NEC Symphonic Winds + William Drury: Toensing, Davies, Price, Krommer

Artist(s)

Sara Zerilli is a first year master’s student at New England Conservatory in the studio of MaryAnn McCormick. She received an Encouragement Award in the 2024 Metropolitan Opera’s Laffont District Competition. Sara completed her Bachelor of Music degree at Manhattan School of Music, studying with Mignon Dunn and Shirley Close. Performance highlights include Viardot’s Cendrillon (Armelinde) with MSM, Suor Angelica (La Principessa) with Operallora, L’incoronazione di Poppea (Fortuna) with MSM, L’incoronazione di Poppea (Ottavia) with Saluzzo Opera Academy. Sara is looking forward to her upcoming roles in NEC’s Later the Same Evening as Estelle in November, and Così fan tutte as Dorabella in February.

Bagpiper William Donaldson was born in Ellon in the north east of Scotland in 1944. He was raised in Fraserburgh. His father’s family came from the Angus and Deeside glens and the Mearns. But it was among his mother’s folk from the fishing villages of Inverallochy and Pennan that from infancy he was immersed in traditional music.

He began learning the pipes at the age of 12 when “Mr Drummond”, an ex City of Dundee Police Piper came to the area. On moving to Aberdeen University he joined their Officer Training Corps pipe band, becoming pipe sergeant and then Pipe Major. His first composition to have a public airing was the retreat air Union Glen on the 1960’s BBC radio programme Chanter. The band gave a focus for experiment in the light music repertoire, which one band member who went on to great fame in the piping world summed up nearly thirty years later as having “broadened my musical horizons and had a great effect on my musical attitudes”. From 1969 to 1977 he studied piobaireachd with Robert Bell Nicol, who agreed to teach him tunes outside the competition repertoire. A stay in Glasgow in 1974 also enabled him to study with Donald MacPherson.

Willie Donaldson’s Ph.D. on Jacobite song pioneered a new area of scholarship, a study of the nature of transmission in the traditional performing arts beginning with the broadside songslips from the 17th and 18th centuries. This approach was developed further in various published studies of the song, instrumental music and language of the Scottish people. Donaldson’s knowledge of the historic repertoire is reflected in some of the little known older tunes and settings included in his light music collection, published by Ceol Sean at www.ceolsean.net, the first new collection of bagpipe music committed exclusively to the medium of CD-ROM, with the title From Broadside to Broadband.

Dr. Donaldson’s first book is a comprehensive and brilliantly researched look at the history of pipe music, composers and compilers. His two books The Highland Pipe and Scottish Society: 1750-1950 (2001) and Pipers (2005) are masterly works of research and prose that have broadened the scope of piping literature immensely and occasioned no small amount of controversy.

Dr. Donaldson’s work has been recognised by a number of awards including an individual Leverhulme Research Fellowship, the Thomas Blackwell Memorial prize, a Scottish Arts Council prize and a Wingate Fellowship. Willie Donaldson has been a librarian, an archivist and a teacher. He currently teaches in the English Department at M.I.T., in Cambridge Mass., where he spends most of his time with his wife, Dr. Ruth Perry.

Captain Brian O. Walden ’02 MM, U.S. Navy (Ret.) has served as Interim Director of Bands at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA where he currently teaches the trumpet studio and music education. He has served as Associate Professor, Director of Bands & Instrumental Studies/Director of Music Education at Samford University in Birmingham, AL and as Director of Bands/Director of Music Education at Marshall University in Huntington, WV where he was also the Coordinator of the Graduate Conducting Program. Brian is currently the Conductor of the Virginia Wind Symphony and the Bay Youth Orchestras of Virginia Wind Symphony. He is also performing as Principal Trumpet with the Virginia Wind Symphony and featured as a member of the Old Dominion University Faculty Brass Quintet. He received a BA in Music/Religious Studies (Double Major) from Saint Leo University, FL and a MM in Wind Ensemble Conducting from the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, MA. Subsequent DMA studies were achieved at Boston University and PhD studies at George Mason University, VA. Captain Walden is an elected member of the American Bandmasters Association, the highest honor for Bandmasters in North America and has received the Legion of Merit from President Barack Obama and is also a recipient of the National Medal of Arts.