The Department of Music will present a special concert December 8, 2011, featuring the world premiere of Jack Stamp's “Canticle: Voces Candentes,” which he wrote in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The concert, free and open to the community, will be held at 8:00 p.m. in the Performing Arts Center's Fisher Auditorium.
The composition's performance will include the talents of the IUP Symphony Orchestra, Wind Ensemble, and members of the Chorale and Chorus. Michael Hood, dean of the College of Fine Arts, will be the narrator for the Stamp piece.
“Voces Candentes,” which means falling voices, represents the feelings of the tragedy of September 11, including the horror as well as the love, Stamp said.
The librettist for the work is Anna George Meek. Her work has been published in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Yale Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Massachusetts Review, Seneca Review, Missouri Review (which awarded her the Tom McAfee Discovery Prize), Water-Stone, Crazyhorse, and other publications.
She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poetry prize, a Minnesota State Arts Board fellowship, the Minnesota Book Award, and the Yale Series of Younger Poets. She has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She lives in Minneapolis, where she works as a freelance violinist and singer and is a professor of English at Normandale College in Minnesota.
The concert will open with the IUP Symphony Orchestra performing works by Franz Joseph Haydn and Igor Stravinsky, conducted by Stanley Chepaitis.
Stamp, who holds the lifelong title of University Professor at IUP, is the chair of the Music Department. He is active as a guest conductor, clinician, adjudicator, and composer throughout North America and Great Britain. His compositions have been commissioned and performed by leading military and university bands across the United States.
He is also a contributing author to the “Teaching Music Through Performance in Band” series released by GIA Publications. He is founder and conductor of the IUP Keystone Winds, a faculty-alumni ensemble dedicated to the performance of American band music.
In addition to his University Professor honor, he is a recipient of the IUP Distinguished Alumni Award and the Distinguished Faculty Award for Creative Arts. In 1999, he received the “Citation of Excellence” from the Pennsylvania Music Educators Association. In 2000, he was inducted into the prestigious American Bandmasters Association. In 1996, he received the Orpheus Award from the Zeta Tau Chapter of Phi Mu Alpha for service to music.