Blogs
BILL DORLAND, UMD Professor of Physics, Honors College Director
I grew up in rural Arkansas trailer parks. Our house had wheels and we used them! By the time I was eight, we had lived in 16 different towns and probably because of this nomadic lifestyle, I had no connection to the performing arts.
I had never seen modern dance or heard music… Chills ran up and down my spine!
KENNETH ELPUS, Assistant Professor of Music Education, UMD School of Music
I was directing a choir of high school students in rehearsal of a contemporary piece called A Boy and A Girl by Eric Whitacre, which is an English translation of a poem by Octavio Paz.
…working with young voices, college age and even younger, is such a magical experience.
SHARON MANSUR, Dance Artist, UMD Assistant Professor, School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies
This is the moment when I knew I wanted to dance for the rest of my life: My high school boyfriend’s mother, Susan Dowling, was the executive producer for dance programming at public television station WGBH in Boston.
I wanted to … needed to … HAD to experience that intimate and compelling mingling of art and life.
SHERI PARKS, UMD Professor of American Studies
At first, I was not even looking. I was just a little kid at her teenaged sister’s school performance, playing with some toy in my lap, when I felt the air go still. It was 1968, the end of segregated education in Asheville, North Carolina. My sister’s class would soon move from their all-black school to the much bigger, all-city white school, leaving behind a safe and caring community to go to a place that did not want them.
DAVID DICKEY, BM in Oboe Performance, BA in Vocal Performance, UMD School of Music
It was the summer of my senior year of high school. I was at the Eastern Music Festival, playing the second oboe part in Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony, which I had never heard done before, which is stupid because it’s such a staple, such an amazing work. So the first time I was hearing the piece was as I was playing it.
The host of WAMU 88.5’s Kojo Nnamdi Show is no stranger to provoking people to talk. As the host of our Creative Dialogue series, he encourages artists to talk about the creative process.
As the conductor of the UMD Symphony Orchestra and the Artistic Director of the National Orchestral Institute, James Ross loves feeling like he’s somewhere nobody has been before.
By Hanna Morgan
Colorful. My first experience at an opera was, well, colorful. The costumes of the eleven UMD students who performed in the Dominick Argento opera, Postcard from Morocco, represented every hue on the color wheel. The various characters were dressed in beautiful purple Victorian dresses and striped vests and carried around decorated pieces of luggage of different shapes, sizes and hues. Besides the visual color, the opera itself was colorful, or unique, in its plot. This kept me engaged throughout the opera, as I had no idea what would happen next.
By Hannah Morgan
Students, parents, musicians and music aficionados alike crowded into CSPAC to groove with two UMD student jazz combos. The show was spectacular, and featured songs written by some of the combo members themselves.