Featured Faculty:
Matthews, Britt

Professor Tamara Matthews (Vocal)

Imagine an instrument whose sound is velvety and warm, glistening with light. Imagine notes emanating from this instrument in bell-like purity, finely focused and vibrant. Imagine this instrument as someone’s voice. You are imagining Tamara Matthews.

Regarded as one of the finest singers of her generation, Matthews is a world-renowned soprano whose status makes her a much sought-after instructor among aspiring vocalists at Furman.

Just ask Joseph Stanek ’08. Last spring he approached Matthews to pick her brain on possible singing opportunities for the summer. He was thinking there might be a fun and enriching local venue that he hadn’t heard about. She was thinking France.

Matthews e-mailed Richard Cowan, artistic director of the Lyrique-en-mer/Festival de Belle-Ile, a summer opera festival in its tenth year in Belle-ile-en-mer, an island off the coast of Brittany, France.  Matthews, who has performed six times at the Festival Lyrique, was influential in convincing Cowan several years ago that positions for supporting singers could be filled by talented college vocalists.

It was suddenly bon voyage for Stanek, along with Erika Powell ’08 and Ben Moore ’08. The three are the latest in a line of Furman singers who have benefited from Matthews’ vast network of connections, cultivated from an illustrious career in the operatic world. Their trip brings them face to face with the world’s finest vocal talent, some hailing from La Scala and the Met.

Why the passion for introducing her students to exciting singing opportunities worldwide? It all traces back to her college experience and the impact of her instructors.

“I entered college to become a pianist,” says Matthews. “I eventually got into the vocal performance of the Baroque style, and a couple of professors took me aside and said, ‘I think you should pursue this.’ That really inspired me.”

Stanek, Powell and Moore have all been mentored by Matthews and are deeply drawn to her, not only by the depth of her repertoire and her seemingly endless list of amazing concert performances (from Carnegie Hall to the Orchestre Philharmonique du Strasbourg) but also by her confident presence.

“She said something that has stayed with me,” says Stanek, who is pursuing a career in opera. “She told me, ‘I’m at home in the spotlight. I can stand in the spotlight and communicate with people in my better language.’ I feel that way too.”

These three students are examples, in Matthews’ opinion, of what is possible for Furman students to achieve. “I think that there is enough freedom built into the school that we can gear things individually to each student,” says Matthews.

She mentions the resources available at Furman for students who have the imagination and the will to succeed. Stanek, Powell and Moore’s summer excursion to France was made possible largely from funds arranged by the Furman Advantage program, which exists precisely to promote this type of creative, enriching extracurricular activity.

“It’s about getting out there and singing. It’s also about learning to work well with others,” explains Matthews. “There are a lot of elements to being a good performer that have to do with your ability to meet and greet people. To be able to go places where you don’t know the culture, and to love that experience.”

But Matthews cautions her students to resist the temptation of doing too much, too fast. For her, college is a time to grow as a musician and also to grow socially as a regular student. This is why she thinks a music program like that at Furman is a better fit for the talented, well-rounded vocalist than the experience in a traditional conservatory.

“The voice matures a bit later than you think,” says Matthews. “Maybe when a student is twenty-three you get an idea of what he or she has.”

Furman delivers a full college experience, with the opportunity for students to explore other disciplines while at the same time receiving as much attention as they need in music instruction.

Plus, you never know what kind of great opportunity will pop up in the course of four years. You might end up five thousand miles away from home, singing your heart out.

Professor Mark Britt (Trombone)

For professor Mark Britt, teaching music is just an extension of living the musical life. 

“Teaching at a university depends on which hat you put on in that five minutes. It’s hard to separate yourself from being a performer and a teacher. I love to play, I love to teach. It’s hard to decide: is this what I do, or is this who I am?”

Britt began his music career the way many American kids do: middle school band. He had high hopes of playing the drums. The school was out of drum kits when he arrived. He picked up a trombone. The rest is history.

“I love to play the trombone, that’s just what I do,” says Britt, whose performance career speaks to this love affair with brass. No stranger to the public stage, Britt performs frequently with the Greenville Symphony and is principal trombonist with the Spartanburg Philharmonic and the Hendersonville Symphony.  He is also a member of the nationally touring Zephyr Brass Trio, which has played at events such as the International BrassFest and the International Horn Society Symposium.

At home in the world of jazz, Britt was a member of the USAIR Jazz Orchestra for five years and has appeared as a freelance performer with artists such as Bernadette Peters, Dinah Shore, Tony Bennett, Frankie Valli, Johnny Mathis, The Moody Blues, Kevin Mahogany, Dione Warwick, CeCe Winans, Kenny Rogers and Michael W. Smith, to name a few.

