On April 18, in conjunction with the Mason Gross School of the Arts 50th Anniversary Celebrations, Rutgers University Libraries cosponsored a concert of music by composers who have taught and studied at the school since its inception in 1976. The idea for the concert came from Music and Performing Arts Librarian Bret McCandless, who manages the Robert Moevs Collection at Mabel Smith Douglass Library, and was organized with much help from the Music Department’s Associate Director, Maureen Hurd. Robert Moevs was an award-winning composer who taught at Rutgers from 1964-1991, cultivating a generation of composers and musicians.
The concert, held at Schare Recital Hall on Rutgers–New Brunswick’s Douglass campus, included music by Moevs, former faculty member (and Pulitzer Prize winner) Charles Wuorinen, alumna Courtney Bryan (MacArthur Fellow) and Nkeiru Okoye, current faculty members Scott Ordway and Robert Aldridge, and current students Lily Tang and Alon Nechushtan. In anticipation of the Mason Gross anniversary, McCandless had curated a catalog of music by Rutgers Composers at Rutgers University Libraries. Music by Moevs, Wuorinen, Bryan, and Okoye was sourced and curated from the Blanche and Irving Laurie Performing Arts Library’s collections, and access to Moevs’s compositional sketches provided artistic context for the performance of his piece, Una collana musicale (“A musical necklace”), which has been performed at many Moevs celebrations.
The event also incorporated materials from Rutgers University Libraries for a display to give context to the composition program over the last 50 years, including a series of concerts held at Carnegie Hall that highlighted the many prominent composers across the three Rutgers campuses in 1976: Gerald C. Chenoweth, Phillip Corner, Noel Da Costa, Daniel Goode, Robert Moevs, Claire Polin, Larry Ridley, Michael Smolanoff, George Walker, and Louie L. White.