NIU Today

Fareed Haque, professor of guitar in the NIU School of Music, will perform a faculty recital at 7 p.m. Friday, Nov. 9 at The House Café, 263 E. Lincoln Hwy. in DeKalb. Haque will perform with his new band, MathGames! A world-renowned guitar virtuoso, Haque recently returned from interstellar pan-dimensional time travel to bring “jazztronica”...

This summer saw several changes to the piano inventory at the NIU School of Music. One of the finest changes arrived in the form of a Hamburg Steinway Model C, which became available in Chicago in July. The piano faculty went to try it and quickly fell in love with the instrument. Carla W. Montgomery,...

Led by Mathew Tembo, the NIU Afropop Ensemble will present a concert at 6:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 9, in the Recital Hall of the Music Building. Currently a graduate student at NIU, Tembo is a well-known Afropop musician from Zambia, Central Africa. He takes music straight from the villages of Zambia, creating his own genre of...

The NIU School of Music’s New Music Ensemble, under the direction of Gregory Beyer, has announced its third annual New Music Festival. Scheduled Tuesday, Nov. 6, and Wednesday, Nov. 7, this year’s celebration will spotlight music of would-be centenarian composer, John Cage (1912-1992), perhaps America’s most widely recognized avant-garde composer and thinker of the 20th...

NIU’s choral program will hold its annual fall concert at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 16, in Boutell Memorial Concert Hall of the Music Building. The concert will feature the NIU Chamber Choir, Concert Choir and University Chorus, all under the direction of Eric Johnson, director of choral activities in the NIU School of Music. On...

NIU’s School of Music will host a concert featuring guest artists Anthony Stoops (double bass), Ching-chu Hu (piano and composer) and School of Music faculty member David Maki (piano and composer) The concert will take place at 8 p.m. Friday, Oct. 19, in the Recital Hall of the Music Building. The program will include new...

Editor’s note: At the time of publication, this composition was titled “Five Pools.” Since then, composer Greg Beyer has changed the title to “Five Ponds.” It is not every day that a percussionist gets the opportunity to practice his art on 200-year-old bronze drums that normally would  be found in a mountain village or on...

Cheng-Hou Lee, cellist with NIU’s Avalon Quartet, waited inside the Recital Hall of the Music Building. Meanwhile, his eventual audience listened to speeches in an auditorium some 825 miles away. Among those speakers at the 2012 Internet2 Fall Member Meeting in Philadelphia was Dan Nichols, Lee’s colleague in the NIU School of Music and the...

NIU’s Jack Olson Gallery is hosting “The Arts Converge: Contemporary Art and Asian Musical Traditions,” a special exhibition that celebrates the creativity of contemporary artists who are working with traditional Asian music, sounds or cultural soundscapes. “The Arts Converge” offers an arena where visual arts media, musical creativity and theatrical performance can merge, the past...

This summer has seen several changes to the piano inventory at the NIU School of Music. Piano faculty have added Grotrian and Hamburg Steinway semi-concert grand pianos to the Recital Hall. They also retired a well-worn Yamaha upright and replaced it with a new Schimmel upright. The Schimmel and Grotrian both hail from Braunsweig, Germany....

Liam Teague, NIU’s “Paganini of the Steelpan,” was named today as a winner of a silver Hummingbird Medal from his native Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. An associate professor of steelpan in the School of Music and co-director of the NIU Steelband, Teague is in good company as his homeland confers its highest accolades on...

Geof Bradfield, a composer and professor of saxophone in the NIU School of Music, will perform his new suite for jazz septet at 8 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 6., in the Music Building Recital Hall. “Melba!” is a tribute to the great jazz arranger and trombonist, Melba Liston (1926-1999), and was supported by a commission from...