Press Releases

APPLETON, WIS. — “Creators: Commercial Music Careers,” an open forum for individuals interested in careers as composers and songwriters of pop, jazz, film, television, radio, and media music, takes place at 1:00 p.m. February 10 in Harper Hall, located in the Music-Drama Center on the Lawrence University campus.

Hosting this educational event is Fred Sturm, director of jazz and improvisational music at Lawrence University and a jazz, orchestral, and media music composer. “This forum will give interested composers and songwriters the opportunity to ask questions about what to study, how to prepare themselves, and what they need to know about commercial music as a potential career,” said Sturm. “Our area high schools and universities effectively inform aspiring composers about the worlds of jazz and classical music. But commercial music careers frequently get short shrift, for institutions typically assume that music students will explore pop, film, TV, radio, and media music on their own.”

The guest panel for the day includes Maury Laws, John Harmon, Lovell Ives, and Patty Darling. Laws, is the music director for “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” the renowned Rankin/Bass animated television specials and films, and arranger for Fred Astaire, Danny Kaye, Angela Lansbury, Burl Ives, Danny Thomas, Art Carney, Judy Collins, and Ethel Merman. Harmon is a composer of music for jazz, orchestral, choral, and chamber ensembles, a former composer and pianist with Matrix, he has music recorded on RCA, Warner Brothers, and Pablo Records, and was the featured artist on Marian McPartland’s PianoJazz.

Ives is the retired director of the Green Bay Packers Band, the retired director of jazz studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, conductor of the annual Cerebral Palsy Telethon in Green Bay, instructor at the Institute of Advanced Musical Study in Crans, Switzerland, and renowned composer and arranger of jazz, pop, and commercial music. Darling is a composer and producer for numerous industrial, film, television, and radio commercial music productions, a staff composer for Saxe Productions in Appleton, and an outstanding jazz, classical, and media music composer.

“We’re blessed to have some of the most respected and diversely experienced commercial music composers serving on our panel. They’ll have meaningful answers to most the questions coming from their audience,” said Sturm.

APPLETON, WIS. — The Lawrence Symphony Orchestra, conducted by David Becker, premieres La Serenissima, a composition by Joanne Metcalf, Lawrence University assistant professor of music, at 8:00 p.m. January 27 in the Lawrence Memorial Chapel. Metcalf will give a pre-concert lecture at 7:00 p.m. in the Lawrence Memorial Chapel. Both the concert and lecture are free and open to the public.

The concert features solos by Lawrence Conservatory of Music faculty members Patrice Michaels, associate professor of music, Steven Paul Spears, assistant professor of music, and John Gates, visiting assistant professor of music.

La Serenissima was composed by Metcalf while on sabbatical last year as a composition fellow at the MacDowell Colony. The composition is an extended scene from the opera Orphans of the Heavenly City, an opera on the extraordinary phenomenon of the all-female professional orchestra and choir of the 18th century Venetian Ospedale della Pietá. The Pietá was one of four ospedali, or social welfare institutions, that functioned as places of refuge for the sick, the abandoned, the unwanted, and the socially undesirable. The Pietá’s clientele consisted entirely of abandoned infants who, if they were female and musically gifted, would be given 10 years of musical training and might spend the entirety of their lives in the coro. These women would neither marry nor take formal religious vows, but acted as servants of liturgical music, performing in services and liturgical concerts daily.

In this scene, the soprano sings the role of La Serenissima, or Venice personified, who watches the foundlings as they are admitted to the Pietá through the scaffetta, a small opening discreetly place on the side of the building. She sings from the libro di scaffetta, an intake ledger that lists the barest facts of the infants’ young lives including apparent age, state of health, clothing worn, and identifying tokens left by the mother. Her music resembles a gentle lullaby, but it is surrounded by fateful, dissonant, crashing chords that allude to the harsh destiny those children would have met on the streets of Venice. The men, each in his time a Doge of Venice (the Republic’s highest leader) and member of the Board of Governors of the Pietá, sing the words of a papal bull of 1548 that are inscribed on a lapide, or stone tablet, that remains on the outer wall of the Pietá today.

