Bruce Adolphe, Creative Director
Composer, author, educator and performer Bruce Adolphe is the founding creative director of The Learning Maestros, Resident Lecturer and Director of Family Concerts for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and the comic keyboard quiz-master of Performance Today’s weekly radio program Piano Puzzlers.
Adolphe has written works for many of the world’s most renowned artists, including Itzhak Perlman, Sylvia McNair, the Beaux Arts Trio, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the National Symphony, the Caramoor Festival, St. Luke’s Orchestra, the New York Chamber Symphony, the Metropolitan Opera Guild, the Brentano String Quartet, the Miami Quartet, The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Chicago Chamber Musicians, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and many others. His compositions include four operas and several theater pieces, all of which have been produced throughout the United States. He has been composer-in-residence at many festivals and institutions, including SummerFest La Jolla, the Folger Shakespeare Theater in Washington, D.C., the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Chamber Music Northwest, Music from Angel Fire, Bravo! Colorado, the Grand Canyon Festival, the Moab Festival, the Virginia Arts Festival, the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival, Chamber Music Virginia, the O.K. Mozart Festival and the Perlman Music Program. Adolphe served as the Distinguished Composer-in-Residence at the Mannes College of Music for the 2003-04 term.
Formerly on the faculties of the Juilliard School and New York University and a Visiting Lecturer at Yale, Adolphe has been the lecturer of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center since 1992, and has been featured in Live from Lincoln Center television programs. In December 2003, he discussed and illustrated aspects of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos from the harpsichord in a live national television broadcast of The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s 35th anniversary concert from Alice Tully Hall. In addition to his lecture series, Inside Chamber Music, now in its 12th season at Lincoln Center, Adolphe was a featured lecturer from 2001 to 2005 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where his series was called A Composer’s View. A much sought-after speaker and concert host, he has appeared at many of the major concert series in the United States, as well as at education conferences, festivals, and competitions.
Adolphe has written three books on music: The Mind's Ear: Exercises for Improving the Musical Imagination; What to Listen for in the World; and Of Mozart, Parrots and Cherry Blossoms in the Wind: A Composer Explores Mysteries of the Musical Mind. His books are used in college and conservatories throughout the United States, and excerpts have been read as short features on National Public Radio. The recently published Origins of Creativity (Oxford University Press), includes summaries and highlights of lectures by renowned scientists, including Antonio Damasio and Benoit Mandelbrot; artists Dale Chihuly and Francoise Gilot; and Bruce Adolphe as the spokesperson for creativity in music. A chapter on Adolphe is included in the book The Muse that Sings: Composers Speak About the Creative Process by Ann McCutchan (Oxford University Press). He is also included in both the Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians and the Groves Dictionary of Opera, as well as the Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music.
Adolphe’s music has been recorded on the Telarc, Naxos, CRI, Delos, Koch, Summit and PollyRhythm labels. The Milken Archive’s/Naxos “American Classics” CD of his music inspired by Jewish subjects was one of five recordings that won a Grammy for producer David Frost in 2005. Adolphe’s film scores include the permanent documentary at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
Adolphe lives in New York with this wife Marija, his daughter Katja, and his opera-and-jazz-singing parrot, Polly Rhythm.
Julian Fifer, Managing Director
Julian Fifer is the co-founder and Managing Director of The Learning Maestros, President and Executive Director of the Venice Music Festival, and an artist manager and producer of concerts and opera.
As cellist, founder, and Executive Director for 26 years of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Fifer guided the ensemble’s career and growth from a counterculture startup to the top echelon of the concert and recording businesses.
The only orchestra in the world where the musicians run the rehearsals and decide their own seating positions for every piece of music, Orpheus was conceived by Fifer in 1972 as a conductorless ensemble in which all the musicians would share both the artistic opportunities and responsibilities. He personally identified and selected the musicians to form a virtuoso ensemble capable of performing at the highest international standard of excellence.
In 1984, Fifer negotiated the largest record contract then held by an American orchestra, resulting in the production of over 50 discs in a twelve-year span. He developed relationships for the ensemble with virtually all of the major international festivals and music centers, including London, Paris, Berlin, Milan, Salzburg, Vienna, Amsterdam, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong and Tokyo, and forged collaborations with leading soloists of the day, including Yo-Yo Ma, Isaac Stern, Richard Goode, Anne Sophie von Otter, Gil Shaham, Wynton Marsalis, Alfred Brendel, Gidon Kremer and Dawn Upshaw.
Before leaving Orpheus in 1999, Fifer positioned the orchestra as an organizational model to help corporations address employee motivation, problem-solving, and job satisfaction. He has been engaged by leading multinational corporations to speak about creating and sustaining effective teamwork and enhancing creativity and quality.
In the eight years that he has served as strategic advisor and worldwide booking manager to the Venice Baroque Orchestra, he has helped build an unprecedented concert and recording career for the Italian period instrument ensemble, including over a dozen albums for Sony and Deutsche Grammophon.
Fifer founded the Venice Music Festival in 2004 to seek ideal balances between music and place, performer and audience. Now in its fourth season, the Festival restores musical masterpieces through historically informed performances, fosters emerging talent, and commissions new work.
A native New Yorker, Fifer attended the Bronx High School of Science and received his B.A. in liberal arts from Columbia University. He began his cello studies at age six at the Manhattan School of Music. His formative musical mentor was Claus Adam, cellist of the Juilliard String Quartet.
