by Daniel Hathaway
IN MEMORIAM:
Oberlin Faculty Sopranos Daune Mahy and Marlene Rosen
Daune Mahy, a member of the Oberlin voice faculty for 39 years, died July 31 in Paris. A beloved teacher and gifted soprano who performed on stages across America and Europe, she joined the Oberlin faculty in 1980 and worked with nearly every Oberlin singer during her tenure.
Mahy was a co-founder and driving force behind Oberlin in Italy, which for 30 years attracted internationally distinguished artists, teachers, coaches, and others to work with the program’s gifted pre-professional musicians. Learn more about Mahy at Oberlin.edu.
Marlene Rosen, who served as professor of voice at Oberlin for 36 years, died on August 5 in Nyack, N.Y., where she had moved with Mike Rosen, her husband of 62 years after their retirement from Oberlin (he was professor of percussion at the Conservatory).
Conservatory Dean William Quillen has passed along a webpage where individuals can leave memories about Marlene, find information about the services, and more.
HAPPENING TODAY:
Tonight at 7 pm at Blossom, The Cleveland Orchestra presents Laufey: A Night at the Symphony. with Ross Jamie Collins, conductor, and Laufey (Laufey Lín Bing Jónsdóttir, the Icelandic-Chinese singer-songwriter and musician).
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Czech-American composer Karel Husa was born in Prague on August 7, 1921. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1954, and taught composition and conducting at Cornell University for 38 years. In a January, 2017 New York Times obituary, Steve Smith wrote
Mr. Husa created works in most of the standard concert-music forms apart from opera, including two symphonies, several concertos, four string quartets and three ballets.…
In “Music for Prague 1968,” a response to the Soviet Union’s crushing of the Prague Spring reform movement, he incorporated a 15th-century Hussite anthem used previously by Dvorak and Smetana to connote solidarity and resistance, alongside eerie, unsettling microtonal passages and instrumental effects evoking bird song, church bells, Morse code and gunfire.
The piece, given its premiere by the Ithaca College Concert Band in January 1969, became one of the most-played works in the wind-ensemble repertoire, with more than 10,000 known performances to date.
Click here to listen to a retrospective of Husa’s music, including Music for Prague, from a 2005 symposium in which the composer participated.
