Author: Ben Layman

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Newbrough Named Distinguished Steinway Artist

William Newbrough, Houghton professor of piano, has recently been named as a Distinguished Steinway Artist by piano manufacturer Steinway & Sons. This recognition places him alongside many piano greats in Steinway’s collection, ranging from Rachmaninoff to Billy Joel, and many others.

Newbrough2The process began when Newbrough was looking to buy a piano for personal use after having much experience with Steinway pianos in the studio and the practice room. He was able to strike up a relationship with the manager and owner of Denton, Cottier, & Daniels, a Steinway dealer located in Buffalo and Rochester, and the oldest one in the country and one that Houghton had established connection with in the past. Becoming a Distinguished Artist for Steinway requires a nomination from a dealership or individual with close connections to the company, a nomination that Newbrough received from the aforementioned manager.

After this, Newbrough was invited to apply by for the recognition of being a Steinway artist. “I had never really thought about it so much for myself,” he comments. “The artists they have there are just, ones that I have admired for years and are of such stature in the piano world.” The application process was lengthy, concerning details such as educational pedigree, performance history and future engagements, and perhaps one of the most important, what pianist you have studied under. Dr. Newbrough was a student of Leon Fleisher, another Distinguished Steinway Artist. Newbrough was also required to list his professional recordings and DVDs, as well as provide a testimonial of his opinion on Steinway pianos to be published by the company. The recognition from Steinway is described as a partnership, representing a kind of brand loyalty for fine craftsmanship.

Following sending in his application, Newbrough did not hear anything for the company for eight months, but was contacted soon after a performance at Carnegie Hall. “I would not be surprised if they had a representative there just doing some final verifications,” he says. Newbrough is most excited about the potential doors that the honor affords for both the music department, and Houghton College as a whole, citing the benefits of being connected to a good dealership. “I’m hoping this will potentially … manifest in an opportunity to be an all-Steinway school.” Newbrough also mentioned Steinway’s relationships with other individuals in the music world, hoping to make further connections for future Houghton performances, as well as the visibility that having a Distinguished Steinway Artist at an institution provides. “I would hope that it would be a tremendous draw for students in terms of student recruitment.”

The honor is just another to add to Newbrough’s extensive list of accomplishments, both nationally and globally, but the artist remains humble, looking upward. “Whatever honors are bestowed on me, I direct them heavenwards,” he says, adding that this particular recognition is just one more opportunity to reveal the glory of God. “For me, I never see a recognition as an end in itself … through my performance career, I’m always looking at what are these kinds of things that can open doors for ministry.”

 

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Stories In Focus

GCF to Put on Faculty and Staff Talent Show

On Friday, March 28th in the Recital Hall, Global Christian Fellowship will be hosting a Faculty and Staff Talent Show. Designed as a fundraiser for GCF missions, the talent show will feature varied acts from multiple disciplines in an effort to raise money for GCF-sponsored mission trips this upcoming summer. Free chai will be provided and there will be baked goods available for purchase, courtesy of the women’s basketball team.

unnamed (21)The event will be emceed by Paul Shea, adjunct professor of missions, who according to Bobby Mauger, GCF’s fundraiser and the driving force behind the show, is “going to open up with something wild” that will set the tone for the rest of the night. Although the show will feature a number of differing acts, including Ben Hegeman, adjunct professor of intercultural studies, performing impersonations of other professors, Mauger said that the primary emphasis of the show will be musical. “It’s a mix of some mostly serious musical talent and then some seriously funny musical talent.” Among those mentioned were a Mo-town group headlined by Michael Lastoria, director of counseling services, and a humorous opera selection sung by Amanda Cox, instructor of voice. Mauger was particularly laudatory of the musical styling of Steve Dunmire, Houghton’s director of church relations. “I think if people don’t know who he is, they’re going to want to know who he is after they hear him sing,” he comments.