Metcalf’s compositions have been performed and broadcast in more than 25 countries worldwide and she has received commissions from the Hilliard Ensemble, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Scottish Arts Council, Cappella Nova, the Netherland-America Foundation, Ensemble Hex, English tenor John Potter, Norway’s Trio Mediaeval, and many more. Her composition Il nome del bel fior has received over 85 performances worldwide and was featured in the 2002 German television documentary Wenn Engel singen: Das Hilliard Ensemble; its recording won the 2005 German Echo-klassik prize, the German equivalent of a Grammy, for Best Vocal Ensemble Performance. Metclaf’s works are recorded on ECM New Series and Oehms Classics labels.

APPLETON, WIS. — With its abundance of natural resources and a young, dynamic population, Africa long has been viewed as a land of great promise. But political instability and crippling economic challenges have often produced more turmoil than prosperity. The world’s second largest continent in size and population will be the focus of Lawrence University’s annual Povolny International Studies Lecture Series, “Africa Today: Problems and Solutions.”

Noted Africanist M. Crawford Young, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, opens the five-part series Monday, Jan. 22, at 7 p.m. in the Wriston Art Center auditorium with the address “Beyond State Crisis in Post-Colonial Africa?” All lectures in the series are free and open to the public.

“It has been more than 25 years since most African countries became independent, yet Africa as a region remains the poorest in the world, troubled by persistent conflict, high levels of poverty, refugee flows and social problems brought by famine and disease,” said Claudena Skran, Lawrence University associate professor of government and the series coordinator.

“This year’s series looks to address both the historical and political roots of African problems as well as examine solutions to them, including conflict resolution, foreign aid, trade and different development strategies.”

Young will share an historic review of the optimism widely held by nationalist leaders, academic observers and the policy community around 1960 when much of the continent gained independence and examine the factors that prevented reality from matching that optimism, among them underestimating the burden of the colonial legacy, economic vulnerabilities and the negative impact of Cold War rivalries.

Young also will discuss the reasons why soon after gaining independence, many of the new country’s democratic institutions put in place by withdrawing colonizers gave way to single-party systems, including the use of military coups in the last half of the 1960s and the rise of “neopatrimonial autocracies” of the 1970s and ’80s. According to Young, the present map of Africa “was entirely constructed by colonial cartography, thus bearing the original sin of alien origin and artificiality.”

Regarded as one of the world’s leading scholars on Africa, Young has written seven books on African politics, edited six others and has had more than 100 scholarly articles and book chapters published.

He gained academic prominence with the release of “The Politics of Cultural Pluralism” in 1976, which earned the Herskovits Prize from the African Studies Association.

His 1994 book, “The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective,” was awarded the Lubbert Prize from the American Political Science Association as the best book written that year in the field of comparative politics. Other books written by Young include “The Ideology and Development in Africa” and “The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State.”

In addition to spending 38 years (1963-2001) on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Young served as the dean of the faculty of social science at the Universite Nationale du Zaire from 1973-75. During his career he also served as a visiting professor at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda and the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal.

A former president of the African Studies Association, Young was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998 and named to the Library of Congress’ Scholars Council in 2004. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and his Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Other scheduled speakers in the series include Joseph Sebarenzi, former head of the Rwanda parliament who was granted asylum in the United States (Feb. 20), Michael Fosdal, a specialist on British politics who teaches government at Lawrence’s London Center (April 3), Jacqueline Klopp, assistant professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University (April 10) and John Roome, an operations director with the World Bank (TBA).

The “Africa Today: Problems and Solutions” lecture series is sponsored by the Mojmir Povolny Lectureship in International Studies. Named in honor of long-time Lawrence government professor Mojmir Povolny, the lectureship promotes interest and discussion on issues of moral significance and ethical dimensions.

APPLETON, WIS. — Robert Suettinger, a former U.S. intelligence officer and a scholar on East Asia, will spend seven weeks of Spring Term as Lawrence University’s Stephen Edward Scarff Memorial Visiting Professor. He will be in residence in the government department from March 22 to April 19 and again from May 8-29.

A 1968 graduate of Lawrence, Suettinger will reunite with his former mentor, Professor Emeritus of Government Chong-do Hah, to team-teach the seminar “The United States and Rising Asian Powers.”

Suettinger, currently an analytic director with Centra Technology, Inc., an Arlington, Va., consulting firm that provides national security research and analysis, among other services, brings an extensive background in East Asian affairs and policy making to Lawrence.

