has been named to a one-year term as assistant conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra and music director of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra, effective next season. He succeeds JAYCE OGREN, who is now completing a three-year term as assistant conductor. Feddeck will hold the Elizabeth Ring and William Gwinn Mather Chair, joining a conducting staff that also includes Assistant Conductor/League of American Orchestras Conducting Fellow Tito Muñoz. A native of New York City, Feddeck is currently assistant conductor of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra. He formerly held that post at Cleveland’s Red {an orchestra}, at the Northern Ohio Youth Orchestra, and at Oberlin Conservatory, where he received a bachelor’s degree in organ and oboe performance and a master’s degree in conducting before continuing his studies at the University of Michigan and at Aspen Music Festival and School’s American Academy of Conducting. As an organist Feddeck has performed recitals throughout Europe and North America and won competitions sponsored by the American Guild of Organists.
The Juilliard School has announced that ALAN GILBERT, music director-designate of the New York Philharmonic and a Juilliard alumnus, has been named to the William Schuman Chair in Musical Studies, effective in fall 2009. In this newly created post Gilbert will coach and lead master classes for instrumentalists, singers, chamber ensembles, and conducting students; direct cooperative projects involving Juilliard young artists and musicians of the New York Philharmonic; co-teach a graduate seminar covering a variety of subjects; and conduct the Juilliard Orchestra in a concert during each academic year. The William Schuman Chair in Musical Studies is named for the man who, as Juilliard’s president from 1945 to 1962, significantly re-shaped the curriculum and shepherded the school’s move to Lincoln Center. Schuman is the subject of a new biography by Juilliard’s current president, Joseph Polisi, entitled American Muse. 
