Brown University Department of Music Box 1924, Providence, RI 02912
Press Contact Drew Moser / 401-863-3236 Academic Program & Outreach Coordinator
May 10, 2018 / For Immediate Release
Mark Seto Hired as the New Director of the Brown University Orchestra
Providence, RI—The Department of Music is proud to announce conductor, musicologist, and violinist Mark Seto as Director of the Brown University Orchestra effective July 1, 2018. In addition to bringing his vast experience as an educator and orchestra director to the classroom and stage, Seto will assist in the development of Brown’s new Performing Arts Center. Seto comes directly from Connecticut College where he was Associate Professor of Music and director of the Connecticut College Orchestra. He also holds the position of Artistic Director and Conductor of The Chelsea Symphony in New York City. Seto earned a BA in Music from Yale University and an MA, MPhil, and PhD in Historical Musicology from Columbia University.
About Mark Seto
Mark Seto leads a wide-ranging musical life as a conductor, musicologist, teacher, and violinist. In addition to his new appointment at Brown University, he continues as Artistic Director and Conductor of The Chelsea Symphony in New York City.
At Connecticut College, Seto directed the faculty ensemble and the Connecticut College Orchestra, and taught music history, theory, conducting, and orchestration. During Seto’s tenure at Connecticut, he helped double student enrollment in the orchestra. Furthermore, the ensemble assumed a greater role in the College’s cultural and intellectual life. Seto aimed to connect the learning he and his ensembles undertook in rehearsal to themes that resonate with them as engaged global and local citizens. For example, Seto programmed Tchaikovsky’s “Little Russian” Symphony and used the opportunity to convene a discussion about Russian-Ukrainian relations with Connecticut College’s Slavic Studies Department; and he served as music director for a staged production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, partnering with the New London organization Safe Futures to offer programming about domestic violence.
Since Seto’s tenure with The Chelsea Symphony began in 2011, the ensemble has programmed more than three dozen world premieres and has had debut performances at David Geffen Hall, Alice Tully Hall, the DiMenna Center for Classical Music, Merkin Concert Hall, and Symphony Space. Under his leadership, the orchestra launched an annual composition contest for early-career composers in partnership with Gerard Schwarz, Conductor Laureate of the Seattle Symphony and Music Director of the All-Star Orchestra; and established an outreach program to bring music to Rikers Island Correctional Facility. Seto’s recent engagements with The Chelsea Symphony include a popup performance in Times Square to promote the BBC America series Blue Planet 2, and an Earth Day collaboration at the American Museum of Natural History featuring Become Ocean, the Pulitzer Prize-winning work by John Luther Adams.
Seto’s research as a musicologist explores issues of influence, nationalism, and cultural identity in fin- de-siècle Paris. Seto’s articles and reviews have been published in 19th-Century Music (University of California Press), Nineteenth-Century Choral Music (Routledge, 2013), Nineteenth-Century Music Review (Cambridge University Press), Current Musicology, and Nineteenth-Century French Studies. Working from manuscript sources in Paris, Seto prepared performance materials and conducted the western hemisphere premiere of La Nuit et l’amour by Augusta Holmès, one of the most significant women composers of the French Third Republic.
Seto was the founding music director of Morningside Opera in New York City, a company acclaimed by The New York Times for its “bold imagination and musical diligence.” In 2009, he conducted the western hemisphere premiere of J.A. Hasse’s Alcide al bivio in a production praised by Opera News as a “lively, well calibrated performance.” He has also served as Assistant Conductor of the New York Youth Symphony, Yale Symphony Orchestra, and Columbia University Orchestra.
Mark Seto studied at the Pierre Monteux School for Conductors in Maine, where he served as an assistant to music director Michael Jinbo for two seasons. His conducting teachers include Lawrence Leighton Smith and Shinik Hahm, and he has participated in workshops with Kenneth Kiesler, Daniel Lewis, Donald Portnoy, Donald Thulean, and Paul Vermel. He was the 2003 recipient of the Yale Friends of Music Prize and has been honored with an ASCAP Morton Gould award.
About the Brown University Orchestra
The origins of the Brown University Orchestra (BUO) date back at least to 1858, the year a “Grand Concert...accompanied by the Orchestra of Brown University” took place in Seekonk, Massachusetts. The modern era of the BUO began in the winter of 1919, when the College Orchestra was established. Renamed the Brown-Pembroke Orchestra in 1940, it became the Brown University Orchestra in 1953. The Orchestra’s current membership consists of student musicians from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. The BUO has given concerts in Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall, toured China and Ireland, and performed with such renowned soloists as Itzhak Perlman, Navah Perlman ‘92, Mstislav Rostropovich, Isaac Stern, Christopher O’Riley, Eugenia Zukerman, Pinchas Zukerman, and Dave Brubeck. In 2006 Daniel Barenboim conducted the BUO during the first of his two residencies with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. The BUO has hosted Samuel Adler, Lukas Foss, Steve Reich, Steven Stucky, Joseph Schwantner, Michael Torke, Peter Boyer, Nico Muhly, and other distinguished composers- in-residence, and won 7 ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music. BUO alumni include current and former members of the New World Symphony, Nashville Symphony, North Carolina Symphony, Chattanooga Symphony Orchestra and Opera, Spoleto Festival Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and YouTube Symphony Orchestra.
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