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The New School of Music is a music school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.
Max Aronoff founded the New School of Music in Philadelphia in 1943 with the initial support of Catherine Drinker Bowen and Barbara Rex. [1] Aronoff together with founding members of the Curtis String Quartet, Jascha Brodsky and Orlando Cole and with support from pianist Vladimir Sokoloff [2] who were all on the faculty at the prestigious Curtis Institute decided on a curriculum that focused on training chamber artists and orchestral members, rather than soloists. Like Curtis, New School's enrollment was only open to orchestral instrumentalists and pianists. The faculty consisted of the four members of the Curtis String Quartet, select members of the Philadelphia Orchestra and two piano teachers (Gisa Adler and Jeanne Behrend).
Housed first at the Orpheus Club on Van Pelt Street, Philadelphia, the school moved later to a building at 18th and Pine with the financial backing of Henry Gerstley, Frank Adler, Alice Tully and Samuel Simeon Fels. [1] In March 1968 the school moved again to a historic, brownstone mansion at 301 S. 21st Street in Philadelphia. The mansion was converted into a high-functioning conservatory, complete with practice rooms, offices, library and auditorium.
New School originated as an all string school. In 1969, they opened admission to winds, brass and percussion, offering scholarships and opportunities to study with Philadelphia Orchestra musicians.
The school received accreditation in 1970 and awarded their first Bachelor of Music degrees in 1974. Prior to 1974, students graduated with a performance diploma.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, the school was thriving and had a reputation of graduating top-tier musicians. Musicians came from all over the world to study with the Curtis String Quartet & Philadelphia Orchestra musicians at The New School of Music.
Founded in 1943, Th New School of Music in Philadelphia is the only credited, degree-granting college in the country devoted exclusively to the training of instrumentalists, including pianists, for careers as performing musicians in professional symphony orchestras and other ensembles. The student body comes from across the country and around the world, representing a wide range of backgrounds and interests.
Study at the New School is centered around group playing and around the critical listening which develops from training in chamber ensembles and full orchestra. The curriculum includes not only private instrumental instruction, ear training and music theory and history, but also chamber music coaching, intensive orchestra reading, weekly instrumental seminars, supervised chamber music reading, orchestra section rehearsals, individual audition preparation and many performance opportunities.
The school has chosen to remain small in order to provide its students with the specialized training that will prepare them for careers in music performance. Graduates of The New School of Music are presently performing in professional orchestras and chamber ensembles all over the world. [3]
In 1985, Temple University alumna, Esther Boyer Griswold, designated the single largest gift in the university's history to date, for a music endowment. The gift served as the impetus for the renaming of the College to: The Esther Boyer College of Music at Temple University. This gift made it possible for Temple Univ to purchase the insolvent New School of Music. The faculty, programs, and library, all merged into the Boyer School of Music program. The New School of Music facility on 21st Street and Spruce was sold for $600,000. Those funds were used to renovate the concert hall at Temple.
In 1986, the board named Richard C. Brodhead acting president. A Philadelphia native and composer, he had been dean of the school from 1982. As Acting President, he played a principal role in formulating the merger of the New School with Temple University's Boyer College of Music and Dance. [4] From 1986 to 1987, the Boyer College of Music's instrumental performance program was significantly enhanced by the merger of The New School of Music . Guided since its founding by members of the Curtis String Quartet, this merger has broadened the opportunities for private instrumental study and for training in the performance of chamber ensemble and orchestral literature.
Max Aronoff was violist of the Curtis String Quartet and teacher at the esteemed Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. He was the first student admitted to Curtis when the school opened and was in its first graduating class in 1934. While a student, Max Aronoff studied with Carl Flesch and Louis Bailly, both legendary teachers in their time. Upon graduation, Aronoff joined the Curtis faculty, a position he held until his death, in 1981. In 1943, Max Aronoff founded the New School of Music. Under his direction, the New School of Music developed an exceptional reputation as a conservatory, specializing in training orchestral musicians.
