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The CU New Opera Workshop (CU NOW) returned June 22-25 with an exciting new program of workshop-style performances featuring commentary from the composers. The workshop opened June 14 with a sold-out recital by CU voice alumnus Ashraf Sewailam.

The Keyboard Department had a highly successful 3rd annual Keyboard Day on March 12, 2011. The audience included local teachers and students, and we spent the day exploring various aspects of keyboard playing and getting to know one another.

On April 25, University of Colorado President Bruce Benson today announced Creating Futures, a $1.5 billion comprehensive fundraising campaign, the most ambitious in university history, which will benefit people, programs and places across CU’s four campuses.

n April 8, 2011, the College of Music hosted the first CU Invitational Orchestra Festival. The festival involved the participation of three orchestras from Â鶹ӰԺ High School, and orchestras from Legacy High School, Lakewood High School and Cherry Creek High School.

2011 BRUCE EKSTRAND MEMORIAL GRADUATE STUDENT PERFORMANCE COMPETITION

In August 2011, four CU students will travel to the Friuli region of Italy to perform with the Piccolo Festival. (Nicole Vogel, Meagan Mahlberg, Jeffrey Seppala, and Wei Wu.) Three will be performing in Rossini’s one-act opera La cambiale de matrimonio. (The fourth student will be performing in their concert...

Dr. Miroslava Mintcheva (DMA 2010, piano performance) is the recipient of the 2011 MTNA StAR Studio Teacher Fellowship Award. This prestigious award is given to an individual who exhibits exceptional teaching and performance skills and is deeply committed to the teaching profession. She is very proud to have been selected as the winner out of a large national pool of applicants. The award is in the amount of $3,000.

I first met Lisa Canning a little over a year ago at the first-ever conference on music entrepreneurship in higher ed, sponsored by the College Music Society. When, during our very first conversation, I learned that she had studied clarinet at Northwestern University — a leading conservatory preparing musicians for orchestral performing jobs — and that she had discovered there that playing in an orchestra was not her calling, I felt an immediate bond.

The College of Music at the University of Colorado at Â鶹ӰԺ hosted its first competition dedicated specifically to collaborative music-making: So You Think You Can Collaborate? Saturday, January 22 at 7:30 p.m. in Grusin Music Hall. The winners of the competition were Forty Fingers of Fury (Allan Armstrong, Laura Brumbaugh, Doreen Lee and Sunyoung Lee, pianos with Owen Zhou, technical guru).

During the holidays, no matter how you celebrate or what your beliefs, music is almost always an important part of the celebration, according to Thomas Riis, a musicologist and director of the American Music Research Center in the University of Colorado at Â鶹ӰԺ’s College of Music.