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Singers’ Club appoints new artistic director

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The Singers’ Club of Cleveland has named local conductor and musician Don VerKuilen as its new artistic director, effective June 1.

VerKuilen is the Director of Music and Liturgy at Saint Rocco Parish on Cleveland’s West Side, where he serves as organist and directs all choirs, including a schola cantorum he has created for the return of the Latin Mass.

VerKuilen has directed choirs across the United States as guest conductor and has held choral directing positions in prominent churches, including Pulaski Heights Methodist in Little Rock, Arkansas, and The Old Stone Church, Cleveland. He has performed as concert organist across the United States and Europe. VerKuilen began his organ and conducting studies at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and is continuing those studies at The Cleveland Institute of Music.

[Read more…]

Oberlin’s Gratitude Showers Challenge begins with Monday broadcast

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by Jarrett Hoffman

A group of students at Oberlin College and Conservatory are spreading gratitude and raising funds for healthcare professionals at University Hospitals Elyria Medical Center, all in a distinctly creative way.

On Monday evening, the Gratitude Showers Challenge kicked off with a broadcast on YouTube from 7:15 to 10:00 pm. I watched the first 40 minutes, which began with Abby Aresty and her students in the course Sonic Arts in Society explaining their project and how people can participate.

Stated most simply, they’re gathering notes of gratitude — a few words, or even a picture — from the public that will then be shared with hospital workers. They’re also asking for donations of $1 for each message received, up to their goal of 100 messages.

The messages will be written out on raindrop-shaped cuts of vinyl, and once it is deemed safe, installed on clear umbrellas that will make up an art installation in a courtyard at the Hospital.

[Read more…]

Oberlin Students partner with UH Elyria for “Gratitude Showers Challenge”

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Back in January, a group of Oberlin students began a collaboration with a nearby hospital. Now those students and others have begun a new initiative to support that hospital’s staff.

The Gratitude Showers Challenge honors the dedication and sacrifice of healthcare professionals at University Hospitals Elyria Medical Center. In recent weeks, the project has been further reenvisioned to involve the creativity of area children and to support a key fundraising initiative at the hospital.

Read Erich Burnett’s article here. [Read more…]

New app brings acoustics of Oberlin’s concert halls to your computer

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by Jarrett Hoffman

It’s uncomfortable to be inside a small space. What about being in a large space that’s often full of happy people, except it’s the middle of a pandemic, and you’re there alone?

“It was kind of spooky,” Andrew Tripp said during a recent conversation. Tripp is co-director of the Recording Arts and Production program at Oberlin Conservatory, as well as the associate director of Audio Services.

In early April, he made his way from one performance venue to the next on the mostly vacant campus. Armed with a two-way speaker, omnidirectional microphones, and a portable recorder, his goal was to “sonically document” each space, which involved the playing and recording of both music and a 30-second frequency sweep.

It was an idea Tripp had been cultivating for a few years, but one that was now more relevant than ever: with students unable to visit Oberlin’s halls, the halls could come to the students.

[Read more…]

Cuyahoga Arts & Culture: Apply Now for 2021 Project Funding 

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Cuyahoga Arts & Culture invites nonprofit organizations presenting arts and cultural programs in Cuyahoga County to apply for funding in 2021. CAC is pleased to offer the following grant opportunities:

2021 Project Support I: Grants up to $25,000 for 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations presenting arts and cultural projects in Cuyahoga County in 2021. Project Support I is available to organizations that have previously received CAC funding. Learn more.

2021 Project Support II: Grants up to $5,000 for 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations presenting arts and cultural projects in Cuyahoga County in 2021. Learn more.

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Revisiting a persistent Beethoven myth: was the composer really stone deaf?

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by Daniel Hathaway

By 2020, the 250th anniversary year of Beethoven’s birth in 1770, you’d think that every aspect of the composer’s life would already have been minutely examined by multiple scholars. Not quite so. There’s the issue of the composer’s hearing problems, which began to affect him as early as 1798 and progressed to the point in May of 1824 that some eyewitnesses at the debut of the Ninth Symphony reported that Beethoven was oblivious to the ardent applause that greeted the performance.

