Michael Colgrass to Become National Honorary at Leadership Institute 2013
The Fraternity is pleased to announce that internationally acclaimed, Pulitzer Prize winning composer Michael Colgrass will be initiated as our newest National Honorary member at Leadership Institute 2013. At the event, he will also be a featured speaker.
Colgrass began his musical career in Chicago where his first professional experiences were as a jazz drummer. He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1954 with a degree in performance and composition and his studies included training with Darius Milhaud at the Aspen Festival and Lukas Foss at Tanglewood. He served two years as timpanist in the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra in Stuttgart, Germany and then spent eleven years supporting his composing as a free-lance percussionist in New York City where his wide-ranging performance venues included the New York Philharmonic, American Ballet Theater, Dizzy Gillespie, the Modern Jazz Quartet, the original West Side Story orchestra on Broadway, the Columbia Recording Orchestra’s Stravinsky Conducts Stravinsky series, and numerous ballet, opera and jazz ensembles.
Colgrass won 1978 Pulitzer Prize for Music for Déjà vu, which was commissioned and premiered by the New York Philharmonic. In addition, he received an Emmy Award in 1982 for a PBS documentary “Soundings: The Music of Michael Colgrass.” He has been awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships, A Rockefeller Grant, First Prize in the Barlow and Sudler International Wind Ensemble Competitions, and the 1988 Jules Leger Prize for Chamber Music.
He has created a method of teaching children – and teachers – how to write music using graphics. In April of 2009 he did a project with the Middleton Regional High School in Nova Scotia, where high school students wrote seven pieces for band in three days and conducted them in public concert on the fourth. As a result, his method was adopted by the Nova Scotia education system for inclusion in the junior high curriculum. Most recently he had students at Toronto’s Rockcliffe Middle School write a group composition for the Esprit orchestra in three days, which was premiered on 25 May 2010 with Alex Pauk conducting.
In recognition of his indelible imprint on music as a composer, performer and educator, we’re proud to be honoring Michael Colgrass as our newest National Honorary member at Leadership Institute.
Colgrass is also in demand as a speaker and presenter, both on his music teaching methods and as an inspiring instructor on creativity and performance. He will be a featured speaker at Leadership 2013. His presentation, “The Key to Creativity: Think Like a Kid!” will focus on the creative process, and helping all those in attendance unlock their creative potential.
To learn more about Colgrass – his life, music, and writings – visit his website at www.michaelcolgrass.com. And to sign up for Leadership Institute to get a chance to hear from and meet this legend in American music, head to www.sinfonia.org/institute.
