by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•Stephen Rubin, 81
•Announcements: BW named a top school for music business, Oberlin grad Tyreek McDole named a finalist in the Sarah Vaughan competition
•Almanac: Marin Alsop, Joan Tower, and Fanfares for the Uncommon Women
STEPHEN RUBIN, 81:
Stephen Rubin (above), the longtime publishing executive who released bestsellers such as The Da Vinci Code and Fire and Fury, and who co-founded the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism with his late wife Cynthia, passed away on Friday at the age of 81 after “a brief and sudden illness,” according to his nephew, David Rotter.
Read an obituary by Hillel Italie for the Associated Press here, and read a 2018 profile of him by Sridhar Pappu for The New York Times here.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Billboard has named Baldwin Wallace University among the top schools for music business. Read an article from BW here, and see the full list here.
And vocalist Tyreek McDole, a 2023 graduate of Oberlin Conservatory, has been named a finalist in the 12th annual Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition. Finalists will perform for the jury and a live audience on November 19 at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. Details and tickets are available here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Dutch composer-organist Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck died on this date in music history (1621), as did German composer and lutenist Silvius Leopold Weiss (1750).
The more cheery anniversaries belong to Czech composer Jan Dismas Zelenka (born on October 16, 1679), American bassist and conductor Henry Jay Lewis (likewise in 1932), and one figure who is still with us: American conductor Marin Alsop (born in 1956, making her 67 today).
Another type of birth: Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire was premiered on this date in 1912, as were two works by Aaron Copland (Billy the Kid in 1938 and Rodeo in 1942), Joan Tower’s Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman No. 4 (in 1992), and Tan Dun’s Paper Concerto (in 2003).
We’ll focus on Tower and Alsop, a fitting pairing, given that both of them are trailblazing women and leading figures in classical music today — and even more fitting in the context of Tower’s six-part series of fanfares dedicated to “women who take risks and are adventurous,” as the composer writes in her program note.
The first of those works was dedicated to Alsop, and the sixth was premiered by the Baltimore Symphony in 2016 under her baton. Plus, she recorded the first five of them on the 1999 album Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman with the Colorado Symphony. Listen to No. 4 here.