During the fifty-two year performing career of the Curtis String Quartet, Aronoff and his colleagues toured the United States and Europe. They performed for such prestigious audiences as the White House and the Queen of the United Kingdom, as well as on many educational and cultural series in and around Philadelphia. They never stayed away from their teaching posts at Curtis and New School for long, and their dedication to training young musicians was respected throughout the musical world. For several generations, students of Max Aronoff have been among the most accomplished violists in professional orchestras, chamber ensembles, and teaching positions at conservatories and universities throughout the United States. The Max Aronoff Viola Institute ("MAVI") was founded to honor the memory of this musical genius and to continue his teaching legacy.
"Jascha Brodsky was a violinist who performed as a member of the Curtis String Quartet for more than 50 years and was a world-renowned violin teacher.
Brodsky was born in Kharkov, Ukraine, in 1907 and was the son of a violinist, who gave him his first lessons. He studied at the Conservatory of Tbilisi in Georgia and performed in orchestras in the Soviet Union until 1926, when he left the country to study in Paris with Lucien Capet and Eugene Ysaye. In the late 1920s, he toured Europe and the Soviet Union as a soloist and performed the Prokofiev Violin Concerto No. 1 with the composer conducting.
On the advice of the violinist Mischa Elman, Brodsky applied to the newly founded Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and in 1930 he enrolled there as a student of Efrem Zimbalist. That year he became first violinist of the ensemble that eventually became the Curtis String Quartet. He continued to perform with the ensemble until 1981, when it disbanded after the death of its founding violist, Max Aronoff. Brodsky joined the faculty of Curtis in 1932, and continued to teach the violin and chamber music there until his retirement in 1996. He also had a long teaching relationship with the Esther Boyer College of Music at Temple University, of which he was a founding faculty member in 1942, when it was known as the New School.
In 2019, violinist Lara St. John alleged that she was molested and raped by Jascha Brodsky in his office at the New School in the mid-1980s when she was 14 years old. Another student came forward anonymously at the same time alleging that Brodsky had made sexual advances toward her when she was 20 and studying with him at the New School. [6]
Donald E. McComas played trumpet in the Philadelphia Orchestra for over 30 years, 1964-1997. He received a Bachelor of Music Degree from the University of Michigan and a Masters of Music Degree from Catholic University in Washington, DC. Before winning the position with the Philadelphia Orchestra, McComas played with the US Army Band in Washington, DC, [7] ) and National Symphony.
Donald McComas' students can be heard in orchestras all around the world. Among some of the institutions Donald McComas taught are the New School of Music in Philadelphia, Temple University, & Philadelphia Bible College. McComas was one of the musicians featured in the 1968 Grammy Award Winning record, "'The Antiphonal Music of Gabrieli"' featuring The Philadelphia Brass Ensemble, The Cleveland Brass Ensemble and The Chicago Brass Ensemble. The players, the brass sections of the Philadelphia, Chicago, and Cleveland Orchestras, had never before worked together; They rehearsed and recorded the entire LP in nine hours over the course of one weekend.
Donald McComas retired from the Phil. Orchestra in 1997 and moved to Montana, with his wife, Sharlene. He died on March 16, 2011, of interstitial fibrosis.
The Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance has been awarded since 1959. The award has had several minor name changes:
Efrem Zimbalist Sr. was a concert violinist, composer, teacher, conductor and director of the Curtis Institute of Music.
Richard Danielpour is an American composer.
Simon Pullman was a violinist, conductor, music teacher and founder and Director of the Pullman Ensemble and Orchestra, and a seminal figure in the evolution of chamber music performance.
Orlando Cole was an American cello teacher who taught two generations of soloists, chamber musicians, and first cellists in a dozen leading orchestras, including Lynn Harrell, Jonah Kim, Ronald Leonard, Lorne Munroe, Peter Stumpf and Marcy Rosen.
