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"music"

Watson Winner Will Go to Africa

By Lauren Cooper ’16 on October 08, 2012 10:59 AM

Watson winner Cole Perkinson ’13 prepares to make a joyful noise.

Watson winner Cole Perkinson ’13 prepares to make merry with his marimba.
Photo by Matt D'Annunzio

All roads lead somewhere. For Cole Perkinson ’13, they lead to Africa.

Cole, a chemistry-physics major, has been awarded a Watson Fellowship to spend a year in Africa exploring native music.

The Watson Year provides fellows with an opportunity to test their aspirations, abilities, and perseverance through a personal project that is cultivated on an international scale. Watson Fellows have gone on to become international leaders in their fields including CEOs of major corporations, college presidents, MacArthur “genius” grant recipients, diplomats, artists, lawyers, doctors, faculty, journalists, and many renowned researchers and innovators. The program offers a stipend of $25,000 to 40 fellows from 40 liberal arts colleges to pursue an independent study of something they are passionate about in a country that is not their own.

For Cole, that passion is Zimbabwean music, which he has played with his family since he was 10 years old.

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Memorial for Ottomar

By Chris Lydgate ’90 on October 08, 2012 10:59 AM

We are sad to report that Professor Ottomar Rudolf [German 1963-98], an iconic figure on campus for many decades, died of a massive stroke over the weekend. He was 83 years old.

Ottomar served the college as a faculty member in the German and humanities departments for 35 years. He founded the German House and launched the Reed in Munich program. He was also a champion of music at Reed; he founded the Music Matinee, coordinated the Music Associates program, sang in the Reed chorus, and served on the boards of the Portland Opera and the Portland Youth Harmonic. He coached the Reed soccer team, was the inspiration for Portland Brewery’s award-winning Uncle Otto’s Oktoberfest beer, and served—at different times—in both the German and the U.S. Army.

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A Five-Octave Finale

By Nisma Elias '12 on June 08, 2012 09:58 AM

The Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery was packed to the rafters last week as alumni from many eras came together in a hush of anticipation to witness a unique occasion--the unveiling of the French double harpsichord created by professor Nicholas Wheeler '55 [physics 1963-2010] over a span of 26 years, and showcased during Reunions '12: Reedfayre.

Nick became fascinated by the harpsichord (the distinguished ancestor of the piano) while playing at a concert his freshman year at Reed and resolved to build his own some day. He finally began work many years later, in August 1985, when he was A.A Knowlton Professor of Physics. While the bulk of the carpentry and metalwork were completed in the two years that followed, the venture languished for two decades when his teaching and other things took greater precedence. Nick was not able to put finishing touches on the instrument until after his retirement in 2010, after 47 years of service.

"This is a Reed instrument and its first public appearance. It's something I've fantasized about for 60 years," Nick remarked. Returning students and friends continued to ask over the years when and if the project would ever be finished. "It is a doubt which I confess, I sometimes shared: it gave me anxiety because I did not want to leave to my heirs the problem of figuring out how to dispose of a stringless box that looked like a harpsichord, but was unplayable." However friends, such as professor Kathleen Worley, [theatre 1985-] helped along the way by picking up some gold-dipped hardware and wood scrapers.

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Synaesthesia and the Great War

By Andrew Choi '13 on February 16, 2012 11:23 AM

"Today's dissonance in music and painting is merely the consonance of tomorrow," wrote Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky in a 1913 letter to Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg. At the dawn of the 20th century, artists like Kandinsky and Schoenberg broke free from the norms of their medium--and subsequently, their era--by creating music and art that was atonal and abstract. But one year later, the entire movement was uprooted, and the daring avant-garde was replaced by the traditionalism of yesteryear.

What explains this artistic retreat? The Great War, according to author and musicologist Olivia Mattis, who visited campus Saturday as part of ROMP (Reediana Omnibus Musica Philosopha), Reed's annual symposium on music and the liberal arts. "The high modernism of the pre-World War I avant-garde was displaced" after the war, said Mattis. "War called for a return to traditional values."

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Listening to 1912

By Chris Lydgate '90 on February 15, 2012 05:23 PM

By James McQuillen '86

Reed's first students embarked on their college career during a period in Western music as momentous as any, with the crumbling of systems of form and harmony, influences from far beyond Europe, and an impending flood of new genres that would soon push the old ones into side channels and backwaters. It was ever thus, you could argue, but like the political upheavals going on at the time, the transformation put paid to the past in radical fashion and set the course for the last century right up to now.

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A Winter's Ramble with Schubert

By Chris Lydgate '90 on February 18, 2011 12:49 PM

I had to chuckle at the brouhaha stirred by New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini recently with his ambitious attempt to rank the Top Ten Classical Composers Ever. (In case you haven't heard, JS Bach was #1.)

Lists of this sort are an old journalistic standby--subjective, outrageous, infuriating, and a marvelous device to spark debate and spur readership.

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