 | Ezra Laderman |
Composer Ezra Laderman, former dean of the School of Music, has been elected president of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Laderman, who was inducted into the academy in 1991, was formally handed the gavel by his predecessor, painter Philip Pearlstein, on Jan. 18. He will serve for a three-year term.
Upon assuming his new post, Laderman noted that he is only the sixth composer to serve as president of the academy, and described how each of these earlier composers had influenced his career. As a youth, he said, he had been moved by the beauty of music listening to Walter Damrosch's radio program of the 1930s. Douglas Moore, Laderman's mentor at Columbia University, encouraged his concern with prosody and the setting of American texts, said the composer, noting he also spent time with the "remarkable" Aaron Copland in the 1970s and 1980s when Laderman was at the National Endowment for the Arts. Hugo Weisgall and Laderman "almost grew up together," he said, and Weisgall conducted a major work of his at Queens College. Laderman also noted that he and Ned Rorem, president from 2000-2003, enjoyed a lively public debate at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on the role of the artist in society.
Dean of the School of Music 1989-1995 and now a professor there, Laderman also holds the post of composer-in-residence. His honors include three Guggenheim fellowships and a Prix de Rome. His compositions have been commissioned by world-renowned orchestras, opera companies, choreographers, ensembles and soloists. Last season, the Colorado Springs Symphony premiered his new cello concerto.
Laderman's works will be among those featured in a New Music New Haven concert on Thursday, March 2, at 8 p.m. in Morse Recital Hall of Sprague Hall, corner of Wall and College streets. Admission to the concert is free.
The American Academy of Arts and Letters, chartered by Congress, was established in 1898 to "foster, assist and sustain an interest in literature, music and the fine arts." It is composed of 250 writers, composers, painters, sculptors and architects; members are elected for life and pay no dues. As vacancies occur, the academicians nominate and elect new members. Each year, the academy gives away just under $1 million in awards to artists, architects, writers and composers. It presents exhibitions of art, architecture and manuscripts; and readings and performances of new musicals.
T H I S
Yale composer is elected the
president of scholarly academy
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