DELVYN CASE (b. 1974) is a composer, conductor,
scholar, and educator based
in Boston. He holds degrees from Yale (B.A. summa cum
laude)
and the University of Pennsylvania, where he completed the Ph.D. in
composition
at the age of 26. Click HERE
for complete curriculum
vita.
Composer
Delvyn Case
has received honors and fellowships from numerous organizations,
including
BMI, The Society of Composers, The MacDowell Colony, The New York
Virtuoso
Singers, The Atlantic Center for the Arts, The Composers Conference at
Wellesley, The Chicago Ensemble, Sounds New, and The College Music
Society,
among others. In 1999, the extensive second movement of his sacred
vocal
work No Secret Hidden was a finalist for the Orvis
International
Prize in Vocal Composition. This piece, which also was honored with a
BMI
Student Composer Award in 2000, was released on a Gesher Records CD by
baritone Lawrence Indik and pianist Charles Abramovic in 2004. He
has been commissioned by virtuoso saxophonist Marshall Taylor, Boston
Symphony
Orchestra bass trombonist Douglas Yeo, and the Triton Brass Quintet,
which
premiered his new quintet, Perichoresis, at Tanglewood.
He is a member of Boston's oldest and most repsected composers'
collective, Composers in Red Sneakers, Inc. He has also served as
composer-in-residence at the MasterWorks Festival
in Winona Lake, Indiana and for Chamber Music NOW, Inc. He has
composed a symphony,
a saxophone concerto, an oratorio based upon African-American
spirituals,
several song-cycles, multiple chamber works, and a recent multimedia
piece
premiered by Boston's Radius Ensemble. Many of these pieces are sacred
and/or liturgical in nature. His composition teachers have
included
Steven Mackey, Ezra Laderman, David Rakowski, Sebastian Currier,
Elliott
Schwartz, James Primosch, and Jay Reise.
Delvyn Case is the composer of The Prioress's Tale,
a 75-minute chamber opera inspired by Chaucer, whose January
2008 premiere garnered feature preview articles in the Boston
Globe and the South Shore Patriot Ledger. A parable
about the
power of forgiveness to heal the wounds of religious intolerance, the
production was funded by grants from the
Massachusetts Cultural Council, a variety of churches and other
community
organizations, and numerous private donations. The touring
version of The Prioress's Tale
will be performed twice during the 2008-2009 season: once at Yale
University and once in Newton, Massachusetts, in a production jointly
sponsored by
Hebrew College and Andover-Newton Theoogical School.
Conductor
Delvyn Case has studied conducting with John Finney (associate
conductor of
the Handel & Haydn Society), LanFranco Marcelleti (Yale), and David
Hayes at the Curtis Institute of Music. He currently conducts the
60-member Eastern Nazarene College Choral Union, a college-community
choir whose recent repertoire has included Handel's Messiah, Mozart's Requiem, and Honegger's King David. In May 2008 the
Choral Union presented a joint concert with the acclaimed Aardvark Jazz
Orchesra featuring choral music from Duke Ellington's 1965 Sacred
Concerts. In May 2009 the Choral Union will be performing Brahms' Requiem.
Dr. Case is the former music director and conductor of two
college
orchestras: the Yale Bach Society Orchestra and Chorus and the Penn
Chamber Music Society. He also has significant experience as a
new-music conductor, having recently conducted Boston's Radius Ensemble
in the premiere of his piece Strange
Energy. In 2001 he was a finalist for the Music Director
position of California's Emyprean Ensemble. He has conducted numerous
outreach concerts for adults and children, including events at
elementary schools, high schools, and the Bedford (Mass.) VA Hospital.
Delvyn Case is also the former music director of the
80-member
ENC Gospel Choir, which in June 2005 opened for gospel superstar Israel
Houghton at Vision New England’s "Friends for Harmony Concert" at The
Bank
of America Pavilion. Under his leadership the choir also performed
twice before thousands at Boston's Hynes Convention as part of
Vision-New England's Congress (2005 and 2007), and toured extensivley
throughout the Northeast.
