Culture

Students give vinyl records a spin at KSPC

April 23, 2012  by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off on Students give vinyl records a spin at KSPC

Digital rules these days in commercial radio, but the turntables are still turning at KSPC (88.7 FM). Last Friday, the campus radio station held a “Vinyl 101” workshop to “encourage students who didn’t grow up with records to get to know” the medium, says station director Erica Tyron. “There are a lot of things that we have that were never re-issued digitally.”

While visitors hung out and played old records from the station’s still-extensive collection, Tyron noted that some students find working with LPs a tad intimidating because of the direct contact with the surface of the record:  “People just get nervous that you’re going to break something.”

Not so for jazz deejay Nathan Schauer ’12, who likes records, in part, because they make it easy to play a particular part of a song. When Schauer was growing up, his dad sometimes played LPs, but “I never really knew how vinyl worked until I started here.” He is one of the roughly 30 percent of KSPC deejays who still make use of the vinyl collection. And with the medium’s recent comeback, the station is even seeing more new releases arrive in LP form these days.

Still, for student deejays the thrill is often found in thumbing through the well-worn album sleeves of yore. “It’s a lot of fun to just find something,” says Ella Schwalb ’14, who has an underground music show. “You don’t really know what to expect.”

 

Sharon Paul ’78 will take the baton as Pomona hosts choral festival for first time

February 18, 2012  by Brenda Bolinger Comments Off on Sharon Paul ’78 will take the baton as Pomona hosts choral festival for first time

Sharon Paul ’78 may never have launched her career in choral conducting if the late William F. Russell, Pomona’s music director from 1951-82, hadn’t been tardy to choir practice. Paul serendipitously took the baton in his stead, unaware of her professor’s arrival.

“I think he watched from the back and thought, ‘Oh! That’s what Sharon should do with her life,’” Paul says. “He saw my abilities, felt I had strengths and nurtured them. I don’t think I would have found conducting if I went to any other school.”

Since then, Paul has carved out an illustrious career in choral conducting and, this month, will return to the Pomona campus as clinician of the 2012 Pacific Southwest Intercollegiate Choral Association (PSICA) Festival, set for Feb. 25. Pomona, a founding member of the association in 1922, is hosting the festival for the first time in the College’s recorded history. Per tradition, the host school’s choral director selects the festival’s clinician.

Donna Di Grazia, Pomona’s choral director and music professor, knew exactly who she wanted. Di Grazia, who is coordinating the festival, points not only to Paul’s talent as a musician and choral conductor, but also to the fact that her “professional work serves as a terrific example of how a liberal arts education can set a foundation that can lead to a significant career in the performing arts.”

Paul, who entered Pomona at age 16, is equally pleased. “I’m so excited, I feel silly. I’m so happy to be coming back,” says Paul, who lives in Oregon with her husband of 16 years and their seventh-grade son. “I’m feeling very nostalgic about my time at Pomona, and the further I get in my career, the more I realize how seminal that time was. I can’t wait to walk the campus, be in the music building, just remember.”

Paul has directed choirs around the globe—Berlin, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Russia, Singapore and elsewhere. Holding an M.F.A from UCLA and a D.M.A. in choral conducting from Stanford University, Paul currently serves as professor of music, chair of vocal and choral studies and director of choral activities at the University of Oregon. For eight years prior, she was the artistic director of the San Francisco Girls Chorus (SFGC) and conductor of the organization’s acclaimed ensembles, Chorissima and Virtuose. Paul joined the SFGC following what she called a “quirky career move,” having left a tenured professor position at Chico State to do so.

As clinician of the 2012 festival, which will bring together about a dozen Southern California collegiate choirs to perform for each other, Paul will provide expert critiques of each choir’s performance, lead a two-hour master class comprised of eight singers from each ensemble and conduct these top vocalists in a performance. She also will coach student conductors during the master class. Visiting performers will find in Paul an engaging conductor and teacher, enduringly influenced by her former instructor, Leonard Pronko, a Pomona professor since 1957. “He was the most engaging educator I’d ever seen, and that stuck with me,” Paul says.

Still Backing Up the Bard

October 7, 2011  by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off on Still Backing Up the Bard

English Professor Emeritus Martha Andresen, a seven-time winner of Pomona’s Wig Award for excellence in teaching, has been keeping quite busy since her “retirement” in 2006. Pomona Web Editor Laura Tiffany reports the Shakespeare scholar has been lecturing and working on a book, Caught in the Act: A Passion for Shakespeare, among other pursuits.  On Oct. 4, the Shakespeare Center of L.A. honored Andresen with a special Crystal Quill Award “for her stellar international reputation for Shakespeare scholarship, publications and teaching.”

Also receiving Crystal Quills were attorney Bert Fields,  author of Players: The Mysterious Identity of William Shakespeare, and film director Roland Emmerich, who also has waded into the who-wrote-Shakespeare? debate with his new film Anonymous. “Both Emmerich and Fields suggest that someone other than the celebrated man from Stratford might have written Shakespeare’s plays,” notes LAStageTimes.com.

But Andresen is having none of that, telling Tiffany: “Not the Earl of Oxford, not Frances Bacon, Lord Stanley, or Queen Elizabeth, but William Shakespeare, playwright and actor, wrote William Shakespeare’s plays!”

Shakespeare Center founding Artistic Director Ben Donenberg told LAStageTimes.com that Andresen’s “position that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare also added a nice dimension to the awardees, but the primary reason is her contribution to the legacy of Shakespeare enthusiasts that she cultivated in many walks of life.”