The Faculty and Staff Talent Show has been in development for GCF as a fundraiser for quite some time, having false-started with the project last year after hearing of a similar event that Houghton alum Julian Cook was putting together. It was nearly cancelled this semester with the announcement of the campus-wide talent show, Houghton’s Got Talent, but when the event was called off, it made room for GCF to create their own.

All of this is borne out of an effort to get students to interact with missions and create awareness for some of the projects that GCF are involved in. “I’ve had a bunch of conversations with students around campus that are interested in doing missions,” said Houghton junior Olivia Neveu, GCF’s prayer coordinator. “How can we put ourselves out there more so that people are aware of it, so that people who are interested can get involved?”

In the past, GCF has raised money by selling chai during homecoming and selling t-shirts, but now, they are going for something bigger. “It started off by imagining what event would really just create a buzz,” said Mauger. “I’m hoping that it will catch on and be done more.”

With the creation of this event, the GCF cabinet decided that a more personal approach would be required. Together they decided which faculty they wanted to be a part of it and then distributed them among their cabinet members to approach them. Paul Young, professor of psychology, who will be singing at the event with his family, said that there was not an audition process, but that he received a personal invitation from Cindy Austin, admission counselor. Proceeds from ticket sales and the bake-sale will be placed in GCF’s mission fund and distributed primarily among Houghton sports teams and individuals doing internships with One Mission Society.

Tickets for the talent show are available for pre-sale for $3 and will be $5 at the door.

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Annual Student Juried Art Exhibition Opens Saturday

This Saturday, March 22, marks the opening of the 25th annual Student Juried Art Exhibition. Submissions were accepted from all Houghton students, provided that the works submitted had been completed within the last year. It will feature a wide variety of artwork including ceramics, printmaking, drawing, book art, and other forms of media, totaling nearly eighty pieces. The expansive selection of work makes it ideal as a sampling of what the art community at Houghton has to offer. “It’s a show we look forward to every year, both for the celebration of creativity among our student body and the recognition of the visual art, design and media programs,” said Jillian Sokso, chair for the department of art and director of the Ortlip Gallery.

Student_JuriedEach student can submit up to five pieces for the show, though only three are placed in the exhibition. This year, all submissions were subject to a jury process by artist Ian McMahon. McMahon is the co-founder and co-director of The Belfry, an artist-run exhibition venue located in Hornell, and his work in sculpture has been shown both nationally and internationally. Many Houghton art majors are already familiar with him and his work, having spoken previously during a Fine Arts Seminar and given critiques.

Amanda Irwin, assistant to the gallery and a junior Art and English double major, says that the great majority of work to be done leading up to the opening had concerned dismantling the previous gallery exhibition. In contrast with a visiting artist who would have specific parameters on how their work was to be displayed, this show requires a certain amount of responsibility and organizational skills from the gallery assistants and Sokso. “Jillian will go and look at all of our pieces and arrange them… and us as the gallery assistants go and hang everything and do the technical aspect of it. Later on we also do lighting ourselves.” Irwin assists alongside Alex Hood, Jordan Smith, and Lydia Wilson.

A number of awards will be designated during the event, also determined by McMahon. These awards include those such as the Ben Moss Award (3rd Place), the Alumni Award (2nd Place), and the Paul Maxwell Memorial Award (1st Place), along with the Ortlip Award for Best in Show, with cash prizes for each. Additionally, there will be a personal selection bid for two pieces of artwork by the College President and the First Gentleman, respectively.

The student show provides an opportunity for the college to acquire Houghton student artwork to display on campus. “We usually have a large turnout for this show,” says Irwin, “just because it’s student work, so it’s really fun to see if you got in and what they got or if your friends did, that sort of thing.”  Jillian Sokso also comments on the contemporary nature of many of the pieces. “The Student Juried Exhibition is an exciting showcase of what is happening in the visual arts,” she says. The entire exhibition will be available for viewing in the gallery until April 18th.