Kent State University musicology professor Theodore Albrecht, who is deep into translating relatively unexplored Beethoven documents, has turned up some surprises. Among them is the suggestion that Beethoven could still hear — if not well — at the premiere of the Ninth. “All the stone-deaf Beethoven stories go out the window,” the scholar said in a recent telephone interview.

That and other discoveries have come to light in the course of Albrecht’s current research project: translating Beethoven’s 139 “Conversation Books” for the first-ever English edition. [Read more…]

Violinist Andrew Sords launches Green Point Editions

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by Mike Telin 

“I’ve always been fascinated with works that are on the fringe of the repertoire,” violinist Andrew Sords said by telephone. The problem with learning and ultimately performing works that are off the beaten track is that even with published works, the editions are often riddled with mistakes, if not illegible. “I’m a little OCD when it comes to the score that’s in front of me. I want it to be legible, correct, and have it provide some historical context.”

Following years of frustration, Sords has taken matters into his own hands. Joining forces with music engraver Daniel Singer, the violinist’s new venture, Green Point Editions, sheds light on musical gems that are often neglected on concert stages. Currently available are works by Franz Joseph Haydn, Jenö Hubay, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Jean Sibelius, Claudio Brindis de Salas, and Eugène Ysaÿe/Frederic Chopin.

Misprints in published editions have existed for centuries. Sords noted that Dvořák’s Violin Concerto has a famously wrong note in the final arpeggio. “You can’t blame the performer simply because they are playing from prints that their teachers said had the correct notes. But have some curiosity. Look at the Urtext, or prints from the 19th century that might be a little more accurate.”

[Read more…]

Downtime, anxiety, hope: checking in with five area musicians

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by Jarrett Hoffman

How are you? That question feels more meaningful than usual right now, not just a greeting but a real entry point into each other’s changed lives.

I reached out to five area musicians to see how they’re steering themselves through the Coronavirus crisis, and how they’re spending their time when the slate of performance work has been wiped clean.

Their replies by email — a mix of serious, thoughtful, and lighthearted — touched on a variety of topics: their downtime, their feelings about social media, what they miss about live music, their anxiety, and their hopes for the future.

[Read more…]

Cuyahoga Arts & Culture to Accelerate Grant Payments 

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Cuyahoga Arts & Culture (CAC) will accelerate payment of $5.1 million in operating support grants to 65 arts and culture organizations impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

At their annual meeting on April 15, the CAC Board of Trustees approved a plan to expedite the payment of 2020 grant funds to General Operating Support grantees. Typically, the grants are paid out in three installments; under this approved plan, grantees can request all or part of their remaining grant funds now. 

Additionally, the Trustees approved changes to the current Project Support grant agreements, which will eliminate the requirement to have matching funds; allow for reimbursements for projects that incurred expenses but had to be canceled; and provide grantees the opportunity to move their project to a date in 2021.

[Read more…]

Tuesday Musical Scholarship Competition: investing in the future 

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by Mike Telin

If you are looking for a good return on your investment, give scholarships to budding musicians to help them over the financial humps during their early careers. Since 1955, Akron’s Tuesday Musical has been providing financial assistance through its Annual Scholarship Competition to College and University music performance and education majors who are Ohio residents or studying with a music teacher at an Ohio institution.

Earlier this year Tuesday Musical announced that brothers Richard Zook and Douglas Zook Jr. had endowed a new prize for the Scholarship Competition with the creation of the Howard E. Leisinger Viola Prize in honor of their maternal grandfather. 

Leisinger, who grew up on a farm near the Maryland-Pennsylvania line, began studying music privately with a neighbor when he was young. “I have only the haziest memory of my grandfather — he died when I was very young,” Douglas Zook said by telephone from his home in Doylestown, Ohio. “The story I heard is that my grandfather’s family, being practical farmers, weren’t particularly supportive, but he continued.”

[Read more…]

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