News: June 2000

Adolphus Hailstork

Southeastern Composers Symposium Taking Place in Virginia

Adolphus Hailstork, of Norfolk State University, and Judith Shatin, of the University of Virginia, are the featured speakers at a composers forum, sponsored by Old Dominion University Libraries, to be held in the Diehn Composers Room on the Old Dominion University campus in Norfolk, Virginia, June 24, 2000. The Southeast Composers Symposium is a gathering of composers for an open discussion and exchange of practical information. The all-day Symposium is geared primarily to the interests of composers. It will conclude with a concert of winning compositions from a Southeastern Composers Competition for which Hailstork and Shatin were the judges. Both symposium and concert are free and open to the public.

Over sixty chamber music compositions were submitted by forty different composers representing Virginia, Maryland, the District of Columbia, West Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. Instrumentation varies from solo flute to full chorus, and includes a wide range of styles and interests, as well as a wide range of individuals from independent musicians to university faculty to student composers. Winners of the competition will not be officially announced until the day of the concert.

Judith Shatin

Dr. Hailstork, Composer-in-Residence at Norfolk State University, is well-known in the Tidewater area and was recently featured in a concert and exhibition produced by the Diehn Composers Room in February. He received his doctorate in composition from Michigan State University, where he was a student of H. Owen Reed. He had previously studied at Manhattan School of Music under Vittorio Giannini and David Diamond, at the American Institute of Fontainebleau with Nadia Boulanger, and at Howard University with Mark Fax.

Dr. Shatin is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Music at the University of Virginia, where she has taught since 1979. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University, a Masters of Music from The Juilliard School, and her B.A. from Douglass College where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa, with honors. She is the recipient of numerous awards and commissions and is known both nationally and internationally.

This is the first composers forum sponsored by Old Dominion University's Diehn Composers Room. The event is part of a series of events funded by the Norfolk Foundation and organized to highlight the contemporary music collections of the F. Ludwig Diehn Composers Room.