John McDonald
Recently described as “the New England master of the short piece,” John McDonald is a composer who tries to play the piano and a pianist who tries to compose. He received the 2009 Lillian and Joseph Leibner Award for Distinguished Teaching and Advising from Tufts University, and was named the 2007 MTNA-Shepherd Distinguished Composer of the Year by the Music Teachers National Association.
John McDonald is a Professor of Music at Tufts University, where he teaches composition, theory, and performance. His output concentrates on vocal, chamber, and solo instrumental works, and includes interdisciplinary experiments. Before going to Tufts in 1990, he taught at Boston University, Longy School of Music, M.I.T., and the Rivers Conservatory. He was the Music Teachers National Association Composer of the Year in 2007, and served as the Valentine Visiting Professor of Music at Amherst College in 2016-2017. Mr. McDonald was Music Department Chair at Tufts from 2000 to 2003. He has served as an Artistic Ambassador to Asia, and is on the advisory boards of American Composers Forum New England, Worldwide Concurrent Premieres, Inc., and several other cultural and academic organizations.
His recent and in-progress projects include Peace Process (for basset horn and piano), The Creatures’ Choir (an evening-long song cycle for voice and piano), Ways To Jump (a choral work concerning frogs, commissioned by Music Worcester), Piano Albums 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009 (collections of piano miniatures that attempt to chronicle some difficulties and joys of daily life through musical observation), Four Compositions for flute and piano, and a new work for saxophone and piano commissioned by the Massachusetts Music Teachers Association that responds to Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise. Pianist Andrew Rangell has just completed a recording (for Bridge Records; May 2009 release) of Mr. McDonald’s Meditation Before A Sonata: Dew Cloth, Dream Drapery, a piece which can function as a preamble to either of the monumental Charles Ives sonatas.
His recordings appear on the Albany, Archetype, Boston, Bridge, Capstone, Neuma, New Ariel, and New World labels, and he has concertized widely as composer and pianist. Recent performances at the Goethe Institut of Boston and at Tufts have been highly acclaimed. His solo piano recital of “Common Injustices” by twenty-five living composers prompted Richard Dyer of The Boston Globe to write “one can hardly imagine anyone else undertaking such a program, or playing it with such modest and unobtrusive but total musical and pianistic mastery.” Mr. McDonald has appeared with many ensembles and has maintained long-standing musical partnerships with soprano Karol Bennett, saxophonists Kenneth Radnofsky and Philipp Stäudlin, and several other prominent soloists. Since 2004 he has performed as pianist for The Mockingbird Trio (with Elizabeth Anker, contralto and Scott Woolweaver, viola).
John has been a close colleague and friend for decades during my time at Tufts University. He is an inspiring teacher and remarkable composer and musician. We collaborated in many ways. I am reminded of a fun prelude to a session during my EPIIC “Global Sports and Politics” year where his avant garde musical group, New Music Ensemble (NME) performed. I remember John playing his original music composition on a baby grand piano whose upraised piano cover was encased in netting with hundreds of ping-pong balls cascading as he played. John surprised me a number of times by composing and playing original compositions in my honor at different intervals in my 30-year career: my 20th, 25th and 30th anniversary.
There was also a delightful moment where he asked me to write a letter of recommendation for one of our common remarkable students, Rich Janoksky. Rich and his band performed at the EPIIC symposium “Future of Democracy” his original composition Habibi (Friend in Arabic) and then jammed with the jazz icon Chick Corea in an unforgettable improvisational concert.
Rich after receiving PhD at the University of Chicago in Ethnomusicology, and teaching at SOAS in London was applying for a tenure track faculty position at Tufts, his alma mater. Rich not only succeeded in gaining this position but is now the chairman of the music department at Tufts.
John also composed a beautiful piece in honor of an extraordinary mentor of mine, the renowned professor Stanley Hoffmann - the former head of the Center of European Studies at Harvard University, to whom I dedicated my last EPIIC year, “The Future of Europe”, in 2016.