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Bard College Hosts Environmental Summer Camp in China

This summer, Lobsang Sonam, who received an M.Ed in Environmental Education from Bard’s Graduate Programs in Sustainability in 2021, led Bard’s first environmental education summer camp in China. Fifteen students in grades 9–11 participated in the immersive two-week sleepover camp hosted at the Old Creek Nature Reserve in Sichuan Province. Students experienced firsthand a naturally rich environment; worked closely with local researchers, community members, and natural resource management professionals; and completed their own research projects. Activities included visits to different villages, learning the history of the reserve, hiking with local patrollers to study the region’s conservation work and challenges, identifying wild animals, weeding invasive plants, designing tree taps, and helping local beekeepers with their work on bee farms.

With Bard College at Simon’s Rock Geography and Asian Studies Professor Chris Coggins as adviser, the camp was developed to encourage students in thinking critically about local environmental issues, nurturing a strong sense of environmental protection and stewardship, and conducting their own service-learning projects.

Post Date: 08-09-2022

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The Fisher Center’s “An Evening with Sandra Cisneros,” Part of the Big Read 2022, Recounted on Lion’s Roar

As part of the Big Read 2022, Sandra Cisneros spoke at the Fisher Center, sharing the history of The House on Mango Street and offering up advice to aspiring writers. Recounting the night for Lion’s Roar, Angélica Paljor highlighted Cisneros’s practical and spiritual guidance given to the audience at Bard this past April. “Writing, she said at Bard, ‘is sacred work, as sacred as a nun or a monk who meditates for days or hours—that’s how I see it,’” Paljor writes. The conversation, prompted by questions from Dinaw Mengestu, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities and director of Written Arts, and Mariel Fiori ’05, managing editor of La Voz, also touched on aspects of representation in writing and one’s intended audience. Ultimately, Cisneros implored beginning writers to write for themselves—and those they love: “I wrote [The House on Mango Street] to stay alive when I was dying, on behalf of the people I loved. That’s the difference: when we make something for those we love and we don’t do it with a personal agenda, siempre sale bonito—it’s always going to turn out well. That’s what The House on Mango Street taught me.”

Post Date: 08-09-2022

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Acclaimed Composers Jessie Montgomery and Missy Mazzoli Join Faculty of Bard College Conservatory of Music as Composers in Residence

The Bard College Conservatory of Music has appointed acclaimed composers Jessie Montgomery and Missy Mazzoli to the faculty as composers in residence. Composer, violinist, and educator Montgomery has been called “One of the most distinctive and communicative voices in the US, as a player and a creator” (BBC). Grammy-nominated composer, pianist, and keyboardist Mazzoli was recently deemed “one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York” (New York Times). They both join the Bard Conservatory in fall 2022.

Jessie Montgomery is an acclaimed composer, violinist, and educator. A recipient of the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence, Montgomery’s works are performed frequently around the world by leading musicians and ensembles. Her music interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness, making her an acute interpreter of 21st century American sound and experience. Her profoundly felt works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful and exploding with life” (The Washington Post).

Her growing body of work includes solo, chamber, vocal, and orchestral works. Some recent highlights include Shift, Change, Turn (2019) commissioned by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Coincident Dances (2018) for the Chicago Sinfonietta, and Banner (2014)—written to mark the 200th anniversary of “The Star-Spangled Banner”—for The Sphinx Organization and the Joyce Foundation, which was presented in its UK premiere at the BBC Proms on 7 August 2021.

Summer 2021 brought a varied slate of premiere performances, including Five Freedom Songs, a song cycle conceived with and written for soprano Julia Bullock, for Sun Valley and Grand Teton Music Festivals, San Francisco and Kansas City Symphonies, Boston and New Haven Symphony Orchestras, and the Virginia Arts Festival (7 August); a site-specific collaboration with Bard SummerScape Festival and Pam Tanowitz Dance, I was waiting for the echo of a better day (8 July); and Passacaglia, a flute quartet for The National Flute Association’s 49th annual convention (13 August).

Since 1999, Montgomery has been affiliated with The Sphinx Organization, which supports young African American and Latinx string players and has served as composer-in-residence for the Sphinx Virtuosi, the organization’s flagship professional touring ensemble.

A founding member of PUBLIQuartet and a former member of the Catalyst Quartet, Montgomery holds degrees from the Juilliard School and New York University and is currently a PhD Candidate in Music Composition at Princeton University. She is professor of violin and composition at The New School. In May 2021, she began her three-year appointment as the Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. jessiemontgomery.com

Recently deemed “one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York” (New York Times), “Brooklyn’s post-millennial Mozart” (Time Out NY), and praised for her “apocalyptic imagination” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker), Missy Mazzoli has had her music performed by the Kronos Quartet, LA Opera, eighth blackbird, the BBC Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, Scottish Opera and many others. In 2018 she became, along with Jeanine Tesori, the first woman to receive a main stage commission from the Metropolitan Opera, and was nominated for a Grammy award in the category of “Best Classical Composition.” 

From 2018-2021 Mazzoli was Mead Composer-in-Residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and from 2012-2015 was Composer-in-Residence with Opera Philadelphia. Her 2018 opera Proving Up, created with longtime collaborator librettist Royce Vavrek and based on a short story by Karen Russell, is a surreal commentary on the American dream. It was commissioned and premiered by Washington National Opera, Opera Omaha and Miller Theatre, and was deemed “harrowing… a true opera for its time” by The Washington Post. 

Mazzoli’s 2016 opera Breaking the Waves, commissioned by Opera Philadelphia and Beth Morrison Projects, was called “one of the best 21st-century American operas yet” by Opera News. Breaking the Waves received its European premiere at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival; future performances are planned at LA Opera, Houston Grand Opera, and the Adelaide Festival. Her next opera, The Listeners, will premiere in 2022 at the Norwegian National Opera, Chicago Lyric Opera and Opera Philadelphia. 

Mazzoli is also active in the orchestral and chamber music field, recently writing new works for the National Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, BBC Philharmonia, and the Bergen Symphony, among others. In 2016, Mazzoli and composer Ellen Reid founded Luna Lab, a mentorship program for young female, non-binary and gender nonconforming composers created in partnership with the Kaufman Music Center. 

Mazzoli attended the Yale School of Music, the Royal Conservatory of the Hague and Boston University.  She has studied with (in no particular order) David Lang, Louis Andriessen, Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis, Martijn Padding, Richard Ayres, John Harbison, Charles Fussell, Martin Amlin, Marco Stroppa, Ladislav Kubik, Louis DeLise and Richard Cornell. Her works are published by G. Schirmer. missymazzoli.com

Post Date: 08-09-2022