From left: Juliano Aniceto, Ryo Hasegawa, Hae Lee, Lee Mills

Last month the Greenville Symphony Orchestra, where professional studies lecturer Jessica Satava (MM ’04, Voice) is executive director, named Lee Mills (GPD ’11, Orchestral Conducting; AD ’12, Orchestral Conducting) its sixth Music Director. Mills, the 2011 BSO-Peabody Conducting fellow and a five-time winner of the Solti Foundation U.S. Career Assistance Award, joins other Peabody Conducting alumni in stepping onto new orchestral podiums this coming season. Hae Lee (MM ’23, Orchestral Conducting), who last year took Second Prize at the Kussewitzky Conducting Competition in Italy and was a finalist at the Besançon Conducting Competition in France, was appointed Associate Conductor of the Richmond Symphony. Orchestral Conducting DMA candidate Ryo Hasegawa was recently named Music Director of the Bloomington (Indiana) Symphony Orchestra. And Juliano Aniceto, a current Conducting DMA student, spends this summer as Marin Alsop’s assistant conductor at Ravinia Festival 2024 with the Chicago Symphony. 

While I normally don’t focus on the same topic two months in a row, I knew I had to make an exception following our graduation ceremonies this year.

Graduation is always the highlight of the academic year. I still get goosebumps with this event as we celebrate our students’ successes and see them off into the world. It is always moving. This year was even more so. Yes, there were disappointments—we truly missed Misty Copeland’s presence due to illness. But the presence of the great Stevie Wonder paved the way for an unforgettable Graduate graduation ceremony and other related university events over a two-day period. For the Peabody ceremony, Stevie talked eloquently and movingly to our students about his life experience and somehow managed also to have the entire gathering singing and improvising with him. Then after receiving the Peabody Medal, as he was sitting next to me just before I was to speak, he asked if I would mind if he were to sing a song. That was a question that you don’t get every day. Of course, my immediate answer was “Yes, please!” He proceeded to sing two songs from his epic Songs in the Key of Life—“If It’s Magic” followed by “Sir Duke.” Later that evening at the President’s dinner for the distinguished honorary degree recipients, of which Stevie Wonder was one, he stepped to the keyboard for an impromptu medley. In a room full of highly distinguished, some famous, and often brilliant people, everyone had their cell phones out recording this incredible moment—fans all. But it didn’t end there. The next day at University Commencement, Stevie Wonder, again in the spur of the moment, performed for the Johns Hopkins University graduates and their families. The roar when he stepped to the keyboard was only surpassed by the thunderous response following his impromptu performance.

Most memorable, however, was this man’s authentic care for people, the warmth that he exudes in the presence of those he is meeting for the first time, and the remarkable generosity of spirit that comes through whether he’s speaking to you, to a group of graduates, or seated at the keyboard sharing his music. It was two days that for all of us touched by Stevie Wonder’s magic will not soon be forgotten.

Sincerely,

Thursday, June 6, through Saturday, June 8

Gemma New (MM ’11, Conducting) leads the BBC Philharmonic through the world premiere of Chinese composer Huang Ruo’s City of Floating Sounds, a multimedia work that uses a mobile app to guide concertgoers through the streets of Manchester listening to fragments of the meditative new piece, recorded by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, en route to the Aviva Studios venue. Tickets are available online.

Tuesday, June 11, through Sunday, June 16 

The NYC-based ChamberQUEER celebrates Pride 2024 with Constellation, a six-day festival of performances and workshops at the MITU580 theater in Brooklyn, NY. Performers include Danielle Buonaiuto (MM ’12, Voice) collaborating with her ChamberQUEER co-founders Jules Biber and Brian Mummert, flutist Amir Farsi (BM ’16, Flute) and pianist and current DMA candidate Maxwell Foster performing works by queer and POC composers and composers who immigrated to the United States. Chamber-pop duo Outcalls—Britt Olsen-Ecker (BM ’09, Voice) and Melissa Wimbish (GPD ’11, Voice; GPD ’14, Chamber Ensemble)—also performs their Release the Gowns variety show. Tickets available online and many events will be livestreamed.

Friday, June 14, 8:00 pm CDT

Conductor Jonathan Taylor Rush (MM ’19, Orchestral Conducting) leads a few concerts highlighting and featuring Black artists during this African American Music Appreciation Month. On June 14 Rush leads the Minnesota Orchestra through a Juneteenth program that includes works by Margaret Bonds, Carlos Simon, William Grant Still, Omar Thomas, and more; tickets are available online. He then joins the Louisiana Symphony Orchestra for a pair of concerts in New Orleans: the June 18 tribute to the free people of color who founded La Société Philharmonique in Tremé, and the LSO’s inaugural Music Of A Movement: A Symphonic Anthology, dedicated to masterpieces composed, written, or made famous by Black people, June 19. Tickets are available online.

Friday, June 28, and Saturday, June 29

The Feminist Border Arts Film Festival in Las Cruces, NM, celebrates digital and analog media arts through film, video, storytelling, and zines. “Forest” (2022), a short film collaboration between dancer/choreographer Rosely Conz and composer/sound artist and Assistant Professor of Computer Music Lyn Goeringer, screens on June 29 as part of the Weird Zexy Shorts program. All festival events are free and open to the public.

Sunday, June 30, 2:00 pm EDT

Così fan tutte, composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and librettist Lorenza Da Ponte’s opera buffa, remains one of Mozart’s reliably entertaining works. Peabody Opera Theatre Music Director Laurie Rogers returns to Opera Saratoga for her fourteenth season as Director of the Festival Artist Program, and she conducts this performance at the Universal Preservation Hall in Sarasota Springs, NY; tickets available online.

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Peabody Notes highlights select off-campus performances featuring Peabody performers. For other events, please visit our Peabody events page.

AMEN

With her third album as bandleader, composer/bassoonist Joy Guidry (BM ’18, Bassoon) introduces elements of gospel, introspective jazz, and meditative ambient atmospheres into her lyrical, soulful music. Recording engineers Scott Li (BM ’21, Recording Arts and Sciences), Edwin Huet (BM ’15, Computer Music, MM ’17, Computer Music), and Noah Tingen (BM ’19, Horn) warmly capture Guidry’s vulnerable emotional range on AMEN (Whited Sepulchre Records). 

Manuscripts Don't Burn

Featuring works by Clarice Assad, Mike Garson, Maya Miro Johnson, Veronika Krausas, Franz Schubert, and Ljova Zhurbin, Inna Faliks’ (BM ’99, MM ’01, GPD ’03, Piano) new Manuscripts Don’t Burn (Sono Luminus) is a superb compliment to her Weight in the Fingertips memoir. Manuscripts collects works written for Faliks, as well as pieces that speak to her interests in the dialogues between music and language.