2023
Jonathan Mak, MM Piano Performance
I am producing some educational outreach music programs for kids with special medical needs by bringing chamber music to them and teaching them about chamber music, specifically the piano trio. We will showcase our instruments, demonstrate how they work, and play a variety of music ranging from Dvorak to Disney classics. Our aim is to bring live music to those who currently cannot access the concert hall due to physical restrictions or illness.
Jaylin Vinson, BM Composition
Mami Wata:
My project includes writing and producing an original 15 -20 minute operatic retelling of an African mythological folktale with an educational, interactive presentation. The intent of this project is to bring opera and this method of storytelling to audiences that would not be exposed to no have ready access to programs of this type.
The chamber opera’s narrative is inspired by the African folktale of Mami Wata, a mythological spirit of the sea. An African Goddess of Beauty, Healing, and Wealth, Mami Wata represents a natural force of elegance and marvel in addition to indifference to human ideas of good and evil. The chamber opera will work to capture a narrative that interweaves these characteristics of Mami Wata and her interventions with the human world. The libretto will be written in collaboration with Houston Youth Poet Laureate Avalon Hogans.
2022
Laura Michael, MM Oboe Performance
My Richter project, entitled “Recorder-Kid: Songs of Birds,” was a solo recorder program whose theme was bird song. The program was meant to introduce its audience to the recorder, to demonstrate that it is an accessible, fun, and serious instrument, and to engage the audience through musical and verbal storytelling. The concert featured Jacob Van Eyck’s “The English Nightingale” and an arrangement of Antonio Vivaldi’s “Spring” for solo recorder. I performed the program both in-person for an audience of adults and children at the Shepherd School’s open house for the Brockman Center for Opera and over Zoom for a group of local elementary schoolers.
After the in-person performance, I received questions from an adult recorder enthusiast as well as a young child who was amazed at the different sizes (sopranino, soprano, and alto) of recorders that I had demonstrated. After the Zoom performance, the students asked me many interesting questions, most of which were personal questions about my relationship to music. It was rewarding to be able to interact so personally with my audiences, which is something that I believe that classical musicians do not do enough.
Keeheon Nam, MM Clarinet Performance
Through my Sviatoslav Richter Fund project, I was able to share my Korean culture and heritage through incorporating several Korean traditional folk tunes that were culturally significant to my own family in a Western classical music setting. Asian Americans are growing in representation as performers, but especially in the type of music we perform or listen to, Asian representation is negligible at best. I wanted to change that by asking a female Korean composer (females also being extremely underrepresented in the music that we as classical musicians perform) to write a piece for clarinet and piano that showcased traditional folk tunes important to my culture and family. Plus, clarinet is not a traditional instrument in Korea, so it was an opportunity to showcase Korean music in a completely new lens.
I had very limited knowledge about my own musical culture and while working on this project, it was quite a challenge to me, especially when it came time to talk about ideas with my commissioning composer, SiHyun Uhm. At the beginning of my project, I knew of some limited works, but I had no idea what kinds of music were culturally relevant to me or my family. Through this project, not only was I able to commission a new piece of music, but it also helped me to open up to my Korean roots and learn much more about my own family history and how music played a part in the Korean culture. This was an extremely enriching project, and I am so thankful funding like this exists for Shepherd Students to not only engage with the greater Houston community, but also to do thoughtful self-reflection and learn what it means to be an artist in the 21st century.