Three CVNCers to Attend NEA/NAJP Seminar at Columbia University
We are pleased to announce that three CVNC critics– Roger A. Cope, Carl J. Halperin, and Jeffrey Rossman – have been selected to attend this year’s Arts Journalism Institute at Columbia University in October. Our writers are among 25 selected from across the country for this intensive 12-day seminar. For more information, see
http://www.nea.gov/news/news05/AJI-Columbia.html. The list of participants and their affiliations follows immediately below.
Angela Allen, The Columbian, Vancouver, WA
Janice Berman, freelance, Palo Alto, CA
Ruth Bingham, affiliated freelancer, The Honolulu Advertiser, Honolulu, HI
Bobbi Booker, freelancer, various, including WRTI-FM, Philadelphia, PA
Brett Campbell, Oregon Quarterly, & freelancer, Wall Street Journal, Eugene, OR
Roger Cope, Classical Voice of North Carolina, Hendersonville, NC
Mike Dunham, Anchorage Daily News, Anchorage, AK
Philip Elliott, The Courier & Press, Evansville, IN
Kelly Ferjutz, freelance, Music & Vision Daily, Cleveland, OH
Jennifer Flowers, The Times, Shreveport, LA
Lawrence Fuchsberg, freelance, Minneapolis Star Tribune, St. Paul, MN
Elaine Guregian, Akron Beacon Journal, Akron, OH
Carl Halperin, Classical Voice of North Carolina, Raleigh, NC
Pamela Hasterok, Daytona Beach News Journal, Daytona Beach, FL
Laura Kennelly, Lorain Morning Journal, Berea, OH
Kevin Kittredge, Roanoke Times, Roanoke, VA
Ken Mayer, freelance, The Reader, Omaha, NE
Rebecca Packard, affiliated freelancer, Tri-City Herald, Tri-Cities, WA
Robert Plyler, Jamestown Post-Journal, Jamestown, NY
Keith Powers, affiliated freelancer, Boston Herald, Cambridge, MA
Jeffrey Rossman, Classical Voice of North Carolina, Durham, NC
Thomas Small, freelance, Concertonet.com, Laguna Beach, CA
John Stoehr, Savannah Morning News, Savannah, GA
Raina Wagner, Seattle Times, Seattle, WA
Lani Willis, Minneapolis-St. Paul Magazine, Minneapolis, MN
Hot off the Presses from the Bastion of Culture that NCSU is Becoming…
J. Mark Scearce, Director of the Music Department at NC State, has been awarded a 2005 commission from the Foundation for Universal Sacred Music. Scearce was selected from a pool of more than 125 composers representing countries from all over the world. For his new work, Scearce will set two Rumi poems from translations by poet Coleman Barks for full chorus and a chamber ensemble of flute, oboe, cello, and harp to premiere in New York in Fall 2006.
The Foundation for Universal Sacred Music sets as its mission fostering the creation of music that reflects the unity and core truths at the heart of all religions. It is the Foundation’s hope that their commissioned works will themselves become agents for social change, helping to bridge the spiritual differences that divide the world today.
This is the fifth national/international competitive career honor for Scearce, whose music can be heard on six commercial recordings on the Warner Bros, Delos, Capstone, Centaur, Equilibrium, and Sony labels.
(From NCSU press release dated 9/20/05; posted 9/2/05.)
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In Memoriam – Rudolph J. Kremer (June 11, 1927 – July 26, 2005)*
Veni Creator Spiritus – Komm Heiliger Geist, Schöpfer – Come Creator Spirit – and lighten with celestial fire – enable us all, through the genius and love of your musicians, to hear with our mortal ears those eternal things which eye hath not seen and ear hath not heard.
I am honored to speak today of my friend and colleague of almost four decades – Rudolph Kremer: organist extraordinaire, master teacher, scholar, composer, builder of beautiful musical instruments (some of which the average person would never have heard of – virginal, forte-piano, and clavichord – the instrument about which I once asked “Why are these things so soft?” to which he responded “because you have to believe in it to hear it”), a loving and devoted family man, an engaging and challenging friend, a normal person rather than an artiste, and a very funny guy.
