Academic Faculty

 

Helen Hudgens' concentrated studies in music cognition, post-tonal music, and theory pedagogy has lent much insight to her extensive classroom experience at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. She has been on the faculty of North Park University since 2001 where she supervises and teaches the theory and aural skills curriculum and teaches courses in music history, music appreciation, and keyboard skills. Before this appointment, she was senior lecturer at Northwestern University in theory and analysis courses. Hudgens is concurrently the minister of music at Reba Place Church in Evanston, Ill. She has presented academic papers on Webern's music for the Society of Music Perception and Cognition and the Society of Music Theory.

 

 

Bruce Tammen, baritone, has taught voice at Luther College, Concordia College (River Forest), and the University of Virginia, and was Director of Choral Activities at the University of Chicago from 1984 to 1996. Currently, he is the founding director of Chicago Chorale and Chicago Men’s A Cappella. Vocal studies include degrees from Luther College and Northwestern University, extensive study in France with Dalton Baldwin and Gérard Souzay, master classes in Sweden and Norway, and several years with Max Van Egmond at Oberlin’s Baroque Performance Institute. He has sung with the Smithsonian Chamber Players, Chicago's Contemporary Chamber Players, the Oregon Bach Festival, and Les Heures Musicales in Biot, France. He participated several summers in the Robert Shaw Choral Institute in Souillac, France, and sings with Helmuth Rilling at the Oregon Bach Festival, and with Rilling’s professional choir, Gächinger Kantorei, in Stuttgart, Germany. He is a baritone soloist on two Telarc/Shaw CDs, Brahms’ Liebeslieder Waltzes and Appear and Inspire.

 

Colin Holman combines performance and academic interests in a wide number of pursuits. Following graduate work, he taught at Teikyo Westmar University and since moving to Chicago in 1992, he has lectured at both the undergraduate and graduate level at Northwestern University, Wheaton College and Northern Illinois University. His primary specialty revolves around English music, although he has contributed to publications on early American keyboard music, a text on eighteenth-century culture and the arts, and on contemporary American brass band music. Celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of the adoption of the American constitution and being a passionate advocate for studies in American music, he toured the Midwest giving lectures on music. Most recently he participated in a PBS documentary on music at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. His extensive conducting credits include work in opera and musical theater, with orchestras, concert and brass bands, and in early music. In 2001, Holman was one of only two people in the arts named by Chicago's Daily Herald newspaper as one of 100 people who had made significant contributions to cultural life in Chicago.

Greg MacAyeal is currently the Assistant Head of the Northwestern University Music Library. Active in professional library organizations, he has made presentations at meetings of the Music Library Association, the Society of American Archivists, the Illinois Association of College and Research Libraries, and the Illinois Library Association. As a composer, Greg's music has been performed throughout the region, with commissions from The Cassandra Manning Ballet Company (Rock Island, IL.), Music From Almost Yesterday (Milwaukee, Ws.), and the Augustana College Koto Ensemble. Additionally, Greg teaches at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Dominican University, River Forest IL.

 

Since completing apprenticeships with the Santa Fe Opera and the Chicago Lyric Opera, mezzo-soprano Julia Bentley has appeared in leading roles with opera companies throughout the country, and has been featured as a soloist with orchestras led by George Manahan, Raymond Leppard, Oliver Knussen, Robert Shaw and Pierre Boulez. She performs in Chicago with Mostly Music, CUBE, the Contemporary Chamber Players, the Orion Ensemble, Pinotage, Ensemble Noamnesia, Fulcrum Point, the Chicago Chamber Musicians, Chicago Opera Theater, Concertante di Chicago, Music of the Baroque, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the MusicNOW series at Symphony Center with conductor Cliff Colnot. She has been a regular guest artist with the Chicago Chamber Musicians' Music at the Millennium and Composer Perspectives series, most recently in works by Berio, Carter, and Boulez under the direction of Mr. Boulez. In 2001 she appeared to critical acclaim at Carnegie Hall, also with Mr. Boulez, as the soloist in Le Marteau Sans Maître. She has recorded on the Albany, Cedille and Tintagel labels. Recent engagements have included performances of the Messiah with the Apollo Chorus at Orchestra Hall, and appearances with the Ars Viva Orchestra and the Bach and Handel Week Festivals, as well as chamber music series in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York and the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Last season she sang La Cenerentola for Sacramento Opera, Meg in Little Women for Dayton Opera, and Time Cycle by Lukas Foss during the composer's Chicago residency.

 

Baritone Philip Kraus has performed as a soloist with the Cleveland Orchestra; symphonies in Dallas, Milwaukee, Omaha, Colorado, Santa Barbara, Richmond, Roanoke, Grant Park, South Bend, Owensboro, Jacksonville, and Madison; and the Rochester and Fort Wayne philharmonics. He has also appeared with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Minnesota Opera, Cleveland Opera, Chamber Opera of Chicago, Chicago Opera, and Hawaii Opera theaters; Light Opera Works; and the Pamiro Opera. Kraus is frequently heard as a guest artist with the Bel Canto Chorus of Milwaukee, Chicago's Apollo Chorus, the Bach Festival of Winter Park (Fla.), Music of the Baroque, the Handel Week Festival, and the Calvin College Oratorio Society. He has taught opera at DePaul University and Roosevelt University and is also a specialist in Gilbert and Sullivan.