He spent three years as director for Asian affairs for the National Security Council in the mid-1990s, where he dealt regularly with NSC advisers Anthony Lake and Sandy Berger and occasionally briefed President Clinton. He also twice served on the National Intelligence Council for East Asia, first as a deputy national intelligence officer (1987-94) and later as a national intelligence officer for East Asia (1997-98).

Suettinger began his career with the Central Intelligence Agency in 1975, spending 12 years with the agency as a researcher, senior analyst and branch chief in the China division of the Office of East Asian Analysis. He joined the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research in 1987, where he spent two years as the director of the Office of Analysis for East Asia and the Pacific.

He has written extensively on U.S. and China foreign policy issues, including the 2003 book “Beyond Tiananmen: The Politics of U.S.-China Relations, 1989-2000,” in which he argues that the Tiananmen Square “massacre” in June, 1989 produced an overnight shift of Chinese-American relations from “amity and strategic cooperation to hostility, distrust and misunderstanding.” He contends the bloody confrontation in Beijing continues to undermine cordial relations between the two countries yet today.

A member of Phi Beta Kappa, Suettinger earned a bachelor’s degree magna cum laude in political science from Lawrence in 1968, undertook Chinese language study at Princeton University and Middlebury College and earned a master’s degree in comparative politics at Columbia University.

He joins a long list of distinguished scholars and notable public servants who have previously held the Scarff professorship, among them McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser to presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Karl Scheld, senior vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, William Sloane Coffin, Jr., former chaplain at Yale University, noted civil rights advocate and peace activist, Takakazu Kuriyama, former Japanese ambassador to the U.S. and George Meyer, long-time secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

The Scarff Memorial Visiting Professorship was established in 1989 by Edward and Nancy Scarff in memory of their son, Stephen, a member of the Lawrence class of 1975, who died in an automobile accident in 1984. It was designed to bring civic leaders and scholars to Lawrence to provide broad perspectives on the central issues of the day.

APPLETON, WIS. — A musical petting zoo, a play-a-thon, and a “Choose-Your-Cruise” raffle are just many of the activities taking place at the Lawrence Academy of Music tutti! scholarship benefit. Tutti!, which means “together” in Italian, will take place on January 27 from 1:00-5:00 p.m. at Appleton North High School, 5000 N. Ballard Road.

Many events and activities will be held throughout the day, including a silent auction, a bake sale, and a KidZone with musical games and crafts. Refreshments will also be available for purchase throughout the day. The drawing for the $2,500 “Choose-Your-Cruise” raffle takes place at 4:00 p.m. Tickets for the raffle are $10 each and are available at the Academy of Music or from any Academy student or teacher. A play-a-thon will feature Academy students, teachers, and ensembles.

All proceeds from this event go directly to the Academy’s financial assistance fund, which provides financial aid to families who would not otherwise be able to afford music instruction for their children. Admission to this fun-filled day is free, however, donations will be accepted at the door.

For more information on this event, call the Academy at 920-832-6632 or visit www.lawrence.edu/dept/acad_music/events.shtml.

APPLETON, WIS. — Beginning Jan. 10, Lawrence University’s Seeley G. Mudd Library will host a national touring exhibition of the 2006 Paul Revere Awards from the Music Publishers’ Association of the United States. The exhibition will be displayed in the cases just inside the library’s main entrance through the end of January.

The collection features nearly 50 scores of works recognized as outstanding examples of graphic design. Approximately 10 scores will be exhibited at a time with changes made to the display on a weekly basis throughout the month. The Paul RevereAwards honor the publishers for their efforts in creating art for the music industry.

Lawrence is the fourth stop on the exhibition’s national tour, which began at Florida State University last September and included previous stops at the University of Minnesota-Duluth and Columbia University in New York City. In February, the exhibition travels to Connecticut College.

APPLETON, WIS. — Love and courtship is a tangled, exhilarating mess as Lawrence University’s dance company in residence, Wild Space Dance Company of Milwaukee, presents Various States of Undress at 8:00 p.m. January 19 in Stansbury Theatre. Tickets for this production are $10 for adults and $5 for senior citizens and students. Tickets are available at the Lawrence University Box Office, located in the Music-Drama Center, or by phone at 920-832-6749. If available, tickets will also be sold at the box office beginning one hour before the performance.

