Friday, October 24, 2008 @ 8:30 pm • Wednesday, November 5, 2008 @ 11:30 pm

Preview

In 1990, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich and beloved cartoonist Charles M. Schulz began an extraordinary friendship that would ultimately unite their creative talents in one masterwork. Through interviews with Zwilich and Mrs. Schulz, along with character clips and rarely seen footage of Charles Schulz himself, this documentary explains how Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the rest of the Peanuts gang went from the daily comics to Carnegie Hall. This program for all ages features a performance of Zwilich’s Peanuts Gallery for Piano and Orchestra by the Florida State University Symphony Orchestra.

Peanuts® Gallery for Piano and Orchestra premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1997 and has since been played by such orchestras as the Chicago Symphony and the Cleveland Orchestra. The piece is made up of six movements: “Schroeder’s Beethoven Fantasy,” “Lullaby for Linus,” “Snoopy Does the Samba,” “Charlie Brown’s Lament,” “Lucy Freaks Out,” and “Peppermint Patty and Marcie Lead the Parade.” According to Zwilich, she “tried to capture something in the nature of each character in short musical sketches.” And viewers will see and hear that she succeeded.

Eric Schultz first came to know Ellen Zwilich when he worked as the producer for Cultural Affairs at Michigan State University Public TV. He produced a documentary about Zwilich and the story behind her composition, Symphony No.4, which was inspired by the renowned gardens at Michigan State University. The resulting program, The Gardens: Birth of a Symphony, was distributed by PBS in 2000 and aired on NJN in 2002. When Zwilich was interested in telling the story behind Peanuts® Gallery for Piano and Orchestra, she contacted Eric Schultz, who had moved to NJN, to produce the project. He served as producer/director for the program, which has aired on PBS stations nationally.

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich - Composer

The music of Ellen Taaffe Zwilich has been enthusiastically received by a broad general public as well as by critics and connoisseurs. The first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in music (for her Symphony No.1), Zwilich had earlier become the first woman to earn a Doctorate in composition from Juilliard. In 1995, she was appointed to the first Composers Chair in the history of Carnegie Hall.

Zwilich has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Chamber Music Prize, the Arturo Toscanini Music Critics Award, the Ernst von Dohnanyi Citation, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 4 Grammy nominations, and, among other distinctions, she has been elected to the Florida Artists Hall of Fame, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has been Composer in Residence in the American Academy in Rome, and she was designated Musical America’s Composer of the Year for 1999. She holds the Francis Eppes Distinguished Professorship at Florida State University.

A prolific composer in virtually all media, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich has seen her works performed by most of the leading American orchestras and by major ensembles abroad. Orchestral works have been commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Louisville Orchestra, Detroit Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, Boston Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic, Buffalo Philharmonic, San Diego Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and the IRIS Orchestra.

Soloists who have premiered Zwilich’s work include Itzhak Perlman and Doc Severinsen. Conductors who have led premiere performances include Sir George Solti, Daniel Barenboim, Loren Maazel, Christoph von Dohnanyi, Zubin Mehta, Pierre Boulez, Seiji Ozawa, Zdenek Macal, John Nelson, JoAnn Falletta, Michael Stern, Lawrence Leighton Smint, Hugh Wolff, Gunther Herbig, Jahja Ling, Edo de Waart, Gunther Schuller, Leonard Slatkin, Fabio Machetti, Yoel Levi and Jesus Lopez-Cobos.

Chamber works have been commissioned by the Kennedy Center, the Library of Congress, the New York 92nd Street Y, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Chamber Music Northwest, the Saratoga Festival, San Francisco Performances, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Boston Musica Viva, the California EAR Unit and Carnegie Hall.

Many of her works have been issued on recordings, and Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians [8th edition] states: “There are not many composers in the modern world who possess the lucky combination of writing music of substance and at the same time exercising an immediate appeal to mixed audiences. Zwilich offers this happy combination of purely technical excellence and a distinct power of communication.”

Eric Schultz – Producer-Director, Peanuts Gallery

Eric Schultz is an award-winning producer and director of arts and cultural programming, with a specific interest in musical subjects. He was trained as a cellist and during the 1980s performed with orchestras and chamber groups in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Michigan. He is a graduate of the New School of Music in Philadelphia. In graduate school at Michigan State University, he studied with members of the Juilliard String Quartet during their chamber music residencies. Mr. Schultz developed an interest in television production after winning a competition which led to a performance on Michigan Public Television of the Elegie for Cello and Piano, by Gabriel Fauré. As the producer for Cultural Affairs at Michigan State University Public TV, Mr. Schultz received numerous regional Emmy nominations and awards, including one for Outstanding Cultural Affairs programming for a PBS distributed documentary called Gil Shaham: Violin. He produced a number of other nationally distributed programs for PBS, including: The Chenille Sisters: Making Rhythm; Marcus Roberts: Among Giants; Richard Stoltzman: Coming Together; and The Gardens: Birth of a Symphony.

In 2002, Mr. Schultz received a Mid-Atlantic Emmy Award for "My Two Dads," a segment for the PBS national project American Family Portraits. In 2003, he received an Emmy for “Young at Heart,” a feature about Ocean Grove, New Jersey resident Dorothy Young, Harry Houdini’s last assistant on Broadway in the 1920s. In 2005, Mr. Schultz received a New York Emmy for a program featuring legendary choral conductor Joseph Flummerfelt. Eric Schultz joined NJN’s State of the Arts in October 2001.

Florida State University
Symphony Orchestra

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich - Composer

Eric Schultz – Producer/Director