Educator
Delvyn Case teaches an extraordinarily wide range of courses at Eastern
Nazarene College in Quincy, Massachusetts, where he serves as Associate
Professor. He established ENC's program in music composition in 2004,
and now teaches a studio of 8 composers. He redesigned and currently
teaches ENC's four-semester comprehensive musicianship curriculum,
which includes ear-training, sight-singing, keyboard harmony, and
score-reading. He also teaches upper-level in orchestration,
twentieth-century music, and form & analysis. In addition, he
teaches a course on the history of popular music and a seminar in
songwriting. He will teach World Music starting in January 2009. He
received a Teaching Excellence Award for Eastern Nazarene College in
2005 after his first year as a faculty memebr.
Dr. Case is a former adjunct faculty member at Boston
College (2002-2006) where he taught a huge lecture course on the
history of popular music. He has also taught at the Univeristy of
Pennsylvania and at Lexington (Mass.) Christian Academy.
An
educator committed to the power of social change through music
education,
particularly in urban areas, Delvyn Case has taught music at all levels
and in a number of communities. In Philadelphia he developed
a mentoring program that paired undergraduate musicians at the
University
of Pennsylvania with students at West Philadelphia High School, where
he
also taught for three years. He has also organized numerous
concerts
and outreach events that have benefited community-service organizations
in a number of urban areas, including Housing For All (Framingham,
Mass.)
and the Quincy (Mass.) Teen Mothers Program. He currently works on
behalf
of Boston’s Project:Think Different, a non-profit organization
dedicated
to the creation and promotion of popular music with a positive social
message.
He has lectured on the ethical aspects of popular music at a variety of
schools and churches, at the 2002 College Music Society Northeast
Chapter
Meeting, and at South Boston’s Bicentennial Community Day at the Boston
Convention and Exhibition Center. During the summer of 2005 he
mentored
a number of gospel-rappers involved with the Bethel Church of the
Nazarene's
Altar Nation youth ministry, where he was able to combine his interest
in hip-hop pedagogy with his research in its rhythmic structure (see
below).
Scholar
Dr.
Case’s scholarly activities focus upon the study of popular music, in
particular,
three areas: hip-hop, the relationship of popular music to
Christianity,
and pedagogical issues/uses of popular music. He maintains a vigorous
schedule
as a lecturer and workshop leader, having recently spoken Harvard
Divinity School, Andover-Newton Theological School, the Association of
Independent Schools-New
England, Boston's Church of the Advent, and Texas A&M University,
where
his lectures on hip-hop and the blues were finded by the Glasscock
Center for Humanities Research.
His work on the rhythmic aspects of rap, presented in nascent form at
the
2004 National Conference of The College Music Society, has been called
"innovative" and "brilliant" by some of Boston's leading scholars
of popular music. He is currnetly expanding upon this research in order
to explore its pedagogical uses.
He is a frequent conributor to Books & Culture, an
interdisciplinary magazine published by Christianity Today. Reviews of
Alex Ross' The Rest is Noise:
Listening to the Twentieth Century and Michael P. Steinberg's: Listening to
Reason: Culture, and Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music
are forthcoming. He is also the co-author of a recent article on
Chrsitian
indie-rocker Sufjan Stephens.
Other Activities
In 2005 Delvyn Case founded the Musica Eclectica Concert
Series at Eastern Nazarene College, which has presented over fifty
concerts of classical, jazz, rock, hip-hop, world, and experimental
music on the ENC campus. He is also a founding member of
(and the pianist in) The Meltdown
Incentive, a Boston-based new
music/improvisation
ensemble, and was a charter member of Sweet the Sound, an ensemble
that
performs sacred American roots music.
Delvyn
Case lives in Quincy, Massachusetts, with his wife, LK, a portrait
photographer,
and their daughters, Alexandra (8) and Madeline (2).
The Cases attend Hope Church
(UCC/DCC) in Roslindale, Massachusetts, a community dedicated to
Christianity's call for social
justice.