The Hollywood String Quartet (HSQ) was an American string quartet founded by violinist/conductor Felix Slatkin and his wife cellist Eleanor Aller. The Hollywood String Quartet is considered to be the first American-born and trained classical music chamber group to make an international impact, mainly through its landmark recordings. These recordings have long been regarded as among the most outstanding recorded performances of the string quartet repertoire.
Jascha Brodsky was a Russian-American violinist and teacher.
John Dalley is an American violinist. He was raised in a musical family. His father was an orchestra conductor, violinist, composer, instrumental teacher, and music educator. His mother, from Bloomington, Illinois, was a cellist, music teacher, and music publisher.
Andor John Toth was an American classical violinist, conductor and educator with a musical career spanning over six decades. Toth played his violin on the World War II battlefields of Aachen, Germany; performed with the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini in 1943 at age 18; and formed several chamber music ensembles, including the Oberlin String Quartet, the New Hungarian Quartet, and the Stanford String Quartet. For 15 years he was the violinist in the Alma Trio. Toth conducted orchestras in Cleveland, Denver and Houston. In 1969, he was the founding concertmaster of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra under Neville Marriner. Toth taught at five important colleges and universities, and recorded for Vox, Decca Records and Eclectra Records.
Walter Levin was the founder, first violinist, and guiding spirit of the LaSalle Quartet, which was known for its championing of contemporary composers, for its recordings of the Second Viennese School, as well as for its intellectually penetrating interpretations of the classical and romantic quartet repertory, in particular the late quartets of Beethoven. Levin was also an important pedagogue, having taught many of the world's leading string quartets, among them the Alban Berg Quartet and the Arditti Quartet; other prominent students include the conductor James Levine, the violinist Christian Tetzlaff and the pianist Stefan Litwin.
Alan Shulman was an American composer and cellist. He wrote a considerable amount of symphonic music, chamber music, and jazz music. Trumpeter Eddie Bailey said, "Alan had the greatest ear of any musician I ever came across. He had better than perfect pitch. I've simply never met anyone like him." Some of his more well known works include his 1940 Neo-Classical Theme and Variations for Viola and Piano and his A Laurentian Overture, which was premiered by the New York Philharmonic in 1952 under the baton of Guido Cantelli. Also of note is his 1948 Concerto for Cello and Orchestra which was also premiered by the New York Philharmonic with cellist Leonard Rose and conductor Dmitri Mitropoulos. Many of Shulman's works have been recorded, and the violinist Jascha Heifetz and jazz clarinetist Artie Shaw have been particular exponents of his work both in performance and on recordings.
David Serkin Ludwig is an American composer of classical music. His uncle is pianist Peter Serkin, his grandfather was the pianist Rudolf Serkin, and his great-grandfather was the violinist Adolf Busch.
Founded in 1976, the Elgin Youth Symphony Orchestra (EYSO) is the oldest and largest youth orchestra program in northwest Illinois and is composed of three full orchestras, two string orchestras, a brass choir, a percussion ensemble, and a large Chamber Music Institute.
Joseph Genualdi is an American violinist.
Richard Fleischman is an American viola and viola d'amore player, conductor and pedagogue.
Joseph Primavera was an American violist and conductor. He was the youngest violist ever appointed to lead the viola section of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Until he retired in 2005, Primavera had served as the longest-tenured active conductor in the world as Maestro and Music Director of the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra.
The Curtis String Quartet was an American string quartet based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Justin (Wayne) Lewis is an American conductor, cellist and educator who became a conductor in the United States Air Force Band program in 2012. He is currently the flight commander of the United States Air Force Heritage of America Band at Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia and the United States Air Force Heartland of America Band at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska. Lewis also serves as conductor-in-residence of the Virginia Choral Society, and as a faculty member at the Pennsylvania Suzuki Institute.
Vladimir Sokoloff was an American pianist and accompanist on the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music. In addition to his teaching work with the accompanying, piano and chamber music students, he was an active performer.
Anton Jivaev is a Russian violist who made an international career as orchestra player, chamber musician and soloist. From 2012, he has been violist of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig, and from 2015 violist of the Gewandhaus Quartet.