Growing up in Chapel Hill in the 80s and 90s.

Chapel Hill is well known for its combination of cosmopolitan  intellectual life and laid-back, small-town Southern charm. These qualities  certainly characterized the musical world I grew up in there during the 80’s and  90’s and created a culture of openness and curiosity in the arts. Between Suzuki  group lessons, seasonal guest teachers and conventions, youth orchestras, and summer
camps, the opportunities to play violin were considerable. Additionally,  good local musicians of all stripes were friendly and accessible, authentic  bluegrass jam sessions were held out in Orange County (if you could find them),  and most Cat’s Cradle shows were all ages. 
I am especially grateful for the 13-plus years I got to study  violin with Mary Frances Boyce. She took my ideas seriously from a very young  age and always encouraged me to focus on whatever most interested me, whether it  was composition, music history, or playing in a rock band. When I left Chapel  Hill to study at a conservatory, I met many musicians whose talent and technique  far surpassed my own but very few who had as broad musical experience or as much enthusiasm for pursuing their own creative vision—two
traits especially cultivated by the Chapel Hill music scene.
BIO
Simon studied violin with Kevin Lawrence at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and graduated with honors from Rice University with a B.M. in Music Composition. Working under a dissertation fellowship from the Mellon Foundation, he completed his Ph.D. in Music Composition at the University of Chicago. His mentors included Marta Ptaszynska and Shulamit Ran in composition and Howard Sandroff in computer music. He has taught at the University of Chicago, Missouri Western State University, and William Jewell College and serves on the Executive Board of KcEMA (Kansas City Electronic Music & Arts Alliance).

Simon is a composer of acoustic and electronic music. His work has abiding interests in Americana, song form(s), and multimedia. Recent pieces have included The Open Boat, an electroacoustic opera based on the work of Stephen Crane premiered by Black House Collective http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kC_nEzhxNlo, MIC CHECK, a commission from the Assembly Saxophone Quartet, and a collaborative performance with choreographer Jane Gotch as part of Breathe, a multimedia installation by visual artist Carrie Scanga.

Simon’s music has been played and premiered by Grammy-winning artists eighth blackbird, the Pacifica Quartet, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Kevin McMillan, and Ian Howell, among many other outstanding musicians. He has won honorable recognition from organizations like the American Composers Forum, the New York Youth Symphony, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his music has been featured at festivals and conferences including MATA, the Staunton Music Festival, and the MoMA (NY) Documentary Fortnight Festival. He has been a fellow at the Aspen Music Festival, the MacDowell Colony, and the I-Park Artists’ Enclave. 

Simon’s electronic work juxtaposes the aesthetics of the natural and the technological and is frequently collaborative in nature. In 2009 he became the first composer to win an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Award for a piece incorporating electronics (Electric Pastoral). In 2011 he was awarded a prize for his site-specific, electro-acoustic collaboration, Dock & Load, at the Music in Architecture — Architecture in Music Symposium at the University of Texas. Simon worked as a recording intern at Houston’s renowned Sugar Hill Recording Studios, and his music has been featured in concerts by S.E.A.M.U.S, Electronic Music
Midwest, and C.C.R.M.A. at Stanford. 
 
Simon’s other interests include a fascination with American folk music. While in Texas, he performed as a fiddler alongside some of the state’s most distinguished traditional players, Alvin Crow and Valerie Ryals O’Briens. Simon’s folk/pop project, Still Lost Bird Music, was featured on the record-breaking popular iPhone game Tap Tap Revenge and released its second album, a lush cycle of (mostly) turn-of-the century text-settings, on DashGo Records in 2011.

Simon Fink, Ph.D.                                      
www.simonfink.com                                                    
                                         
 



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***** October 10, at 7:30 pm. Memorial
Hall on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus.   
The UNC Symphony
Orchestra will give its first concert of the 2013-14 season.
Tonu Kalam, Music Director and Conductor writes the following -

