News

Chamber Singers Wrap Up Tour:

Excerpted from the New Canaan Advertiser, New Canaan, CT Thursday, October 28, 2010

Earlier this month, Lafayette College’s Chamber Singers wrapped up their New England tour by performing traditional and contemporary music for alumni, friends and prospective students at the Carriage Barn Arts Center in Waveny Park. The students performed to a standing room only crowd on the last leg of the tour, which included two stops in the Boston area. The Chamber Singers, an elite group of 18 students and two recent graduates, not only demonstrated their vocal abilities, but then fielded questions from interested students about campus life.  Paul McCurdy, New Canaan resident and former president of Lafayette College Alumni Association, said the alumni and community support for the event was incredible. “I think the audience was delighted to learn that our gifted students are studying and majoring in engineering, the sciences, languages in addition to the fine arts,” he said. “That reality is a testament to how successful Lafayette is as a liberal arts college with big time resources and a commitment to helping our students pursue their passions and goals inside and outside the classroom.”

Lafayette Student Composers create music for New York choreographer Ben Munisteri.

As she sat alone in the darkened theater, Kara Enz ’13 watched as a group of professional dancers rehearsed for that night’s performance at the Williams Center for the Arts. She knew the routine by heart from studying a video of it countless times on her computer.  She knew members of the Ben Munisteri Dance Projects would perform one-legged twirls, vigorous arm spins, and exit stage left one-by-one after 5 minutes and 21 seconds.

Enz was one of three Lafayette students selected to compose music for Catalog, a three-part dance created by Ben Munisteri, a respected New York City choreographer. A psychology major, Enz (Milford, N.J.) worked on the composition over the summer on her home piano conferring with Kirk O’Riordan, assistant professor of music and director of bands, in person and by email.

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Lafayette Sophomore presents original research at National Conference

Tracy McFarlan ’13 presented a paper entitled Identity Crisis: Music, Art and Literature from 1900 to 1914 at the College Music Society National Conference in Minneapolis, MN. The three-day meeting of performers, composers, musicologists and music educators presents research on a wide range of topics from all musical disciplines. Most speakers are of the graduate student or faculty level: it is very rare that a second-year undergraduate (who submitted as a first-year student) is invited to read a paper. Her paper was derived from her final project in her First-Year Seminar, taught by Assistant Professor of Music Kirk O’Riordan.