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Alumni: If you would like to let your classmates know what you have been doing, please send your information to our online submission form, or submit via email to fanfare@northwestern.edu. You can also send the information to Fanfare, Northwestern School of Music, 711 Elgin Rd., Evanston, IL 60208. (Note: If you are submitting digital images to go along with your news item, you must use the email address and attach those images to the email.) Your information may also be included in the next issue of Fanfare, the school's alumni magazine. We reserve the right to edit your item for either online or print publication.

| 2000s | 1990s | 1980s | 1970s |

2000s

Toby Oft (G00) has won the principal trombone position with the Boston Symphony. He was previously the principal trombone with the San Diego Symphony.

Phillip Serna (G01) has started a video podcast to support his outreach efforts through “Viols in Our Schools.” He endeavors to bring high-quality performances and instructive videos through podcasting and videocasting. For more information, visit violsinourschools.blip.tv.

Anders Härstadhaugen (G02) won the principal euphonium position in the Royal Swedish Navy Band in June 2008. Since graduating from Northwestern he has performed with professional wind bands and symphony orchestras all over Scandinavia.

Heather Aranyi (G05) was the soprano soloist for the Northwest Chicago Symphony Orchestra in December as part of a program that included Mozart's “Allelulia” from the Exultate Jubilate, “Laudamus Te” from Vivaldi's Gloria, and O Holy Night.

1990s

Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate (90) became the first American Indian composer to have a CD of his music released when Cleveland-based Thunderbird Records released a performance of Tate's Tracing Mississippi, performed by the San Francisco Symphony and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus.

Keith Clifton (G93, G98) was awarded tenure at Central Michigan University. His recent publications include reviews of Donald Mitchell's Letters from a Life: Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten, Vol. 3 and Thomas Forrest Kelly's First Nights at the Opera for The Opera Journal. He also has seven reviews in press for the same journal, as well as additional reviews for Music Library Association Notes and Fontes Artis Musicae. Recent papers presented include "Beyond Childhood: Poulenc, La courte paille, and the Aural Envelope" at the College Music Society national meeting in Salt Lake City, UT, in November; and "Ô Dieu, donne-moi délivrance: Honegger's Trois psaumes and Cultural Politics Under Vichy," for the 18th Congress of the International Musicological Society in Zürich, Switzerland in July 2007. His Poulenc paper will be published in College Music Symposium in 2009.

David Searle (96) was appointed in 2007 as Director of Orchestral Activities and Conducting Studies at the Catholic University of America's Benjamin T. Rome School of Music in Washington, DC.

Jacqueline (Black) Woolley (G96) is in her fifth year as a cello instructor at Edinboro University. She is also a cellist with the Erie (PA) Philharmonic.

Molly Alicia Barth (97) and her husband Phillip Patti are currently living in Oregon. Molly is the assistant professor of flute at the University of Oregon and a founder of the Beta Collide New Music Project. She recently received a Grammy Award for the last album she recorded with eighth blackbird, titled strange imaginary animals.

Rebecca Miller (G98) will guest conduct with the Reno Philharmonic in October as a finalist in the search for a new music director.

1980s

Colette Rice (84) See Adelaide "Addie" (Nelson) Backlund.

Franks Ferko’s (G85) new collection, Merton Songs: Five Songs on Poems of Thomas Merton, received their world premiere on April 15, 2008, by baritone Nathan Gunn, accompanied by pianist Julie Gunn, in New York's Carnegie Hall.  The songs were written especially for the Gunns, who presented them at a multi-media concert incorporating special lighting design, video, and a solo dancer.  The sold-out concert also included Ferko's 1981 setting of Merton's For My Brother:  Reported Missing in Action, 1943. The Chicago-based chorus Bella Voce presented a series of concerts to celebrate its 25th anniversary, and the programs included four of Frank Ferko's Hildegard Motets.  The set had been commissioned by Bella Voce (under its former name of His Majestie's Clerkes) to commemorate the ensemble's tenth anniversary in 1993.  Two recently released choral music recordings include works by Ferko: his setting of O salutaris hostia for unaccompanied women's voices is featured on a Pro Organo CD Across The Bar, performed by the St. Mary's College Women's Choir; and the British choir Commotio released a CD titled Night (Herald) which includes Ferko's Lord, Let At Last Thine Angels Come for mixed chorus and violoncello, and also the unaccompanied Motet for Passion Sunday.

Augusta Read Thomas (87) had another busy year. Her piece e.e. cummings Settings, commissioned by the Houston Symphony, will premiere in January 2009. Her Violin Concerto No. 3, co-commissioned by Festival Présences with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the BBC Proms, and Mr. and Mrs. Bill Brown, will premiere in Paris. The ASCAP Foundation has commissioned a work for cello and piano entitled Cantos for Slava, In Memoriam Mstislav Rostropovich, which was premiered and recorded this summer. New compositions for the San Francisco Girl’s Chorus, the Angel Fire Ensemble in New Mexico, the Voices of Change in Dallas, and the Juilliard School will premiere in the future.

Stephanie Vial’s (87) book The Art of Musical Phrasing in the Eighteenth Century: Punctuating the Classical "Period" was published by the University off Rochester Press. Vial performs and records widely as a cellist and has taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University. The new book offers practical suggestions, and documentary evidence, for performers wishing to understand the gestures and nuances embedded in eighteenth-century musical notation.

Janette Fishell-Andrews (G88) has been appointed to a professorship at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music in fall 2008. She is currently a distinguished professor of music at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC.

1970s

Adelaide “Addie” (Nelson) Backlund (77) has been chosen by New Jersey-based non-profit Partnership in Philanthropy to be the development consultant for the Actors’ Shakespeare Company at New Jersey City University. Coincidentally, the opera company is run by School of Music alum Colette Rice (84).

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Submit Your Alumni News

You can now submit your alumni news through the form below. If you would prefer, news can also be submitted via email to fanfare@northwestern.edu or by postal mail to Fanfare, Northwestern School of Music, 711 Elgin Rd., Evanston, IL 60208. (Note: If you are submitting digital images to go along with your news item, you must use the email address and attach those images to the email.) Your information may also be included in the next issue of Fanfare, the school's alumni magazine. We reserve the right to edit your item for either online or print publication.

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