Laurence D. Wallach

Livingston Hall Chair in Music

Music

Division: Arts and Aesthetics

Year Appointed: 1973

Positions:
Since 2000, has been teaching composition at Bard as well as at Simon's Rock. Currently on the faculty of Bard's new Masters Program in Conducting.

Education:
A.B., M.A., Ph.D., Columbia University

Areas:
Music composition, Piano performance, Musicology

Awards/Grants:
Received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1977-78 to study performance practices of early piano music, particularly Mozart and Schubert, and in 1980 he participated in the Aston Magna Summer Academy on German Music and Culture. His composition, "Echoes from Barham Down," won a competition sponsored by the New School of Music in Cambridge in 1985.

Special Activities:
A composer, pianist, and musicologist, Dr. Wallach's compositions, mostly chamber music, have been performed in New York and Boston as well as in the Berkshires. He founded the baroque chamber ensemble, the Italian Connection, in which he performs on harpsichord. He is founding board member of the Berkshire Bach Society and performs with them regularly on harpsichord and organ. As a pianist he collaborates on chamber music performances with numerous area musicians. Recent compositions include: "So Much Depends Upon Distance" for solo piano; "Canzona" for mixed chamber ensemble; "Berkshire Morris Madness" for woodwind quintet; "Hexagram: Wind Over Water" for flute, harp, vibraphone and piano; and "Pastorale Quartet" for strings. His latest composition, for strings and chorus, was written to fulfill a commission from the Housatonic River Festival and the Berkshire Society for Theology and the Arts for performance in August 2004. In 1996 he performed at the Bard Music Festival devoted to Ives and and he presented a paper on Ives at Quinnipiac College in the spring of 1998. For two years, he offered a series of music appreciation lectures cosponsored by Tanglewood and the Berkshire Museum. Since 1995, he has been on the staffs of early music weeks at World Fellowship Center, New Hampshire, and Camp Pinewoods, Massachusetts, as pianist and harpsichordist. For the 2001-2002 season, Dr. Wallach served as repertoire advisor and program annotator for the American Symphony Orchestra, and taught composition courses to Bard undergraduates as well as students in the Bard MFA Program for Conductors. In the summer of 2002 he participated in the International Baroque Institute at Longy School.

Publications:
Dr. Wallach's writings have appeared in Musical Quarterly and the Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Music and he has written several entries for "The Compleat Brahms" edited by Leon Botstein.

Contact Information:
Office: Daniel Art Center