Grammy and Emmy-nominated conductor, educator, and choral specialist Judith Clurman will hold a master class with Princeton students followed by an interview on Tuesday, April 14 at 1:30 p.m., which is free and open to the public to observe. The event is one in a series of guest artist visits to Professor of Theater Stacy Wolf’s spring course, “Isn’t It Romantic?
Photo by Frank Wang
The Broadway Musical from Rodgers and Hammerstein to Sondheim.” The event will be held in Room 219 at 185 Nassau Street.
Judith Clurman has worked in a diverse range of musical genres from Milton Babbit to Sesame Street. She has commissioned and premiered works by over fifty American composers including Babbit, Marvin Hamlisch, Nico Muhly, Stephen Paulus, Christopher Rouse, and Howard Shore. While Clurman’s work has taken her to many prestigious performance spaces, perhaps her most familiar residence was on television’s Sesame Street. Her collaboration with the Muppets as associate music director earned a 2009 Emmy nomination for Outstanding Achievement in Music Direction and Composition. Her work on a recording with Son Sonora Voices earned her multiple Latin Grammy nominations. She conducted “The Music In My Mind” for Hamlisch’s children’s book.
Her educational work has included programs at The Julliard School, Harvard University, Cambridge University, Columbia University, Curtis Institute of Music, the Zimriya at Hebrew University (Israel), and the Janacek Academy of Music and Performing Arts (Czech Republic).
Currently, she conducts Essential Voices USA, which is in residence with the New York Pops at Carnegie Hall and performs programs at the DiMenna Space for Classical Music. She has recorded for New World, Sono Luminos, and Delos, and has been published by and edited works for G. Schirmer, Hal Leonard, Schott, Subito, and Boosey & Hawkes. She is a member of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers’ Special Classification Committee and the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Previous guests to Wolf’s class throughout the semester included Grammy Award-winning Broadway composer Paul Bogaev, arts administrator and producer Howard Sherman, and theatrical producer and president of Disney Theatrical Group Thomas Schumacher. Wolf is a professor of theater and director of the Princeton Arts Fellows in the Lewis Center where she teaches courses in American musical theatre history, dramaturgy and dramatic literature, histories of U.S. performance, performance theory, and performance studies.
Wolf is the author of Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical; A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical; and the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical. She has published articles on theatre spectatorship, performance pedagogy, and musical theatre in many journals, including Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, and Camera Obscura. She was the editor of Theatre Topics: A Journal of Pedagogy and Praxis from 2001 to 2003. She also directs the Lewis Center’s Music Theater Lab and has experience as a theater director and dramaturg.