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Stories In Focus

Creation Care House: Engaging in Environmental Stewardship

Designed as an effort to create more options for students to get involved in the act of environmental stewardship, the Creation Care Townhouse is continuing to have an impact. Houghton’s Sustainability Coordinator, Brian Webb, sent out an e-mail last summer to all townhouse residents, seeking anyone who was interested in the opportunity to pursue creation care. Webb said that his purpose in creating the Creation Care House was to designate a place that could engage students on the topic of creation care in a more intentional and ongoing way. “I was familiar with the model of a living learning community…I really liked the idea of taking that model and applying the topic of creation care to it, particularly since creation care, stewardship, sustainability, whatever you want to call it, is very appropriate to the residential context.” Webb also said that these types of communities are particularly impactful because when students go on to live on their own, they are able to take the principles they’ve implemented and continue them into an awareness of how their habits impact the world.

After conferring among their housemates, future residents of Perkins 49 took Webb up on his offer. House member Lauren Bull stated that their admittance into the house was anything but grueling. “There wasn’t really a formal selection, we just kind of volunteered,” she said. Her housemates include Winona Wixson, Brittany Libby, Lydia Wilson, Jory Kauffman, and Amy Eckendorf. After the group had been selected, a number of different options were afforded to them in terms of which area of creation care they wanted to explore. The group chose food and water.

CreationCare2

Bull said this meant they would be composting, low-flow faucets and toilets would be installedin the house, as well as having monthly meetings and brainstorming sessions with Brian Webb to learn more about sustainable food practices and the difficulty of eating organically in college, among other things. It was all part of this initiative that moved two large composting bins to the townhouse area, available for all residents’ usage.Webb said his goal for designating the Creation Care House was to create something that was both internally and externally focused in educating and encouraging good stewardship practices within the townhouse, as well as enabling the students to take their knowledge to the community, particularly in the other townhouses. Last semester, the group sponsored a visit to a local farm where all the vegetables were naturally grown. Bull said the visit along with listening to the farmer and his wife talk about his farming practices was part of the learning process of coming to awareness in being more intentional. “It’s really cool to see how achievable it is. They made it look very attainable.” The venture was posted with only 24 slots, all of which were filled. The first of this month marked a showing of the documentary Fresh, examining America’s food system, all organized and promoted by the Creation Care House. They are currently planning gardening workshops to be held later this semester.

As for the future of the program, Webb said he is leaving room for expansion. “Ideally,” he said, “I would like to get two houses next year. If I had two quality applications from groups of students who are committed to it, then I would accept two houses.” He also mentioned that the following year’s application process would be a little more difficult, hoping for more of a competitive bidding process, not made possible this year because of the rapidness with which this was developed. He is also hoping that next year the Creation Care House will be able to bring in some sort of creation care expert each month about their area of expertise, adding weight to the program’s intentionality and credibility. In its educational and communal benefits as well as its perceptible success, the Creation Care House has measured out to be something sustainable in itself.

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Grading Scale Undergoes Changes for Next Semester

The college has recently proposed a motion to relinquish the current grading scale in favor of a non-numerical rubric. The rubric would still retain quality points for determining GPA, but it would also establish value based on certain adjectives such as Excellent, Good, Average, etc. Each department would have the responsibility of maintaining grading criteria that are consistent across each discipline, the results of which would be funneled through the rubric.

Grading_Scale_CMYKThe decision stems from multiple sources, the principal cause being the results of a faculty survey taken in the Fall of 2012. The results, collated from 68 participants, discovered that more than half of faculty members (54.4%) substituted the official grading scale with their own, and an even higher number (61.5%) reported that they did not believe that Houghton’s current grading scale was effective in portraying student learning.

Professor of education, Connie Finney, was especially critical of the current grading system, citing philosophical problems with its attempt to artificially create a normal curve. “With the current grading scale, you have a small A, a larger B, an even larger C, and a small D. This pushes students toward C, the largest category. What should be a naturally occurring phenomenon ends up getting manipulated.” She regarded the new rubric as quite an improvement, with the caveat that C’s are still defined as ‘average.’

Dean Mills Woolsey said that prior to the survey there had been a few discussions, but after the studies were done, it really helped bring the conversation to a place where they could act on it. “If it were like 10% of the faculty then you would say, ‘oh, we’ve got to get after that 10%,’ but if it’s that significant, it means that there’s probably a problem with the system itself.”