Rudi was the first member of his family to be born in America, and he was blessed to have been born into a close, hard-working, highly-principled, deeply artistic, and religious family. The son of a cathedral organist, he received a first-rate education, launched a distinguished musical career, and started his own close, hard-working, highly-principled, deeply artistic, and religious family. What delight and pride he had in his family! Marianne – the love of his life, his life-long companion, the mother of his children, the heart and soul of their home. He was not only proud that she is a beautiful woman but also that she is such an accomplished pianist and organist, and especially of her work here at St. Thomas More. And his boys – Damian, Rudi, Chris, Nicholas. We heard every detail of their growing up. We knew what pieces they were learning, when they got new instruments, what they did during vacation, how they were doing in school, what they thought about or perhaps were doing about some of the great issues of the day. And then there were Rudi’s daughters-in-law, Kim and Asako, and the grandchildren – a new generation and the promise of the future. For a family man like Rudi, to come full circle in this way was perhaps the greatest satisfaction in a full and blessed life.
When we think of Rudi, the normal person and regular guy, we have to mention his unfailing sense of humor. Now humor is a great asset in life – how can any of us get through life without being able to laugh? – but it is an especially useful tool in teaching. Generations of Carolina students laughed and listened their way into the art of music as Rudi opened to them the mysteries of classical music, an enterprise which earned him a prestigious Tanner Award in undergraduate teaching. He always had a joke – “Hey did you hear the one about?” – often very funny, often very corny, never mean-spirited or vulgar. He was happy to take a joke on himself as well. Years ago he wore a new tie to one his recitals on the Schlicker organ over in the Rehearsal Hall – you remember that they were so jam-packed he had to give back-to-back performances. The tie was fuzzy and looked as if it had once been alive; it was really quite alarming. “Hey, what do think of my tie?” I said I thought that it needed to be shaved. Rather than taking offense, he laughed and, I later learned, simply added it to his repertoire. Even in the years of his debilitating illness, he could joke about himself to make others feel at ease in situations that were anything but funny. What a gift!
In closing I want to return to Rudi’s identity as an extraordinary organist, something that we might overlook with the passing of the years. The great French organist and composer, Charles-Marie Widor, once wrote that “The true organist is an artist with a vision of eternity.” Well, Rudi was much more likely to crack a joke than talk about his vision of eternity, so how can we discern in him the “true organist” as defined by Widor? We can see this by remembering what he most liked to play. Now at first glance you might say, well, he played just about everything. When he came down to audition for the job at UNC – unlike the other candidates, who brought four of five impressive pieces to play – Rudi apparently brought an enormous pile of music and asked the committee what they would like him to play, not out of conceit but with the youthful naiveté of someone who had worked really hard and hadn’t perhaps realized the true significance of having accomplished so much. But looking at his most often played repertoire, some interesting things stand out – some of them French rather than the expected German. He often, for example, played in its entirety Olivier Messiaen’s staggeringly difficult and profoundly spiritual Ascension Suite.
In this great work, as in all of Messiaen’s organ music as well as many of his compositions for other instruments, each movement is given a highly imaginative title, followed by a heavy-duty passage from the Bible, a theologian, or the liturgy of the church. In the case of L’Ascension, the movements are: “The majesty of Christ asking his Father to glorify Him”; “Serene Alleluias of a soul who desires heaven”; “The outburst of joy of a soul before the glory of Christ, which is its own glory”; and “The prayer of Christ ascending to His Father.” The quotations are taken from the Gospel according to St. John, the epistle to the Colossians, and the proper liturgy for the Feast of the Ascension. There is much work to do even before beginning to learn the music! Messiaen has said that his intention in all of his music was to give expression to the truths of the Catholic faith, and he makes no accommodation to our human perception of time, our ordinary expectation of rhythm and timbre, or the physical limitations of organists, but rather, as he said, to everything “that pertains to stained glass and rainbows.” Or take another example, the Chorale in E Major by César Franck. This extended composition (the first of a cycle of three, which Albert Schweitzer and others saw as a musical glorification of the Holy Trinity) spans the entire range of human experience before God and ends with a glorious peroration in which, in words attributed to Handel as he was writing the “Hallelujah Chorus,” one can see “the heavens open and the Lord God Almighty” on his throne.
Of course we think primarily of Rudi’s love for the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, and he played them all; but think for a moment of those extraordinary works of Bach in which he specialized: the monumental polyphonic cycles – Klavierübung, III (the so-called “German Organ Mass,” some of whose movements are like archeological digs through successive layers back to the well-springs of German church music in Gregorian chant), or The Art of Fugue, or the Canonic Variations on Vom himmel hoch, or the great Preludes and Fugues – especially the “Wedge” (Prelude and Fugue in E minor) and the Fantasia and Fugue in G minor. These works require not only dazzling technique and mature musicianship but also the capacity of the organist to generate a coherent and glittering tonal universe, a cosmic architecture, a soulful and godly reality truly perceived only by the soul. Helmut Walcha, the great 20th-century specialist in baroque German organ music, once wrote that “polyphony leads a man to contemplation.” I think he meant that in the joys and sorrows of the independent voices in a polyphonic composition, in the collisions with other voices (dissonance, sometimes called “cross” relations) those voices encounter as they spin along, each according to its own inner necessities, in the inversions and adventures of the voices through various keys, and in the higher resolution of individual will and purpose in a greater order and harmony, polyphonic music mirrors reality at its deepest level. Such music by its very nature requires an intersection of the horizontal and vertical dimensions, forming, in essence, a cross. Polyphonic music then – like reality, as Christians understand it – is cruciform, truly – a vision of eternity with humankind and all creation redeemed and transformed.
