Presented prior to each of The Pasadena Symphony's concerts, the Insights features leading musicologists who give entertaining and informative talks about the works being performed to help draw audiences into the performances. Insights will include historical backgrounds on the composers and the periods in which they lived.

Insights - 2007-2008

October 13, 2007- 7:00 pm
INSIGHTS SPEAKER: Ed Barguiarena

November 17, 2007 – 7:00 pm 
INSIGHTS SPEAKER: Jeffrey Bernstein

December 8, 2007 – 7:00 pm 
INSIGHTS SPEAKER: Dr. Donald Brinegar

January 12, 2008 – 7:00 pm 
INSIGHTS SPEAKER: Dr. Byron Adams

February 2, 2008 – 7:00 pm 
INSIGHTS SPEAKER: Dr. Byron Adams

March 15, 2008 – 7:00 pm 
INSIGHTS SPEAKER: Dr. Byron Adams

April 12, 2008 – 7:00 pm 
INSIGHTS SPEAKER: Dr. Erica Muhl

Ed Barguiarena
is an accomplished music producer, arranger, composer, musician and educator.  He has composed music for film, television, theatre, modern dance, chamber groups, orchestra, rock bands, drum & bugle corps, computers, and children.  He is a recipient of grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Ford Foundation, The ASCAP Foundation, The American Music Center and others.  He has created compositions, educational projects and special events for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, The Kennedy Center, The Los Angeles Opera, The Mark Taper Forum, The La Jolla Playhouse, Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble and more.  His work as an arranger, in collaboration with drummer and musical director Terri Lyne Carrington, received a BBC Jazz Innovator nomination(2004) for "Billie & Me," a tribute to Billie Holiday featuring: Dianne Reeves, Nancy Wilson, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Chrissie Hynde, Joan Osborne, Meshell Ndegeocello, Lalah Hathaway, Angelique Kidjo and Fontella Bass. 

Upcoming projects include: A CD of traditional music from Botswana, an EP for “southern-soul” singer Travis Houle, a concert script for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Toyota Symphonies for Youth concert series featuring the life and music of Jean Sibelius , and original music for the upcoming documentary series “Freedom Files,” produced by Brave New Films.
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Jeffrey Bernstein
is Director of Choral Music at Occidental College and Assistant Conductor of the Pasadena Symphony.  Prior to beginning his post at Occidental in 1997 he served as Acting Associate Director of Choral Activities at Harvard University where he was apprenticed to Jameson Marvin and conducted the 200-voice Harvard-Radcliffe Chorus and the world-famous Harvard Glee Club.  Bernstein holds a Ph.D. in Composition from UCLA, an M.M. in Choral Conducting from the Yale School of Music, and an A.B. magna cum laude in Music from Harvard College.  He has led a dozen concert tours in this country and abroad and has appeared as a frequent guest conductor with the Transylvanian State Philharmonic Chorus in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.  His vocal arrangements were featured in the 2002 film “Slackers” and his concert compositions have been premiered in Italy, Romania, and throughout the United States. In February 2006 he was honored to appear in concert conducting the Occidental Glee Clubs before nearly 1,000 choral conductors at the American Choral Directors Association convention in Salt Lake City, Utah. Bernstein has frequently prepared choruses for Maestro Jorge Mester, and Mester has requested regular collaborations through 2009. Bernstein’s choruses have also performed under Esa-Pekka Salonen and Zubin Mehta.

2007 has been a busy year for Bernstein. In January he traveled to Arad, Romania to conduct the state philharmonic and chorus in Haydn’s Creation. In May, just before traveling to Naples, Florida for a week-long conducting fellowship with the Naples Philharmonic, Bernstein led a full-length program of his own choral-orchestral music at Occidental College and a performance of Bach’s St. John Passion in Boston with baritone Sanford Sylvan. At the end of May Bernstein lead the Occidental Glee Clubs on a two-week concert tour of Australia. A recent review in Naples called Bernstein “a rising star in this country” and prognosticated “If this group is any indication of Bernstein’s ability to mold a group into a unified whole, the future bodes well for him.”
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Dr. Donald Brinegar
Donald Brinegar is Professor of Music and Director of Choral and Vocal Studies at Pasadena City College. He is also co-director of the Masters of Choral Music program at California State University, Los Angeles and lecturer in voice at Pomona College located in Claremont, California. For over thirty years he has had an active career as a tenor soloist performing throughout the United States, Europe, Japan and numerous other countries. His choirs have received invitations to sing at major choral conferences such as the American Choral Directors Association, the Southern California Vocal Association, The California Music Educators Association and significant choral festivals from New York to Hawaii and from England to Germany.

His choral ensemble, The Donald Brinegar Singers, have recorded ten highly acclaimed compact discs which include the premier recording of the organ version of Morten Lauridsen's LUX AETERNA, and with the Santa Barbara Symphony the world premier of Villa Lobos' 10th Symphony AMERINDA. In the fall of 2004 they will released a new compact disc featuring the music of Morten Lauridsen and Eric Whitacre. In the spring of 2002 they recorded Emma Lou Diemerís new work, MASS and David Childís HYMN FOR ST. CECILIA for Santa Barbara Publishing.