The decision has passed through the Academic Council, gained approval from the faculty, with the final step being to publish the new rubric in the 2014-2015 catalog. This publishing would stand as a contract to the New York State’s Department of Education, while eliminating discrepancies between faculty members’ usage of alternate systems and creating more flexibility within each department.

Another primary reason which Dean Mills Woolsey cited was behind the decision lay in some of the negative reactions that parents had to Houghton’s grading scale, especially in regard to their students’ eligibility for scholarships that are dependent on maintaining a certain GPA, as well as an extensive conversation on the Houghton Parents Facebook page, dated in March of 2012, revealed a parent’s concern that their child’s test scores, which would typically be higher in many other schools, was weighed down at Houghton due to the stringency of the grading system.

Dean Mills Woolsey said that Houghton’s current grading scale has had a long established tradition here, but she also said that many other institutions, especially those Houghton considers as sister schools such as Wheaton or Asbury, use a similar grading rubric. “The fact that most of the schools that we consider peer schools or that we benchmark with don’t use a numerical scale suggests that maybe we’re finally coming into some kind of a mainstream.” She cautioned against those who would claim it a dumbing down, saying that grading varies greatly from discipline to discipline. “Some disciplines are very quantitative and they lend themselves to that numerical scale, and other disciplines are more qualitative. You have to somehow translate what you’re doing into numbers in order to make that scale.” Mills Woolsey believes that the rubric’s implementation will eliminate many previous problems that they have had, and that this new change is the right step forward.

 

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Stories In Focus

Brothers Collaborate on New Gallery

This past Friday marked the opening of the Word / Image art show at the Ortlip Gallery, a creative collaboration between brothers John and Ronald Leax. Ron Leax is currently a Professor of Art at Washington University in St. Louis, and the affectionately named Jack returns to Houghton after a long career of teaching in the English and Writing department. The display features pyramidal formations of several of Ron’s experimental pieces alongside vinyl cuttings of a selection of John’s poems.

Ron was quick to point out that most of his work has been as a sculptor, but a decade-old back injury forced him into other artistic pursuits. Nothing has been lost in the transition; Ron’s scientific precision testifies to that. “Making art is how I figure out the world,” he said, a sentiment shared by his like-minded brother. “We’re still trying to figure it out ourselves,” Jack admitted, saying that he and his brother share a lot of the same concerns and explore many of the same themes, just with differing contexts. He described the collaboration process as being very casual. “We knew over the years that we’d been working on the same kind of themes so we decided that it would be interesting to see them together.”

Initially, Ron created a model of the gallery with an arrangement of all of his pieces, but Jack was unaware of the actual pieces being shown, only the titles. After seeing this model, Jack was able to implement his own arrangement of his selection of poems based on what he knew that his brother was doing. The whole thing is a process of investigation into uncharted territory, taking cues from Ron’s advice in that “you have to use your work to figure something out, not using what you already know.” Although he described his work as “drawings,” Ron is not averse to employing a large variety of materials, among them being coffee, insects, wine, and most unusually, urinal cakes. “Anything that will make a mark is free game,” he said.

Art faculty member Ted Murphy described the images as being largely diary entries that harbor a combination of personal story and record-keeping. “They feel like maps, like they’re trying to quantify an emotional world,” he commented. “I think if you think about that and you think about poetry it’s exactly the same.” Jack said that Ron was instrumental in the poetry selection process, saying that he encouraged Jack to utilize poetry that he had never intended to show publicly. He remarked that the original poems were exercises in disciplinarily pulling back and the minimalistic results were markedly different from his other work. According to Murphy, this is advantageous in complementing the visual pieces, and said that this makes Leax’s poetry more concentrated and image-based. Jack was able to define the creative partnership as juxtaposing the work of two people who have common background and have been working on common themes independently for many years and seeing how close they come. Word / Image will be on display in the gallery through March 13th.