Alumni Network Event
On Saturday November 7 from 2 to 3:30 PM, students in MUSC 299-Music, Performance and Community participated in a workshop with ten Holy Cross music alumni as they shared their experiences and life journeys while pursuing careers in academia, performance, composition, science and business.
Janet Galligani Casey, professor of English at Skidmore College, has received the 2011 Gita Chaudhuri Prize from the Western Association of Women Historians for her book, A New Heartland: Women, Modernity, and the Agrarian Ideal in America (2009, Oxford University Press). The awards committee called it a "most innovative and transformative work on rural women." The Gita Chaudhuri Prize annually recognizes the best monograph about the history of women in rural environments, from any era and any place in the world, published by a WAWH member. In announcing the award, the WAWH noted, "This book recasts rural women and the gendered image of farming during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Using a multitude of sources, Casey eloquently argues that male urban spaces defined modernity during the early twentieth century, relegating writers like Willa Cather to a second-tier, women's rural place. This book transforms the way we look at rural life and its position in society." Since, she has written and edited numerous books and articles, such as Teaching Tainted Lit: Popular American Fiction in Today's Classroom, (2015, Iowa University Press).
Casey is Associate Dean of the Faculty for Diversity and Faculty Affairs and Professor of English at Skidmore, where she teaches and researches Modern American Literature and Culture, Ideologies of Class and Gender, History and Theory of Leftist Literature, and Middlebrow Modernisms.
https://www.skidmore.edu/english/faculty/casey.php
email: jcasey@skidmore.edu
Stage director, choreographer, and bass-baritone Paul Houghtaling has worked extensively on the world’s leading stages, including productions at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, Central City Opera, The Bard Music Festival, The Santa Fe Opera, and The Center for Contemporary Opera in New York.
Paul serves as the Director of Opera Theatre at the University of Alabama, and he is the Artistic Director of the Druid City Opera Workshop. His work with the UA Opera Theatre has won prizes at the National Opera Association’s Opera Production Competition (Amir Zaheri’s Freedom and Fire!, world premiere, Fall 2016; Jeremy Gill’s Letters from Quebec to Providence in the Rain, Fall 2017) and Collegiate Opera Scenes Competition, and that group’s outreach work in conjunction with National Opera Week has caught the attention of Opera America. As of January 2020, he is the Immediate Past President of the National Opera Association (NOA).
Recent seasons at Alabama have included productions of Die Fledermaus, Don Giovanni, The Consul, The Merry Widow, Pagliacci, Suor Angelica, The Gondoliers, Patience, Così fan tutte, and The Mikado, A Little Night Music, and Street Scene which was supported by a major grant from the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music.
Houghtaling holds a BA from The College of the Holy Cross, a BM from The New England Conservatory of Music, an MA from Hunter College of CUNY, and a DMA from The City University of New York.
http://paulhoughtaling.com | http://paulhoughtalingdirector.com
email: phoughtaling@ua.edu
Anoosua Mukherjee is a Co-Chair and Assistant Professor of Music at Washington & Jefferson College. She received her Ph.D. in Historical Musicology from New York University and a B.A. in Music and German from the College of the Holy Cross. Her research focuses on twentieth-century American music and cross-disciplinary projects connecting art history to music. Mukherjee teaches courses in Musicology and Ethnomusicology that survey both classical music repertory and global music traditions. She also teaches topical courses of her own design addressing the social politics of music. Mukherjee is a classically trained violinist and performs regularly in the classroom and for the W&J College community.
https://www.washjeff.edu/person/anoosua-mukherjee-ph-d/
email: amukherjee@washjeff.edu
Soprano Rochelle Bard has been described as an ‘exquisite singing actress, brilliant and heart-breaking.’ With a specialty in bel canto and Verdi repertoire, recent performances include the title roles in Norma, Aida, Abigaille in Nabucco, Maria Stuarda, Elisabetta in Roberto Devereux, Violetta in La Traviata, Leonora in Il Trovatore, Lady Macbeth in Macbeth, and Lucia di Lammermoor, at such companies as Sarasota Opera, Boston Lyric Opera, Knoxville Opera, Utah Festival Opera, Opera Company of Middlebury, Opera Tampa, and Sacramento Opera. In 2019, she had her company debut in the title role of Tosca with Hawaii Opera Theater, her role debut of Rosalinda in Die Fledermaus with Opera Tampa, performed the title role of Aida at the Egyptian Embassy in Washington, D.C., and was the soloist in Carmina Burana at Carnegie Hall with Alvin Ailey dancers. Looking ahead to 2020/21, the role of Odabella in Verdi’s Attila is scheduled with Sarasota Opera, as well as concerts with Maryland Opera. Additional roles include Magda in La Rondine, The Merry Widow, and the four heroines in The Tales of Hoffmann. Critics wrote of her Abigaille in Nabucco: ‘The star of the night was the Abigaille of Rochelle Bard. Her arias were simply sensational. She has a very rare talent combined with instinct that will place her in the pantheon of the very greatest of the great...what a dazzling display of vocal fireworks!’ On the concert stage, she has been a soloist on the stages of Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, and Tanglewood, with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Boston Symphony Orchestra, National Chorale, MidAtlantic Symphony, and Opera Orchestra of New York. Ms. Bard earned a Master’s degree from the New England Conservatory and was recently awarded an honorary Doctorate of Music from her alma mater, the College of the Holy Cross. A pianist before finding her classical voice, she is also an accompanist and Choir Director.
As Director of People and Community at Cue Ball, Kercofa Francois leads and manages Cue Ball’s relationship ecosystem as well as the firm’s talent recruiting and development efforts. She also serves as the program and content director for On Cue, Cue Ball’s annual gathering and community platform initiative. In her role, Kercofa looks for interconnections between our portfolio companies and our external relationships that can contribute value to our founders.
