5/20/2023 0 Comments Armenta adams hummings bio![]() “Eastman has been there, quietly supporting when asked and where we could,” says Jamal Rossi, the Joan and Martin Messinger Dean of the Eastman School of Music.īut last year, Gateways and Eastman formalized and deepened their alliance. The festival and the Eastman School of Music have partnered since the third festival, in 1995, with Eastman providing Gateways with rehearsal and performance spaces, along with financial backing. I can only imagine how even more inspiring it is to see a stage full.” (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)įor young musicians, Gateways “can play an important role in just demonstrating what’s possible,” Laing says. Reaching out to fellow African-American musicians is at the heart of the Gateways Music Festival, a celebration of professional classical musicians of African descent. And this summer, as he has in summers past, he’ll experience again the inspiration he felt as a teen. ![]() Today, Laing is the principal clarinetist of the Phoenix Symphony. ![]() Watt wrote back to him, a gesture that still moves him. “I didn’t really know what to say except, ‘I’m trying to be you when I grow up,’ ” Laing says. He’d begun playing the clarinet at age 11, motivated in part by his grandmother’s love of Benny Goodman.Īnd so he wrote Watt a letter. He was then an aspiring musician, growing up in Silver Spring, Maryland. “I remember being excited and inspired that there was someone who looked like me, who identified as I did,” says Laing. Watt joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1970. Horn player to be hired by a major US symphony. When Alexander Laing was 14, his teacher showed him a magazine article about Robert Lee Watt, the first African-American French (Photo: Keith Bullis for University Communications) IN PERFORMANCE: Anthony McGill, the principal clarinetist of the New York Philharmonic, took center stage at the 2015 Gateways Music Festival, playing a concerto with the festival’s orchestra.
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