Alumni Gazette: Grammys

Jazz composer and ensemble leader Maria Schneider ’85E (MM) (Photographs: Briene Lermitte)

Three Eastman School of Music alumni were winners at the 63rd Grammy Awards this spring. In addition, a Grammy was awarded to a composition by the late Christopher Rouse, a Pulitzer Prize–winning composer who taught at Eastman for two decades.

Maria Schneider ’85E (MM), jazz composer and leader of the Maria Schneider Orchestra, won two awards: Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album for the double album Data Lords and Best Instrumental Composition for “Sputnik,” a track on the album.

Soprano Sarah Brailey ’04E (Photograph: Miranda Loud)

Classical composer Christopher Theofanidis ’92E (MM) (Photographs: Matthew Fried)

A previous winner of the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master Award—the highest American honor in jazz—and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Schneider has also become a prominent critic and activist working against an internet economy based on the sale of consumer data and dominant streaming services that limit the capacity of artists to make a living from of their work. (Schneider sells her music through the crowd-funding platform ArtistShare). Data Lords is a musical critique of the digital economy and its major players.

Sarah Brailey ’04E was a featured soloist on the Best Classical Solo Vocal Album, The Prisoner by Ethel Smyth. Smyth (1858–1944), a British composer and suffragist, wrote the choral symphony, a dialogue between a prisoner and his soul, in 1930, based on text by philosopher Henry Bennett Brewster. The Experiential Orchestra and Chorus’s 2020 recording, with bass-baritone Dashon Burton as a prisoner and soprano Brailey as his soul, was the symphony’s first.

The Best Classical Instrumental Solo award went to Richard O’Neill and the Albany Symphony’s performance of Concerto for Viola and Chamber Orchestra by Christopher Theofanidis ’92E (MM). Theofanidis is a professor in the practice of composition and coordinator of composition studies at Yale School of Music. His compositions have been performed by leading orchestras from around the world, including the London Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Moscow Soloists.

Composer Christopher Rouse, who taught at Eastman from 1981 to 2002, was honored posthumously with the Best Contemporary Classical Composition for Symphony No. 5. Rouse, who died in 2019, wrote the piece as an homage to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the first classical piece he ever heard and which inspired him to become a composer. The Nashville Symphony Orchestra performed the premiere—and only—recording of the symphony in 2020.