Program to Support Graduate Conducting Students Announces Three 2022 Recipients
Andrew Hon, Frédéric-Alexandre Michaud, and Will Myers are the first successful candidates in the inaugural round of the Program to Support Graduate Conducting Students in the Study and Performance of Music by Composers from Underrepresented Groups. This a 3-year pilot initiative is a collaboration between the Schulich School of Music, the Marvin Duchow Music Library and its Gertrude Whitley Performance Library.
The Program seeks to highlight the study of works by composers from underrepresented groups, in alignment with the University’s EDI Strategic Plan and Anti-Black Racism Action Plan. Through financial support of up to CAD 1,000 per individual toward the rental or purchase of one musical work (or multiple short works for Choral Conducting students), the Program enables graduate students in Schulich’s Orchestral and Choral Conducting Programs to access scores not held by the Performance Library collection. The Program aims to enrich the educational experience of conducting students and acknowledge their potential to bring positive influence and change to musical performance at McGill and beyond.
Andrew Hon (DMus’22) will be conducting Considering Matthew Shepard for his doctoral recital. This choral work, composed by Craig Hella Johnson (b.1961), is a response to the 1998 anti-gay hate crime against Matthew Shepard, a student at the University of Wyoming who was brutally murdered. The Washington Post wrote that Johnson’s oratorio, “Considering Matthew Shepard demonstrates music’s capacity to encompass, transform and transcend tragedy. Powerfully cathartic, it leads us from horror and grief to a higher understanding of the human condition, enabling us to endure.”
Frédéric-Alexandre Michaud (DMus’22) will be conducting an excerpt from William Grant-Still's Symphony No. 1 with the McGill Symphony Orchestra. William Grant-Still (1895-1978) was an American conductor and composer and was the first African American to conduct a professional symphony orchestra in the United States. His work Afro-American Symphony, or Symphony No. 1, combined traditional symphonic form with blues progressions and rhythms common to African American popular music at the time.
Will Myers (MMus’22) will be conducting the following works in his Winter 2022 recital: Felix namque es attributed to Leonora d’Este; Written on a Rainy Night (from Tang Poems) by Chen Yi; My Lord, What a Mourning by William Dawson; Hourglass (from Love Song) by Jean Belmont Ford; There Is a Balm in Gilead by Stacey V. Gibbs; Like As a Father by Ulysses Kay; Darest, O Soul by Mari Esabel Valverde; and Vertue (from Vertue) by Judith Weir. Myers's program contemplates the individual soul in a flawed world through settings of mystic, celebratory, and mournful texts. This selection of music is united by predominantly 20th and 21st century choral styles of neo-romanticism, post-minimalism, and modernist developments of folk melodies.