Congratulations to Hannah Darroch and Alessandra Ignesti, who have won their respective categories of聽the 2019聽International Grant Competition聽for two very unique projects.聽Read more about their work and backgrounds below:
Hannah Darroch (Performance category)
New Zealand-born flutist Hannah Darroch is in her聽third year of a聽Doctor of Music. During her time at McGill she also concurrently completed the 鈥� a year-long program for 30聽musicians worldwide that focuses on teaching artistry and social entrepreneurship聽鈥� and was awarded their Hildegard Behrens Foundation Global Humanitarian Entrepreneur Prize as one of the top聽graduates of 2018. She holds a Master of Music from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she was a TA and member of their award-winning resident wind quintet.
As an orchestral musician Hannah has played professionally for聽over a decade聽under conductors including Yannick N茅zet-S茅guin and Sir James MacMillan, and alongside international artists ranging from Ren茅e Fleming to H氓kan Hardenberger. Hannah can be heard on a number of commercial recordings including the 2014 soundtrack to The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, and the premiere release of Frank Ticheli's Pulitzer-nominated Songs of Life and Love. Her career has also included positions as Radio NZ Concert's Digital Content and Program Producer, Chamber Music New Zealand's Marketing and Communications Executive, and recent consultancy work聽to develop a new mentorship program for the Wellington Youth Orchestra, and to redesign RNZ聽Concert鈥檚 publicity and partnerships strategy.
Hannah has recently been invited to teach guest classes and perform in locations across Canada, the United States, Chile, Australia, and New Zealand. In 2017 her research was chosen from hundreds of doctoral applicants across Canada to be featured on CBC鈥檚 Ideas. Hannah聽is also the recent winner of the Schulich School of Music's 2019-2020 Research Alive Student Prize, and a Graduate Mobility Award to attend a residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
She聽said of the recent win: 鈥淚t鈥檚 a real honour to win this competition. The funding will allow me to widen the scope of my dissertation and commission a new work for solo flute, which I鈥檒l premiere聽during my final lecture-recital next year."
Project Details:
Cultural convergences: Exploring the emulation of traditional M膩ori flutes in New Zealand鈥檚 contemporary classical music
The twentieth century was a period of great activity and experimentation for the modern flute. Composers became more interested than ever before in the flute's聽sonic potential, pushing new boundaries in terms of its timbral capabilities and the new-found ability to play several notes simultaneously. A series of 鈥渆xtended techniques鈥� were first codified in Bruno Bartolozzi鈥檚 treatise New Sounds for Woodwinds in 1967, and other resources continued to be published in the decades that followed, including volumes by Thomas Howell (1974), Robert Dick (1975, 1989), and Pierre-Yves Artaud (1980). Notably, composers have used these聽techniques as a means of emulating the timbre of traditional flutes, looking back to the various bone, bamboo, and wood flutes of past centuries. My research examines links between contemporary flute techniques and the characteristics of traditional New Zealand M膩ori flutes 鈥� the k艒auau, p奴torino, and nguru 鈥� and considers how their emulation in recent classical music relates to a solidification of cultural identity.
Alessandra Ignesti (Research category)
Since 2014, Alessandra has collaborated as a research assistant on the Cantus Ultimus project, part of the聽聽project (Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis) directed by Professors Ichiro Fujinaga and Julie Cumming. She is also involved in the project (Citations: The Renaissance Imitation Mass) led by Richard Freedman (Haverford College) and David Fiala (CESR, Tours) that is devoted to the comparative analysis of a corpus of sixteenth-century imitation masses and their models. Recently, she has received a fellowship from the University of G枚ttingen, where she will be working on two plainchant manuscripts preserved at the municipal archive.
When asked about her reaction to winning the International Grant Competition, Alessandra said: "I always experience a聽kind of childlike wonder when it comes to winning something, so my reaction was, if I may say so, one of wide-eyed amazement. I was genuinely happy that other people found interesting something I am working on."
Project Details:
Ippolito Baccusi and the musical culture of northeastern Italy
Not much is known about him, except that he was born in Mantua around the middle of the sixteenth century, was an Augustinian monk, and worked at San Marco as assistant choir director and later in Spilimbergo, Mantua, and Verona as maestro di cappella. His compositions include madrigals and various genres of sacred music, among which there are six books of imitation masses that await to be transcribed, studied, and performed. My dissertation will focus on the first three books (published in 1570, 1585, and 1589) and will aim to analyze his compositional style and use of musical borrowings. In addition, I will enjoy the thrill of archival research in the attempt to cast some light on his professional life in Mantua and in Verona, where he spent the last part of his life.