Brinegar lectures throughout the university and college community on historical intonation practices, vocal pedagogy and performance, conducting, and the art of teaching. He has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Southern California, Southern Oregon University, and the University of Nevada, Reno, Northwest Missouri State, Florida State University and California State University, Los Angeles.
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Dr. Byron Adams
(b. 1955) earned a Bachelor of Music degree, magna cum laude, from Jacksonville University, studying piano with Mary Lou Wesley Krosnick and composition with Gurney Kennedy.  He received a Master of Music degree from the University of Southern California, where his teachers included Halsey Stevens, Robert Linn and Morten Lauridsen. He received his doctoral degree from Cornell University, studying musicology with William Austin and composition with Karel Husa. Byron Adams has had performances of his music in Europe, such as at the 26th “Warsaw Autumn” International Festival of Contemporary Music in Poland, the Leith Hill Festival in England, the Conservatoire Américain in Fontainebleau, France, and the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra.  His music has been presented in America at such institutions as the Eastman School of Music, Harvard University, Yale University and Carnegie Recital Hall.

Byron Adams’s scholarly work was recognized when he was awarded the first Ralph Vaughan Williams Research Fellowship in 1985.  He has published widely on the subject of twentieth-century English music, giving lectures and interviews on this topic over the BBC and at the National Meeting of the American Musicological Society. Articles and reviews by Prof. Adams have appeared in 19th Century Music, Music and Letters, MLA Notes and The Musical Quarterly as well as in Vaughan Williams Studies, a volume recently published by Cambridge University Press. Prof. Adams has contributed four entries to the revised edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, including those on Husa and Walton. In 2000, the American Musicological Society bestowed the Philip Brett Award on Professor Adams for two essays dealing with twentieth-century English music. He was recently elected to the Council of the American Musicological Society.

Prof. Adams is presently Professor of Composition and Musicology at the University of California, Riverside. He was appointed Composer in Residence of the Colonial Symphony during the 1990-91 and 1991-92 seasons.  During the summer of 1992, Prof. Adams taught solfège, composition and conducted the chorale at the Conservatoire Américain in Fontainebleau, France.
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Dr. Erica Muhl
Major critics have praised Erica Muhl’s music, describing it as "strong and poetic," "ravishingly beautiful," “haunting,” even "fearless.”  Paul Hertelendy, one of America’s most esteemed writers on music, wrote, "Muhl has a fine ear and an iridescent palette...[Her work] is a contemporary foray into impressionism, mysticism, veiled allure and the shimmering colors of a concert orchestra."

Muhl’s exciting and beautifully crafted works have been commissioned, performed, and broadcast by such organizations as Minnesota Opera, New World Symphony, Cleveland Chamber Symphony, Italy's Orchestra della RAI, Venezuela’s National Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, the Arditti Quartet, Cuarteto Latinoamericano, National Public Radio, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Mexican National Television, and Radio-Televisione Italiana.  Her music has been featured at national and international festivals and competitions, including the Aspen Festival, the Ernest Bloch Festival, the International Festival of New Music in Caracas, Venezuela, the International Forum of New Music in Mexico City, the Festival di Musica Contemporanea in Rome, and the International Percussion Competition in Luxembourg.  She has received grants and awards from such organizations as the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Opera America, and was the recipient of the prestigious Whitaker Commissioning Prize.  She has been awarded residencies and fellowships from -- among others -- Italy’s Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Charles Ives Center for American Music, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the American Academy in Rome, and the Cultural Ministry of Venezuela.

Muhl was trained both as a composer and conductor, with much of that training completed in Europe.  At age sixteen she was invited to study with renowned teacher Nadia Boulanger at the American Conservatory in Paris.  After returning to California to earn her Bachelor of Music, she traveled again to Europe for graduate studies at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome and the Accademia Chigiana in Siena, studying with prominent Italian composer Franco Donatoni.  In 1991 she completed her D.M.A. at the University of Southern California.  Along with Boulanger and Donatoni, her primary teachers in composition were Aurelio de la Vega, Daniel Kessner, and James Hopkins.  She also credits as primary mentors composers Joan Tower, Bernard Rands, Chinary Ung, and Morten Lauridsen.  In conducting, she worked with Walter Cataldi-Tassoni, long-time conductor and stage director for Rome Opera and himself a student of Mascagni, and the legendary Fritz Zweig, a student of Humperdinck and a close colleague of Richard Strauss and Otto Klemperer.

Muhl has served as Assistant Conductor for Los Angeles Opera Theater, Seattle Opera and the Pacific Northwest Wagner Festival’s complete Der Ring des Nibelungen.  She has regularly conducted her own works, including the recording of Consolation with Cleveland Chamber Symphony contained on her CD Range of Light (Albany Records, 2004).  A noted and charismatic speaker on music, she has lectured for colleges and universities throughout the western United States, and has presented countless talks for major organizations such as the New York Philharmonic, Opera Pacific, Los Angeles Opera, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.  Erica Muhl is Professor of Composition at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music.
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 For more information, call (626) 793-7172, ext. 18.