From uncertainty to intimacy and back again, Wild Space reveals these states through full-bodied dance, inventive choreography, and clever wordplay. In the title piece, “Various States of Undress,” fictional characters John and Mary are in love; or at least that is what the writer thinks as he creates them in his imagination. But the course of true love does not run smooth in this text and dance work inspired by Diane Schoemperlen’s “How to Write a Serious Novel About Love.” There are infidelities and insecurities as John, Mary, and their creator wryly navigate the risks and rewards of love, romance, and the interior monologue. Played by Wild Space Dance Company members, Randy Talley and Laura Murphy, John and Mary take direction–and sometimes give it–to guest performer Scott Howland as the writer.

The performance also features “One Time at Lunch” by Artistic Director Debra Loewen, a light-hearted quartet set to the offbeat country songs of Terry Allen, and works by company members, Monica Rodero, Dan Schuchart, and Katie Sopoci. Guest artist, Sofi Askenazi, performs in Sopoci’s choreographed, “The Existential Crisis of the American Youth” (or “I wish I was a cat”).

Wild Space Dance Company has intrigued audiences for 20 years as one of Wisconsin’s most dynamic and creative performing companies.

APPLETON, WIS. — An opening reception and lecture for the next exhibition at the Wriston Art Center galleries takes place at 6:00 p.m. January 19. Michelle Grabner, who will exhibit Mid-Career Retrospective in the Hoffmaster and Kohler galleries, will give the opening lecture. The Leech Gallery will feature recent acquisitions.

Grabner, an artist, professor, art critic, and curator, has had one-person exhibitions in London, Melbourne, Los Angeles, New York, Boston, and Chicago. This exhibition, organized by University Galleries, College of Fine Arts, Illinois State University, Normal, and supported in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, will represent her first large-scale solo museum survey.

The spare minimalism of Grabner’s works is actually an ongoing and complex response to the material world of everyday life. Some of her early works were derived from some of the most common objects found in domestic interiors. The patterns on rugs, colanders, produce bags, and bedspreads were meticulously stenciled onto canvas and panel and then painted by hand with enamel or flocking. In later works, Grabner investigates the illusory and ever-changing refraction of light in rainbows and the natural diffraction of reflective surfaces. Through the last 10 years, all of Grabner’s works have been precise and seemingly obsessive interpretations of common phenomena, filtered through a careful and subtly changing vision.

Included in the recent acquisitions exhibition at the Leech Gallery are two 20th century Japanese woodblock prints, a Thomas Dietrich watercolor painting, a painting by the American Surrealist Walter Quirt, executed in 1947, a sculpture by contemporary artist Ronald Gonzalez and a piece of Native American pottery from the southwest.

These exhibitions will be on display through March 11. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Friday, 10:00 a.m.-4:00 p.m. and Saturday-Sunday, noon-4:00 p.m.

APPLETON, WIS. — Mezzo-soprano, Susan Graham, will grace the stage of the Lawrence Memorial Chapel at 8:00 p.m. January 16 as part of the 2006-07 “Performing Arts at Lawrence” Artist Series. Accompanying Graham is pianist Malcolm Martineau.

One of today’s foremost international opera stars, Graham’s repertoire spans the history of opera, from the Baroque to the classical and contemporary. She has always had a special affinity for French repertoire and devotes the entirety of her current recital program–like much of her extensive discography–to French song and opera. Graham has sung leading roles in many of the great opera houses of the world, including the Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, Lyrica Opera of Chicago, La Scala Milan, the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and Vienna State Opera.

Last season, Graham created a leading role in her second Metropolitan Opera world premiere, Tobias Picker’s An American Tragedy. Her first was in The Great Gatsby, by John Harbison, in 1999-2000. Graham has an extensive discography of solo recitals and complete opera recording. Her disc of Charles Ives songs with pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard won a Grammy Award. She received a Grammy Award nomination for her portrayal of Dido in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. She also received the Maria Callas award from France’s Académie du Disque Lyrique for the same role.

She was honored by the French government with its highest award for performers, the “Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.” She was also named Musical America’s 2004 Vocalist of the year. She won the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and the Schwabacher Award from San Francisco Opera’s Merola Program, as well as a career grant from the Richard Tucker Foundation.

