American Academy in Rome

The New York Times has reviewed Marnie, an opera based on Winston Graham’s novel with music composed by Nico Muhly (2018 Resident). “Mr. Muhly opted,” Anthony Tommasini writes, “to maintain mystery through whole stretches of the score, to suggest emotions rather than making everything explicit.”

New Focus Recordings has just released a new CD, Waterlines, from Christopher Trapani (2017 Fellow). Waterlines features five of Trapani’s chamber and ensemble works, with performances by some of New York’s finest musicians. The music is inspired in part by Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans, the composer’s home town.

The celebrated architect Robert Venturi (1956 Fellow, 1966 Resident, Trustee from 1969 to 1976), whose firm designed buildings at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and oversaw an addition to the National Gallery in London—among many other structures—has died at the age of 93. His books, among them Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) and Learning from Las Vegas (1972, written with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour), have been influential well beyond the discipline of architecture.

Between September 14 and October 10, John Kelly (2007 Fellow) will present Down To You, a concert version of his tribute to the music of Joni Mitchell, at Joe’s Pub in New York.