Today we commend Rudi, our friend and brother both in art and in the faith, to his Creator. May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.
Wylie S. Quinn III
*This homily, portions of which were read at the funeral mass celebrated on July 30 by The Catholic Community of Saint Thomas More (Chapel Hill) for Dr. K., is reprinted with the permission of the author, a distinguished organist and teacher in his own right.
What’s in a Name?
Years ago, when I used to cover local theater for Raleigh, NC-based Spectator Magazine, I would write previews of shows for that entertainment weekly’s print edition and reviews of the same shows as “online exclusives.” From time to time, readers unaware of the online exclusives or unfamiliar with the Internet would ask me, “Where are your reviews?” Eventually, those online exclusives and later Spectator itself went the way of the dodo; and I created a free weekly e-mail Triangle theatrical newsletter called Robert’s Reviews to ensure that the most exciting entertainment “beat” in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area got the comprehensive, in-depth coverage that it deserved.
In September 2002, when Spectator merged with The Independent Weekly of Durham, Raleigh-based Classical Voice of North Carolina — North Carolina’s premier performing-arts platform — started republishing portions of Robert’s Reviews on Internet pages till then devoted mainly to reviews of classical music, opera, dance, and related books, CDs, and DVDs. With CVNC paying for theater reviews, I was able to add Scott Ross, Alan R. Hall, and occasionally others to this newsletter’s stable of reviewers.
At that point, I began to wonder whether Robert’s Reviews was the best name for our collective efforts — and I expect that even after several years of publication, many readers are still wondering who Robert is. So, I have decided to rechristen this newsletter as the Triangle Theater Review, starting Sept. 1st. I think this name is not only more intuitive and user friendly (to use a couple of overworked terms from my daytime computer job) but also more accurately identifies the beat that Scott, Alan, and I are endeavoring to cover — and it will keep me from explaining, a good part of every day, who I am.
Other than the name change, this newsletter will remain substantially the same. As donations to CVNC increase, there will be more reviews by Scott, Alan, and others — and fewer by yours truly. That’s the way I want it. I did not conceive the Triangle Theater Review as a vanity project; indeed, I hope that all members of the Triangle theater community will see this newsletter as a forum to speak their minds about all things theatrical. To them, I say, “This is your newsletter, complete with a comprehensive online directory of local theaters, a comprehensive theater calendar for 2005 and much of 2006, a formidable set of links to local and national theater sites, and more full-length previews and reviews of major productions than all of the other local news media combined. Moreover, if you don’t like our review of any given production, feel free to write a rebuttal that we can publish in the next available issue.” None of the other local news media outlets can or will promise you that!
Sooner or later, there will be a day when I shall no longer edit the Triangle Theater Review. I can only hope that CVNC and the other writers will carry on, because there is no other way that some of the up-and-coming members of the Triangle theater community will get the all-important publicity they need to grow and to attract ticket-buyers and public- and private-sector financial support. Indeed, no other publication will keep local theater buffs better informed about the endless variety of high-quality theatrical productions in our portion of the State of the Arts. Long live the Triangle Theater Review*!
Robert W. McDowell
*To subscribe to the e-mail edition of Triangle Theater Review, e-mail
RobertM748@aol.com and type SUBSCRIBE TRIANGLE THEATER REVIEW in the subject line. To unsubscribe, e-mail
RobertM748@aol.com and type UNSUBSCRIBE TRAINGLE THEATER REVIEW in the subject line.
Note from CVNC: While the Triangle Theater Review will concentrate on thespian goings-on in the RTP area, we invite presenters throughout the state to share their schedules with us, for inclusion in our extensive Openings Page — and audition notices, too, for inclusion in our Performance Opportunities section. We envision a time when our theatrical reviews will be statewide in scope, as our music and dance reviews have become. Please send your notices to
cvnc1@earthlink.net in accordance with instructions posted on our series tab.
(Posted 9/13/05.)