Martineau was born in Edinburgh, read music at St. Catharine’s College in Cambridge, and studied at the Royal College of Music. He is recognized as one of the leading accompanists of his generation and has worked with many of the world’s greatest singers including Sir Thomas Allen, Ina Bostridge, Della Jones, Amanda Roocroft, and many more.

He has presented his own series at St. Johns Smith Square, the Wigmore Hall, and at the Edinburgh Festival. He has appeared throughout Europe, North America, Australia, and at the Aix-en-Provence, Vienna, Edinburgh, Schubertiade, Munich, and Salzburg Festivals. He was given an honorary doctorate at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in 2004.

Tickets for this concert are $22 and $20 for adults, $19 and $17 for senior citizens, and $17 and $15 for students and are available through the Lawrence University Box Office, located in the Music-Drama Center, or by phone at 920-832-6749. Tickets, if available, will also be sold beginning one hour before the performance at the box office.

Other upcoming Artist Series concerts include cellist David Finkel and pianist Wu Han on March 3 and bassoonist Peter Kolkay ’98 on April 21. For more information on the “Performing Arts at Lawrence” concert series, please visit www.lawrence.edu/news/performingartsseries.

APPLETON, WIS. — Justice Louis Butler, the first African-American to serve on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, will deliver the keynote address at the 16th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Monday, January 15 at 6:30 p.m. in the Lawrence University Memorial Chapel. The theme for this year’s event is “For the Common Good — Is King’s Dream Still Relevant Today?”

The celebration, co-sponsored by Lawrence and the organization Toward Community: Unity in Diversity, is free and open to the public. A sign language interpreter will be present.

The event will be a homecoming for Butler, who graduated from Lawrence in 1973 with a bachelor’s degree in government. During a stellar law career spanning more than 25 years, Butler has achieved several notable “firsts,” including being the first public defender from Wisconsin to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court and the first African-American Wisconsin Supreme Court justice. He was appointed to the state’s highest court by Governor Jim Doyle in August, 2004 to fill the position left vacant by Justice Diane Sykes’ acceptance of a seat on the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

A native of Chicago’s south side Park Manor neighborhood, Butler earned the J.D. from the University of Wisconsin Law School and served as an assistant Wisconsin State Public Defender in both the appellate and trial divisions.

He served as a Milwaukee Municipal Court judge from 1992-2002 and Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge from 2002 until his appointment to the state supreme court. A former adjunct assistant professor at Marquette University Law School, Butler is a permanent member of the faculty of the National Judicial College in Reno, Nev., where judges from across the nation pursue continuing education.

“We’re thrilled to have a person of Justice Butler’s stature headlining our annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration,” said Erik Farley, assistant dean of students for multicultural affairs at Lawrence. “This is truly a community-enriching event, one that fosters new friendships and nurtures old ones as it gathers together Lawrentians and Fox Valley community members. It’s gratifying to know that Dr. King’s work lives on in our efforts to create and sustain a living and learning environment that respects all aspects of human difference.

“It is my hope that this celebration serves as a catalyst for future discussions that will challenge this community to think critically and to intellectually explore what might be unfamiliar territory,” Farley added. “We all have a responsibility to inspire the courage to question and to stretch some comfort zones within a safe space for learning and discussion.”

After moving to the Fox Cities in 1990, Rev. Roger Bertschausen of the Fox Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship and a founding member of Toward Community, was instrumental in organizing the community’s first King holiday celebration.

“I am delighted that the Martin Luther King celebration has become an important annual event in the life of our community, calling us to celebrate the strides toward community and justice we have made and reminding us that we have further to travel,” said Bertschausen.

In addition to Butler’s address, acclaimed singers Tim and Ezra Dorsey will perform during the celebration and lead the audience in a rendition of the African-American national anthem “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Tim Dorsey, who has been singing professionally since the 1970s, is well known for his musical versatility and distinctive vocal styling.

Highlighting the event will be the presentation by Toward Community of the annual Jane LaChapelle McCarty Unity in Diversity Award to an area individual who has made great strides in bringing together different people in the community.

The celebration also will include the reading of winning essays written by area youth who have addressed the question, “Is Dr. King’s message of equality and harmony among all people and all races still relevant today?”

A reception for all in attendance will follow the program.