- A World of Possibilities: University of Nebraska at Omaha Keyboard Area’s Project Recital initiative
- With burgeoning efforts towards teaching and performing music by historically-ignored composers, repertoire awareness is an important first step in the process. It is from my own growing awareness of the need to expose our diverse-population students to larger swaths of music that the Piano Project Recital was initiated at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. These projects promote a healthy mix of standard and new repertoire in students’ education. Musicians who are equipped with information on how to identify, acquire, and research more diverse repertoire will be more prepared for their own careers in the 21st century. This presentation briefly introduces our projects we’ve undertaken at UNO, discuss music score acquisition, how the studio unites together in their common background research into the topic, and student reactions to the effectiveness of this initiative.
- Compositional Seismicity: Generational Evolutions in 20th Century Icelandic Solo Piano Works
- This recital program (either for full recital or lecture recital) explores three composers from different generations (The Lost Generation, The Silent Generation, and the Baby Boomer Generation) and their significantly different approaches towards compositional language and techniques in the narrative of the uniqueness of Icelandic music history. All three composers lived abroad and absorbed many of the current musical styles into their own compositional language. Páll Ísólfsson’s Variations on a Song by Ísólfur Pálsson, most likely his greatest work for piano, is a highly tonal and Romantic-style work comprised of 17 variations on a theme written by his father. It was composed in the year of his death, of which we are recognizing the 50thanniversary in 2024. Þorkell Sigurbjörnsson takes a completely different atonal path in his theme and variations work, Hans Variations, written for the Swedish pianist Hans Pålsson, basing the work on an Icelandic folk song about a knight who rides into battle and is killed. Instead of presenting the entire theme at the beginning, Þorkell‘s innovative approach to the Theme and Variations genre involves dividing the theme into sections and using each variation individually to develop its own section of the folk tune. As a strong contrast, Mist Þorkelsdóttir’s Sónata til lífsins (Sonata to Life) examines the sonata form in a one-movement work in the “new simplicity”style.
- The Baker Sonata: A Masterwork from a Legendary American Piano Professor
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- Pedagogical aspects of the solo piano works of Thorkell Sigurbjörnsson
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- Icy Alternatives: Nordic Music Worth Investigating
- (more information forthcoming)