"I am delighted to welcome my friend and colleague Dr. Michael Griffith as
guest conductor for this program. Michael is the Director of Orchestral
Activities at the University of Wyoming, and he has often participated in
“podium exchanges” with colleagues in the United States and internationally.
Thus, in return for his conducting a concert here, I will be conducting a
concert with his orchestra in Wyoming in March. An exchange of this kind has
valuable musical benefits for both orchestras and both conductors, and I am very
happy that this project has come to fruition.
Michael has chosen a varied and
exciting program for his appearance with the UNCSO. The concert will begin with
Overture of the Season, a brilliant work by Czech-American composer Tomas
Svoboda. This will be followed by Dvořák’s charming and melodious Czech Suite,
Op. 39. After intermission the program will conclude with the major work of the
evening, Mussorgsky’s colorful Pictures at an Exhibition, in the
masterful orchestration by Maurice Ravel.
I will be back on the
podium leading our orchestra in our second concert in November. In the meantime,
I will have the pleasure of being able to sit in the audience and enjoy the
October 10th performance of our wonderful group of musicians. I hope you will
join me there!"
This scholarship benefit concert featured a podium exchange. The UNC SO
hosted Professor Griffith for rehearsals and this concert this week, and
Professor Tonu Kalam will visit the University of Wyoming in March 2014.

                                      
                        ***** Sept 28th at 8pm.
Hill Hall, UNC. Jennifer Curtis  - UNC Visiting Violin Faculty member.  Solo Violin concert.  
Enescu, Vivaldi, Tartini, Curtis and "New York/Copenhagen,"  a duo for violin and drumset by Tyshawn Sorey, commissioned by the  International Contemporary Ensemble and premiered at the Mostly Mozart Festival in August 2013.   http://iceorg.org/about/artist/curtis 

I don't have the words to describe Jennifer's sublime performance tonight. Hopefully John Lambert, the CVNC reviewer will have the words. When an audience stands up to clap after the first piece, you know it is going to be an unforgettable evening, and it was - Jane Salemson  
                                                                        

I've had the pleasure and honor of working with musicians as a performance anxiety coach for ten years, and teaching flute in Chapel Hill for 23 years. My studio career earned national attention because of my innovative approach to music education, emphasizing the joy of music and its ability to enrich life. My 
students performed in venues as diverse as our local ice cream parlor and on a flute trip to London, England. My passion, coaching musicians to perform with confidence, consistency, focus, and self-compassion incorporated my background in education, counseling, music and public speaking. This later-in-life profession found me in an unexpected way, and I now spend most of my time working in my Chapel Hill office using the phone and Skype to reach my clients who are all over the world. 
My book A Flute in My Refrigerator: Celebrating a Life in Music was published this summer and is available through Amazon or at the festival. Filled with uplifting, endearing stories of my adventures as a flute teacher, adult learner,  performer, and more, this book is written from the heart and abounds with  treasures uncovered when love and passion guide a life. 

“Rarely does someone share that which is truly meaningful in her life on
  such an intimate level. Helen describes the depths of her musical journey with
  dignity, forthrightness, enormous grace, enthusiasm and love.  This book
is a  page turner, not because of some adventure story, but because of the pure
  honesty and courage of its expression. It is only the time of night that
compels  me to stop reading.” –-Brooks de Wetter-Smith, James Gordon Hanes  Distinguished Professor of Flute, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
I look forward to seeing everyone at the festival, and I thank Jane Salemson and all the volunteers for their hard work in bringing it to life!

In the late Sixties and when my children were all in school, I decided to start playing the piano again after having studied for ten years.  I began studying with Virginia Calmeyer, a wonderful warm piano teacher and friend and one of the first persons to start getting together a group of private musicians in Chapel Hill.  After a few years she and her husband (from The Netherlands) moved abroad. She asked me to take over some of her students and that was the beginning of a new stage in my life after majoring in Zoology in college.  I continued to learn as I taught.  Before long The Chapel Hill Music Teachers Association was formed and several of us got together and produced a handbook.  I began studying with Barbara Crittenden in the late seventies.  We started out playing duets because I felt more comfortable playing next to another warm body, but soon I was playing solo pieces!  I not only benefitted from a remarkable teacher but gained a lot of confidence.  Among her other students were Barbara Clyde, Betsy Mann (also teachers), and Don Hartman.  We became friends and in the early Eighties I talked them into trying some eight-handed music. 
Not much had been written for eight hands until then, but we scoured both sides of the Atlantic and found enough music to begin performing.  What fun we had.  As the FourMost, we played together for over twenty years in various places in Chapel Hill (including our own student’s recitals).  It certainly changed my life.

