Three days of events celebrating the music of Johann Sebastian Bach will bring together the town and the College.

Audiences are in for a treat as the 2011-2012 arts season at Middlebury College launches in September. The year will feature over 300 plays, exhibitions, concerts, dance performances, films special events, and more. Middlebury students and faculty showcase their diverse work alongside first-class artists visiting from around the world.

Dance Company performs and blogs its way through the Dominican Republic.

From Middlebury Magazine: A behind-the-scenes look at an art historian's improbable four-year adventure.

Allison Coyne Carroll (staff, MCFA) spends her free time advocating for simpler immigration and taxation policies for foreign national visiting artists. Allison attended Arts Advocacy Day on Capitol Hill in March 2009, and met with Senator Leahy (who is also Chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations) to champion for improved visa processing, and ensure Middlebury can continue to present premiere performers from around the globe.

Radio Arts Middlebury is a completely student-written and -produced radio program dedicated to reporting the events, people, and ideas that comprise the arts community at the College. In the fall of 2008, the show sprang fully-formed from the mind of Colin Foss ('10, LITS). Foss hosted RAM until the spring of 2009, when John Patrick Allen ('11, PSCI) took over during Foss's time abroad. RAM has interviewed Middlebury professors, visiting artists (including Girl Talk and Anaîs Mitchell), students, and staff -- people who find themselves creating or promoting art on campus.

Peter Hamlin, Class of 1973 and chair of the Music Department at Middlebury, served as on-air host and interviewer for live television broadcasts of the Quad City Symphony and Dubuque Symphony on Iowa Public Television (fall, 2008).

Hamilin also was the emcee for the Vermont Symphony's youth concerts, performing in five different school locations throughout the state (spring 2009). The program included three movements from an orchestra piece of Hamlin's called Green Mountain Variations.

Larry Hamberlin had an essay included in a book of Schubert studies published by Ashgate Press in the fall.

In the spring, Hamberlin presented papers at the Experience Music Project's pop music conference in Seattle and at the conference Feminist Music and Theory in Greensboro, North Carolina. 

Alison Maggart, Class of 2008, has been working as harpist with and assistant to the renowned Indian film composer A.R. Rahman. Rahman is known as the "John Williams of India" -- with "Slumdog Millionaire" just one of the recent films for which he has composed music. Maggart's duties include orchestrating, arranging and preparing Rahman's scores for his films.

The College Choir embarked on a highly successful tour of Connecticut, Boston and New York City over spring break, April 21-26, 2009. The tour included concerts at the phenomenal Trinity Church in the City of Boston, St. Michael's Church on 99th Street in Manhattan, and the New York Society for Ethical Culture on Central Park. The choir sang contemporary choral music, madrigals, and folk music, and a short choral drama featured several Middlebury student soloists.

The Sound Investment Jazz Ensemble completed its third full year under Dick Forman’s direction, and its second year as a Music Department performance ensemble. Twenty one students participated. The band offered five performances this year, including a town-gown dance at the Town Hall Theater in April.

Fifteen students performed in the Spring Jazz Showcase. Combos that formed in the Jazz Workshop performed regularly at the Grille, and occasionally at 51 Main.

Seven graduating seniors in the Class of 2009 – Alex Benepe, Mary Chiles, Sonia Epstein, Pujan Gandhi, Kelsey Nelson, Ramona Richards, and Jennifer Yamane – recently concluded either their second or third year of participation in the Museum Assistants Program (MAP) at the Middlebury College Museum of Art.

Professor Cynthia Packert reports:

Zmira Zilkha, Class of  2009 and a February graduate, is an intern now at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy. http://www.guggenheim-venice.it/inglese/default.html 

And Nicole Macmillan, also 2009, has been awarded an intership at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. http://www.phillipscollection.org/

Pujan Gandhi, Class of 2009, recently served as the Reiff Intern at the Middlebury College Museum of Art. While there, he researched Enrique Chagoya, Robert Gober, and Glenn Ligon, and and contributed to the publication that accompanied the exhibition "Confronting History: Contemporary Artists Envision the Past," which was on view February 13 through April 29, 2009.

During her semester abroad in Bali, Indonesia, Abby Hoeschler introduced three elementary schools to the Visual Thinking Strategies method of viewing art that she learned through her involvement with the Museum Assistant Program (MAP) at Middlebury. Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) is a research-based innovative approach used to introduce young viewers to works of art. Curator of Education Sandi Olivo employs the VTS method, which asks (rather than tells) viewers about art, in our student-led school tours at the Middlebury Museum.

Since 2001, Bettina Matthias (German) has worked with German students, from first-semester to graduating senior, in Middlebury's German Theater Group. What started as an alternative to the typical final paper in late 2001 has grown into a very successful staple in the German Department and on campus, a steady group with at least 10 members at any given time, that has won the German Theater Competition at Mt. Holyoke College five times and has performed nine full-length plays in German. In fall, we will celebrate our tenth production together.