Prior to Cue Ball, Kercofa worked as a program coordinator for Neighborhood Health Plan of RI. An avid and gifted musician, she serves as the piano and organ accompanist for her church. She is also an active volunteer for Patriote de la Zone, a non-profit organization providing free education to children in Jacmel, Haiti.
Kercofa is currently an MBA Candidate, Class of 2022 at The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.
https://cueball.com/people-old/kercofa-francois/
email: Kfranc12@g.holycross.edu
Ray Lustig is a genre-fluid composer-performer creating for live stage, recording, and live internet performance. The central ethos of his work is connection—from the collaborative connections that energize and invigorate creative work to themes of connection in his work.
In response to the 2020 covid pandemic, he created CLOUDS IN SINGLE FILE, a work for live ensemble made up of individual musicians playing from their own quarantine places. He also engaged with artists in Italy, India, and Palestine on a live improvisational project United Sounds in the Dark that was presented by the Milan-based Palazzo Marino in Musica festival.
Lustig’s teachers have included John Corigliano, Robert Beaser, Samuel Adler, Sebastian Currier, Jonathan Kramer, Derek Bermel, Philip Lasser, Pia Gilbert, Conrad Cummings, and Shirish Korde.
Born in Tokyo and raised in Queens, New York, Lustig received his B.A. from Holy Cross College, where he pursued interests in music and the sciences. He studied cell division, the cell skeleton, and cell polarity at Columbia University and Massachusetts General Hospital before beginning his graduate studies in composition at Juilliard, where he completed his MM and DMA degrees. He currently lives in Washington Heights, New York, and teaches Advanced Composition and Composition Lab at the Juilliard Evening Division.
Ron Passaro is a composer based in New York City.
He has had a very diverse and rewarding composing career, which includes writing 3 full length musicals, orchestrating songs for My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, writing a brass fanfare for the West Point Band, writing music for numerous commercials, the score to a Children’s Defense Fund tribute to Hillary Clinton, as well as scoring numerous films, licensing his music over 6,000 times and writing cues for dozens of popular TV shows.
Ron studied music and orchestration with Shirish Korde and Osvaldo Golijov at the College of the Holy Cross where he was awarded the Beethoven Prize for best original composition. He continued on to get his MFA at the Tisch Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program at NYU and studied small ensemble composition with Conrad Cummings at The Juilliard School. Ron also attended Hollywood orchestrator Scott Smalley’s Advanced Orchestration Course: “The Art and Craft of Orchestration for Film & TV.”
Ron Passaro is a proud member of ASCAP, the SCL, the Game Audio Network Guild (G.A.N.G.) and sits on the board of the New York Chapter of the Ravel Study Group.
Ethnomusicologist and performer Bethany Collier is Associate Professor of Music at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA, where she teaches courses on music and culture, critical reading and writing, and directs the Bucknell University Gamelan. She earned her Ph.D. in Musicology at Cornell University in 2007, and is recipient of Fulbright-Hays and FLAS fellowships. Bethany’s scholarly research focuses on the relationship between performance and identity in contemporary Indonesia, especially in Bali, with several ongoing projects related to vocal music, youth ensembles, intimacy, gender and the body, and representations of Chinese-ness.
Bethany began her studies of Balinese music and culture as an undergraduate student at the College of the Holy Cross, where she was a Brooks Scholar (flute) and Fenwick Scholar (Class of 2000). She has since studied, collaborated, directed, and performed with many gamelan ensembles and artists in the United States and Indonesia. Bethany is founder of New Atlantic Chamber Gamelan, a collective of female artists committed to performing innovative new works and creative reimaginings of traditional music in flexible configurations.
https://www.bucknell.edu/fac-staff/bethany-collier
email: bethany.collier@bucknell.edu
Meaghan McGeary graduated from Holy Cross in 2016 with a BA in Music and Biology. While at Holy Cross, she was a member of the College Honors program and several musical ensembles, served as ACT music director and as an admissions interviewer. After graduation, Meaghan matriculated in the Yale Biological & Biomedical Sciences program, where she is a 5th year PhD candidate. Her research focuses on factors in tumor cells that impact the immune response to cancer. At Yale, she is also chair of the Graduate Student Assembly, a volunteer musician at Yale-New Haven Hospital, and an avid enjoyer of the many Yale musical groups.
email: mkmcge16@g.holycross.edu
Ryan Malone leads an eclectic musical career with interests in composition, Renaissance and chamber music, as well as early American music. He received an A.M. and Ph.D. in composition from Duke University where he was a Mary Duke-Biddle Fellow and studied with Stephen Jaffe, Scott Lindroth and Sydney Hodkinson. He previously earned a B.A. from the College of the Holy Cross, where he held the distinction of Liturgical Music and Organ Scholar, and studied composition with Shirish Korde and Osvaldo Golijov.
In addition to serving as primary organist at the Church of the Sacred Heart in northern New Jersey, Ryan founded and directed Sacred Heart Schola, an all-professional choral ensemble that performed a complete choral Mass setting as well as the Gregorian Proper at the church's weekly High Mass. Under his direction, the schola recorded its first CD entitled The Renaissance Mass, Vol. 1, which features settings by Byrd, Victoria, Lasso, Hassler, and others. Ryan also managed and served as artistic director of the biweekly Sunday Vespers Series, a privately funded series devoted to the preservation of the chanted office.
Ryan is currently Assistant Professor of Music at Bucknell University where he teaches courses in Music History, Theory, and Organ. He lives in Lewisburg with his wife, Bethany, and their son, Bastien.
