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Columbia University has named James Bolle, founder and conductor of the New Hampshire Symphony Orchestra and originator of the summer festival Monadnock Music, to receive the 1996 Ditson Conductor's Award for the advancement of American music.
The award, the oldest honoring conductors for their support of American music, will be presented Saturday, August 17, at a Monadnock Music concert at 8 P.M. in the Peterborough Town House in Peterborough, N.H.
It will be an evening full of anniversaries, associations and celebrations: Mr. Bolle will conduct a concert performance of Virgil Thomson's and Gertrude Stein's "The Mother of Us All" (1947), an opera centered on Susan B. Anthony's efforts to gain the vote for women. It was commissioned by Columbia's Alice M. Ditson Fund and composed by Thomson at the MacDowell Colony, a retreat for creative artists in Peterborough. The performance will mark the 30th anniversary of the founding of Monadnock Music and the 100th anniversary of Virgil Thomson's birth and the arrival in New Hampshire of Edward and Marian MacDowell, the founders of the MacDowell Colony. Edward MacDowell, the outstanding American composer of his day, 100 years ago, in 1896, was named Columbia's first professor of music and founding chair of its music department.
The Ditson Conductor's Award was established in 1945 by the Alice M. Ditson Fund at Columbia. Past recipients have included Leonard Bernstein, Eugene Ormandy and Leopold Stowkowski.
Columbia Professor of Music George Edwards, the Secretary of the Ditson Fund Advisory Committee, will present the 52nd annual award and $1,000 to Mr. Bolle. He will read a citation from Columbia University President George Rupp praising the conductor for "charting a brilliantly independent course that has brought unusual repertoire and extraordinary music-making to audiences in northern New England," for his "exceptional devotion to American music," and for leading "performances of over 100 works by more than 50 American composers." The citation will also note his "deep knowledge of contemporary music," which enables him "to premiere compositions by outstanding younger composers whose work is just beginning to be widely heard."
Mr. Bolle, a native of Evanston, Ill., began organizing and conducting musical groups while still in high school. He is a graduate of Antioch College and holds a master's in music from Northwestern University. He studied composition with Darius Milhaud and conducting with Joseph Rosenstock and Richard Lert. His compositions have been performed in the United States, Israel and Canada. His opera, "Oleum Canis," was recorded with a grant from the Ford Foundation. He has conducted the Saskatchewan Silver Jubilee Music Festival in Canada and Musica Viva in New York and Chicago and has conducted in Israel and Germany.
He founded Monadnock Music in 1966 and the New Hampshire Symphony Orchestra, the state's year-round professional orchestra, in 1974 and has made broadcasts and recordings with both. In 1994 New Hampshire Public Television broadcast a documentary of the rehearsals and premiere of Michael Daugherty's "Metropolis Symphony" with narration written and read by actor-poet Jack Larson. Among composers he has worked with on the performance of their works are Milhaud, Thomson, Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, Roger Sessions, John Adams, Donald Martino and John Harbison. His recording of Thomson's Symphonies No. 1 and No. 2 was named among the best of the year in 1989 by The New York Times. His recordings of American music also include Thomson's opera "Lord Byron" and disks devoted to works by John J. Becker and Leo Sowerby.
During the centenary season of the MacDowell Colony he will lead a retrospective series of works by composers who have received the MacDowell Medal or been colony fellows.
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