West Virginia University Professor of Music and Composer-in-Residence John Beall will celebrate his 25 th anniversary at the College of Creative Arts with a recital of his music Friday, March 5, at the Creative Arts Center.
The free concert begins at 8:15 p.m. in the Bloch Learning and Performance Hall (Room 200A). The public is cordially invited to attend.
This is the second of two 25 th anniversary concerts Dr. Beall has scheduled during 2003-2004. The principal performers will be the West Virginia Piano Quartet, and WVU music professors Laura Kobayashi, violin, Harold Levin, viola, William Skidmore, violoncello, and James Miltenberger, piano. They will perform a work written expressly for them and premiered in 2001 �€the Quartet for Piano and Strings.
Guest artists joining the West Virginia Piano Quartet for this program will be violinist/violist Stephen Beall, and pianist Carol Beall. Stephen and Carol Beall will open the program with Wondrous Love, Variations for Viola and Piano (1999), a work based on the famous Southern Harmony hymn tune.
Stephen Beall will also joint the string players of the West Virginia Piano Quartet for the Morgantown premiere of the String Quartet No. 2, a work composed in 2001-2002.
Beall came to the Division of Music as Composer-in-Residence in 1978 and has written more than one hundred major works while at WVU , many of them based on Appalachian themes, folk materials and hymns. His work has been performed by orchestras such as the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Rochester Philharmonic, the Dallas Symphony, and others, as well as professional chamber ensembles and soloists in the United States, Africa, South America and Europe.
One of his most recent works, Symphony No. 2,Spruce Knob,was premiered by the West Virginia Symphony Orchestra last July and also was on the inaugural concert of the orchestra in the new Clay Center for the Arts and Sciences in downtown Charleston. Another popular work is his two-act operaEthan Frome,that premiered at WVU as part of the centennial of the Division of Music in 1997 and was recorded for video broadcast over public television.
Beall is a graduate of Baylor University, where he was a pupil of Charles Eakin and Richard Willis, and the Eastman School of Music, where he studied with Samuel Adler. His work first attracted attention when he was a graduate student at Baylor and had two works performed by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. Following military service, he completed his doctorate at Eastman in 1973 where he won the Louis Lane Prize for hisLament for Those Lost in the War (1972)and the Howard Hanson Price for hisConcerto for Piano and Wind Orchestra (1973).He taught at Southwest Texas State University and Eastern Illinois University before coming to WVU .
During his years at WVU , he has taught 9 to 15 composition students each semester. One of his most successful students in recent years is Kevin Beavers, a native of Keyser, who recently had two of his works published by Oxford University Press.
It’s been a really great 25 years,Beall said.Every piece of music I’ve written has been performed here at WVU . My colleagues have been very generous with their time and I owe them a lot for playing my stuff. I’ve also had excellent students. I’d put my class up against anybody’s. I’m very grateful.
Beall also is currently chairman of theory and composition at Interlochen Arts Center in Michigan, one of the premier music camps in the world, where he has spent each summer for the past 12 years.
He has received the prestigious Serious Music Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) every year since 1979. The awards are granted by an independent panel and are based upon the unique prestige value of each writer’s catalog of original compositions, as well as recent performances of those works.
In 1982 he was named Composer of the Year by the West Virginia Music Teachers Association and in 1985 he was awarded a fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation to work at its Study and Conference Center at Bellagio, Italy, and at Yaddo, Saratoga, N.Y. He received a 1989-90 Benedum Distinguished Scholar Award from WVU in the category of Humanities and Performing Arts and in 1995 he was named to a Fellowship in Music Composition by the West Virginia Division of Culture and History in collaboration with the West Virginia Commission on the Arts.
He has fulfilled commissions for the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Letters, Texas Tech University, the West Virginia Music Teachers Association, Radiological Consultants Association of West Virginia, the West Virginia Symphony Orchestra, and many other institutions and private artists.
Beall has also written for his son Stephen, also a graduate of Eastman School of Music, and for his wife Carol, a pianist and a member of the Morgantown musical group The Monongahela Trio.
His current writing projects include a sonata for viola commissioned by Randolph Kelly, principal violist with the Pittsburgh Symphony. He is also working on more piano pieces to go with Vandalia Suite.
His music is published by MMB Music, Inc., Carl Fischer, and Southern Music Company. Recordings are on Crystal Records, Cambria Master Recordings, and ERMMedia.
CDs includeOn Chestnut Ridge,published in 1997 and featuring his son and wife as major musicians, andSonata for Pianothat came out in 1999, also featuring pianist Steven Smith performing most of the pieces.
A new work for orchestra titledRaven Rock,that was premiered last March by the Baylor Symphony Orchestra, is included inMasterworks of the New Era,a twelve-CD series published by ERMMedia. Formed in the late 1970s in Paris and now headquartered in the United States, ERMMedia is a publishing house dedicated to the music of the 20 th and 21 st centuries.Masterworks of the New Erais designed to introduce listeners to the new master composers and to scores that may become the masterworks of tomorrow. Through a very competitive screening process, ERMMedia selected those works to be recorded by top-notch orchestras world-wide. For more information, check the ERMMedia Web site athttp://www.numusic.org.