    When I arrived in 1964 in Chapel Hill which was still a very small town, the University Music Department was the center of all music activities. Just about everyone attended the Tuesday Evening Concerts which featured music faculty - all accomplished musicians, in weekly concerts. WUNC broadcast the concerts live. Parking was no problem, as we just parked in the Music Department parking lot outside the door. Town musicians played in the Music Department symphony along with the students, and many people studied with the faculty.
    In addition to the university scene, there were many musicians who taught and performed on a regular basis. They formed the Chapel Hill Music Teachers' Association which thrives to this day.
    I was pursuing a Masters in Violin in 1965 where I met Mary Frances Boyce who was completing her Ph.D. in musicology (a name only musicians would understand - it is a degree in history and theory, as opposed to performance). Mary Frances was also a Suzuki violin teacher and persuaded me to join her, Nancy Brooks and Mary Ellen Bierk in founding the Chapel Hill Cooperative String Project teaching the then-new Suzuki method. The program took off as more parents, especially Asian parents, became interested. It is now a well established program almost 50 years later.
    In 1974, Musica della Collina was formed to perform baroque music on original instruments, the first in North Carolina. Newcomer to Chapel Hill, Jane Salemson - cello, Beverly Abel - harpsichord, (later, after Beverly left for the South, Jane Harris became our harpsichordist) along with Mary Frances Boyce and Ellie Kinnaird - violins, Joyce Peck and Florence Peacock - sopranos, performed in the Dialectic Society music room with its small stage and historic portraits in Old East. Our men's auxiliary carried the harpsichord up four flights of stairs in the 19th century building without an elevator. Many evenings of music and food in a beautiful setting were spent there.

Professor of Violin, Edgar Alden and his wife Dorothy Alden, were the heart of the string world. Dorothy, in addition to teaching many students, started the Young People's Orchestra which continues to this day as the Piedmont Youth Orchestra. Generations have enjoyed lessons, orchestra and chamber music in Chapel Hill through these varied and rich programs.

Tied in to the local scene, was the North Carolina Symphony, conducted for many years by Benjamin Swalin. His wife, Maxine Swalin directed the public schools programs for countless years. (She lived to
102, proving that music is the healthiest of activities. I heard her play magnificently on her 100th birthday). How many North Carolina 4th and 5th grade students remember tooting away on the recorder and autoharp with the symphony, perhaps their only exposure to classical music?
We have all been enriched by the opportunities available in this university town where music and learning is valued by all.

JANE'S BIO 
www.britcellist.com
Before arriving in the US in 1969, I had studied cello in England with Michael Evans, cellist of the Dartington String Quartet at Dartington College of Arts in Devon, and Bernard Richards at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. After graduating, I was offered a position in the Haifa Symphony Orchestra in Israel. It was an incredible experience for 3 very happy years before returning to the US with my American husband and baby son. While raising two boys in New York, I started building a teaching studio, playing with the Huntington and Queens Symphonies and in chamber music groups before moving to North Carolina. In Chapel Hill I taught strings in the local public schools and privately, and played in the Raleigh, Durham and Greensboro Symphonies, and freelance groups. During this period, I started playing the bass viola da gamba in our Chapel Hill Baroque group, I Musici di Cappella della Collina. For several summers we all attended the Baroque Performance Institute at Oberlin College where I studied with Caterina Meints.
From 1981-86 my family were away from Chapel Hill - in Princeton, NJ (the boys attended the American Boychoir School there), and then in England to give the boys for some English education, and for me, teaching in schools in Exeter, Devon, and playing with various ensembles. I continued studying the viol with Alison Crum and playing with local consort groups.
With the exception of those sojourns, Chapel Hill has been home. On my return in 1986 I rejoined the Raleigh Symphony and became principal cellist for 19 years, reluctantly leaving recently, due to commuting challenges and gas prices. However I continue to play with the Durham Symphony closer to home, and enjoy being back with old friends. For 22 years I taught cello and strings at the Emerson Waldorf School in Chapel Hill and was conductor of the Piedmont Intermediate Youth Orchestra for 10 years.  As organizer of the Chapel Hill Chamber Music Competition which ran for 12 years, I enjoyed hearing the young musicians grow musically. Although we had been playing together before I left Chapel Hill, on my return, with friends Mary Frances Boyce and Ele Kinnaird, we formalised Musica into a booking agency providing professional musicians for social functions, specializing in wedding music. www.musicamusicians.com.