by Mike Telin
Tonight, October 26, the Cleveland Arts Prize will hold its 63rd annual awards ceremony at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The CAP promotes creativity in Northeast Ohio by honoring artists for artistic excellence and recognizing community leaders who help arts flourish in the region.
Among the list of distinguished recipients is Dana Jessen, who will receive a mid-career artist prize for music. Jessen is a trailblazer in the world of new and improvised music. Hailed as a “bassoon virtuoso” (Chicago Reader), she is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and a Huygens Fellowship. In addition to her active solo career, her resume includes world premiere performances with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Alarm Will Sound, Ensemble Dal Niente, Anthony Braxton’s Tri-Centric Orchestra, S.E.M. Ensemble, and the Amsterdam Contemporary Ensemble. As an educator she serves as Associate Professor of Contemporary Music and Improvisation at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music.
I caught up with Dana Jessen by phone and began our conversation by congratulating her.
Dana Jessen: Thank you. I am incredibly honored. I was telling somebody that it felt like the Cleveland Arts Prize was actually looking at all of the things that I do. It’s not just that I’m a bassoonist, but that I also write my own pieces, I play with electronics, and I improvise. I also interpret pieces that I’ve commissioned. And I teach. So it’s very humbling to be seen for the entirety of what I do as opposed to one thing or the other.
Many musicians can only dream of performing at Carnegie Hall. But next week students at the Oberlin Conservatory will have had the opportunity to perform at the famed venue not once, but twice in as many months.
“Music is something that throughout time has developed different flavors around the world,” violinist Edwin Huizinga said during a Sunday morning telephone conversation.
What do you get when you combine the sounds of an organ, accordion, guitar, violin, and piano? A creative soundtrack to Les Vampires, of course.
When we think of film composers, the names Miklós Rózsa, John Williams, and Randy Newman immediately come to mind. But who were the important composers from the silent era?
To open the academic calendar in recent years, Oberlin Conservatory violin professor Sibbi Bernhardsson has organized interdisciplinary festivals centered around intriguing themes. That continued earlier this month with “Music, Sports, and the Enduring Influence of Ancient Greece,” a topic that was examined through a variety of events, musical and otherwise, over the course of two days. I caught the tail-end of the festival via live stream: the fourth and final faculty recital in Warner Concert Hall on the evening of October 10.