Louise Ann Gikow, Author
After acquiring a master’s degree in medieval literature from Columbia University, Louise Gikow began her career as editorial assistant and then senior copy editor at the now-legendary National Lampoon magazine. She has worked as Editorial Director and creative consultant at Jim Henson Productions, created and run a publishing and multimedia division at Nickelodeon, and worked as Senior Vice President, Creative Operations at Sirius Thinking, the company that created the award-winning Between the Lions, currently being broadcast on PBS. She served as consulting producer and staff writer for that show. She is also the co-creator and head writer of Johnny and the Sprites, currently airing on Playhouse Disney and recently nominated for four Emmys; and co-creator and co-executive producer of Lomax: The Hound of Music, a music education show in development for PBS.
Louise is an Emmy-award-winning author/composer of over 150 scripts, books, and songs for kids and adults, including scripts for Between the Lions, Cyberchase, Peep, Oobi, and Sesame Workshop (where she served as head-writer of both “Sesame Stories” — a Palestinian/ Israeli/ Jordanian co-production—and “Sesame English” — an EFL series). She has written books about Barbie and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Spider-Man novels, nonfiction titles for tweens, a host of Muppet titles, beginning readers, a biography of Jim Henson, film novelizations (including the best-selling adaptations of Madagascar, Shark Tales, The Grinch, and Over the Hedge), adult humor books (“How to Bear Children” and “Miss Piggy’s Rules”), software for Knowledge Adventure, music for Macmillan’s school division, and a series of music education videos for Silver Burdette Ginn. She is the librettist of a number of chamber and orchestral music pieces for children and adults composed by Bruce Adolphe that were commissioned by the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the Imani Wind Quintet, and the Young People’s Chorus of New York, among others. She has also written “Cosmic Collisions,” the critically acclaimed planetarium show now playing at the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the Museum of Natural History in New York City and around the world, and is currently at work on their next sky show.
Louise lives in New York City with her husband, daughter, and two cats.
Evan Polenghi, Art Director
A versatile virtuoso of visual media, Evan Polenghi has created fine art, illustrations, and designs that can be found in such diverse locations as The Museum of Modern Art in New York, collections in the United States, Europe, Latin America and Japan, Sports Illustrated for Kids, Gap/ Banana Republic, Absolut, and the walls of public schools throughout New York City. Those cheerful murals, collaborations between Evan and New York Cares for New York public schools, are part of an ongoing innovative educational Polenghi project called WallsforKids.com.
An artist without conventional walls himself, Evan has designed pillows, upholstery fabrics, carpets, and bedding for various accessories companies, and plays lead guitar in the rock-fusion band Citi-Zen. He is the illustrator for two recent Klutz books and is the artist of Scholastic’s new book, I’m Your Bus. Born in New York into a family of artists and raised in Milan, Italy, Evan cannot remember a time when he wasn’t drawing.
http://www.polenghistudio.com
http://www.evanpolenghi.com
Polly Rhythm, Parrot
Polly Rhythm, the opera-and-jazz singing yellow-fronted amazon parrot, was hatched in 1965 and grew up in the home of the Adolphe family in Long Island, New York. Polly began listening to opera when only three months old, and after only a few weeks was able to imitate Beverly Sills and Elly Ameling, later adding Teresa von Stratas to his repertoire of beloved sopranos. In addition to opera, oratorios, and lieder, Polly took an interest in show tunes and jazz, and does a mean Ethel Merman.
Aside from his musical talents, Polly Rhythm imitates blue jays, cats, dogs, smoke alarms, and the sound of steaming milk when making a cappuccino. He also says hello in a variety of moods and attitudes, as well as some other phrases, such as pretty bird, hello pretty Polly, and mmmm, good! These are trifles, of course, compared with his singing, to which he devotes his studies.
Polly Rhythm caught the attention of the media early in his career, and has been featured on the front page of the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times sitting on the knee of his composer-owner Bruce Adolphe, as well as in the Daily News, the New York Post, and in the magazine Best Friends. Polly’s appearance on National Public Radio in 2003 was a major hit with the public, receiving more e-mails for several weeks than any other topic on NPR. That audio clip, of Polly singing along with Natalie Dessay in an excerpt from the Queen of the Night’s aria from Act II of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute (“Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen”) was included on NPR’s Driveway Moments CD. In fact, Polly was singing alone when NPR recorded him, and they later decided to mix in Natalie Dessay’s recording of the aria to show how closely Polly was singing the music, and because Polly uses no words ... and occasionally adds his own ornaments.
Other radio appearances for Polly have included the nationally syndicated show about extraordinary pets, Best Friends, and a surprise appearance on WNYC’s Around New York with host John Schaeffer. Polly has also appeared in video in Alice Tully Hall, and will appear again in 2009 in the newly renovated Tully Hall in a family concert called Caws for Celebration: Birds! Natures Great Musicians. PBS is considering including Polly Rhythm in a TV special on Music and Instinct, planned for next season.
Polly’s hobbies include ripping up cardboard tubes, laughing uncontrollably when people laugh, and tearing up the corners of books. His greatest masterpiece of ripping and tearing remains the Dover edition of the complete Beethoven string quartets, which he almost completely destroyed in 1993.
He lives in New York with his owner of 43 years, composer Bruce Adolphe, and Bruce’s wife Marija and daughter, Katja.
