There's nothing quite like a university, especially if it has a thriving school of music: concerts and recitals and events, sometimes several per week, and usually free to the public. Well, this year, Rice University Shepherd School of Music celebrates its 50th Anniversary Season, and all this year they'll be putting on special events and performances.
We caught up with Matthew Loden, Dean of the Shepherd School of Music, and Miguel Harth-Bedoya, Director of Orchestras, to listen to some recent performances together and talk about fifty years.
According to Loden, they've been planning this for some time now, putting puzzle pieces together as well as funding. "We were able to issue a whole series of commissions from our whole Composition Department, so that the professors of composition would write a special 50th-anniversary piece and have it performed." It all starts at the gala event on November 8th.
Harth-Bedoya is a new feather in the cap—he's only been on staff for a few weeks, and says it's been exciting getting to know the orchestra students (200 in three orchestras) and getting up to speed. "It's just a fantastic energy, a combustion of music that comes out of these musicians that I couldn't be more excited to work with," he said.
Loden was impressed by the new arrival's introduction to students. When he told them "You are representing an art form when you are on stage, and we never know when someone in the house has come to us for the very first time. And our obligation is to make sure that that first-time concertgoer has an extraordinary experience and sees happy people on stage doing beautiful things together." Said Loden, "That kind of approach to music-making, I think, is going to keep us here for another fifty years."
Being in Houston, with its fertile classical music scene (including being the world capital of new opera) is a big plus. Said Loden, "One of the things that is so amazing about being in this artistic environment is that we can all lean on each other for talent and opportunity, and, with the recent building of the Brockman Hall for Opera, we have created a space that is quite extraordinary in the world." 84,000 square feet of extraordinary, at that.
Anyone who wants to take in some of these 50th-anniversary performances can simply visit music.rice.edu to find out more.
How does it all feel? In Loden's words: "There are some bags under our eyes, but they are well-deserved; we're incredibly excited to be pulling all of this off finally."
