Dear Macro members,
I am thrilled to report the 2010 winners of our Macro student honorariums!
J. Richard Freese is this year’s Bruce Benward Honorarium winner. He came to music with strong backgrounds in mathematics and the visual arts, merging the two when analyzing and composing. He graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Science double-major in Music and Art from Wisconsin Lutheran College and is currently a graduate student at Truman State University. Recently he worked on two research projects on the madrigals of Carlo Gesualdo; one paper traced his three styles, included an analysis of a madrigal from each period, while the other looked at these works in comparison with the seconda prattica.
He has won four awards in state and regional music composition competitions, including a First Place in the Missouri Music Teachers Association and an Honorable Mention (Second Place) in the Music Teachers National Association West-Central Division Composition competitions last fall. He also had a composition performed at the University of Nebraska Kearney’s New Music Festival IX, which included participation on their Composers Symposium panel discussion. He also composed incidental music for a Truman State University theatrical production, and his works have been performed throughout the Midwest in venues including jazz concerts, art exhibitions, worship services, and theatre productions, including multiple commissions for choral works and a commission for a grade school wind ensemble – recent travels to Iceland provided inspiration for the latter piece.
Mr. Freese has a strong interest in composing for younger musicians. He is currently working on repertoire for young performers, and is interested in expanding the repertoire to create music that is enjoyable for performers of all abilities. His interest in young musicians extends into guitar instruction, as well as theory and composition lessons. He plans to continue teaching throughout the rest of his career.
J. Richard Freese plans to graduate from Truman State University with a Masters degree in Music Composition in the spring of 2011, and then hopes to pursue a Doctorate in Music.
Paola Savvidou is this year’s Robert Fountain Memorial Honorarium winner. Her long-term career goal as a musician is to have a positive impact on people s lives both through teaching and through performing. She is currently in her second year of a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Piano Performance and Pedagogy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and plans to graduate in Spring 2011. She frequently performs as a soloist and as a chamber musician at UW-Madison, as well as at several other venues in the Madison community. In 2008, she was a winner of the UW-Madison Beethoven Competition, and in 2007, she was a winner of the UW-Madison Concerto Competition.
Her specific area of research is creative movement away from the keyboard as a means for deepening musical understanding, and improving alignment and connectivity. She is striving to achieve a deeper understanding of the interplay between functional (i.e. movement required for producing sound at our instrument) and expressive movement. In March she will be presenting her research at the national conference of the Music Teachers National Association in Albuquerque, NM, and last October she presented a poster session at the World Pedagogy Conference in Phoenix, AZ.
Paola Savvidou uses a holistic approach for teaching and learning music. She emphasizes the theoretical aspects of a piece, including analysis, form, and the phrase structure, and leads her students to a more comprehensive study of the compositional framework. She facilitates understanding of music through the study of a work from all possible angles: physically, aurally, visually, cognitively, theoretically, as well as how it relates to music history and the culture of its time. She believes this approach leads to more communicative performances.
Paola Savvidou serves as the Director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Piano Pioneers program, which provides quality piano instruction to underprivileged community members. Her ultimate goal is to open her own Music and Dance Academy for students from the pre-school to the high-school level. Aside from instrumental lessons, the Academy will also offer group piano classes for adults, and classes in creative movement for instrumental and vocal students.
Congratulations two both of our winners!
(To all MACRO members: Don't forget to submit your Musician's Workshop proposals and travel honorarium requests.)
Jamie