He is also the founder of the Palmetto Posaunen, trombone ensemble comprised of university trombone professors, symphony musicians, freelance trombonists and band directors. The ensemble includes musicians from five states across the Southeast and is one of only a small number of professional trombone choirs in the country.

Hard to believe he finds the time to teach, but in fact, Britt regards his keenness towards professional performance as something that keeps him fresh and strong as an instructor.

“Playing professionally is something you have to do for your own development,” he says. “For me artistically it satisfies the need I have—and it’s important when it comes time for the student to see what it is you are trying to get them to do and to provide models for them.”

Also professor of the euphonium and tuba, Britt regards every interaction with his students as a potential learning experience.

“Because Furman is such a small place you have a close relationship with students beyond the classroom,” Britt explains. Sometimes he meets his students at Pete’s, a locally famous hamburger restaurant a mile from campus. “We’re not just hanging out at Pete’s having a milkshake,” he says, “All of these situations become learning situations.”

For Britt, playing the trombone and teaching others how to play go hand in hand. “That’s a person’s philosophic decision,” he says, “whether they will teach and play or just teach. But doing both is what keeps me going.”

Professor Anita Burroughs-Price (Harp)

The first time Anita Burroughs Price saw a harp was in the fourth grade. “They would take all the 4th graders to listen to the Greenville Symphony every year,” she said. “It was on the McAlister Auditorium stage at Furman. I dragged my mom the next night to the symphony to hear it.”

She attended Furman to study music, and was Furman’s first harp major. She earned her master’s degree at Yale, did further study as a Rotary Scholar at London’s Royal College of Music, and is now a faculty member at Furman, her studio only steps away from where she first heard the instrument. She is also principal harpist for the North Carolina Symphony in Raleigh.

It is obvious she is a busy woman. But that description doesn’t nearly begin to cover her life, her teaching or her music.

Burroughs-Price was recently featured in the Raleigh Observer and on the Hallmark Channel, not as much for her musical prowess as for her humanitarian efforts. In addition to her classical performances, she takes her harp and uses her artistic gifts to comfort others. “Sometimes it’s people near the end of their lives,” she says, “sometimes it’s just after a hard surgery. Sometimes it’s premature babies.”

She first began doing this as a volunteer for friends, and it broadened to include people referred to her by doctors, nurses, ministers and friends. Sometimes it’s 15 hours a month; sometimes 15 a week. “I play ‘Amazing Grace,’ ‘This is My Father’s World,’ ‘The Tennessee Waltz’ — whatever would be of comfort. When people are close to dying, but can still move their arms, I have seen them dancing to this music.”

Recently, she says there was a small girl whose dad was in his final days. “I was going over there three times a week or so and finally I just left my harp there rather than transport it back and forth. The mother told me that the daughter would strum on it . . . and finally told her father, ‘Daddy, it will be okay for you to go to heaven, because I know you’ll like the music there.’”

Unlike many other musicians who perform these type services, Burroughs-Price does so at no cost. “This is something I want to give back to people without any financial concern whatever,” she says.

And give back she does. After Hurricane Katrina, a number of those displaced by the storm ended up in a shelter in the Raleigh area. Burroughs-Price showed up at the shelter with her harp, regaling them with blues, Gershwin, and favorites such as “When the Saints go Marching In.”

Proceeds from her recent CD, “Healing Touch,” funded replacement equipment for some of the New Orleans musicians who had lost their instruments. “You turn the resources into blessing your neighbor,” she says.

Giving back is a theme you see repeated in the various facets of Burroughs-Price’s life. When she talks about teaching, she says, “I feel like I’m giving back to a community that invested greatly in me,” she says.

As a student at Furman, Burroughs-Price participated in a study abroad program in France, and studied with the world-renowned Catherine Michel at the Paris Opera. Understandably, it was difficult to find an instrument for her to use while she was there, but faculty members worked until they made it happen.

Flash forward to Burroughs Price teaching at Furman and Erin Knight as her student. This fall, Erin is going to Italy, studying with a student of Catherine Michel. And Burroughs-Price and others have helped Erin find a harp. “A number of us worked together,” says Burroughs-Price, “and we went through about 15 different sources trying to find someone to rent a harp to a student for three months. And we did it!”

Professor Daniel Koppelman (Piano and Music Technology)

What do you get when you take a college student majoring in pre med and combine a love of gadgets, a talent for math and an ever-broadening interest in music? You get Daniel Koppelman and his career in music technology. 

For Koppelman, music technology brought together music and gadgets and numbers. “It’s a natural niche for me as a musician,” he says. “I love to work with things that are new and evolving.”

Pre-med morphed into music, and Koppelman went from UC Berkeley to UC-San Diego to San Francisco State, where he got his undergraduate degree in piano performance. His master’s at Indiana University followed not long afterwards, and then he headed back to UC-San Diego where he combined his interests in contemporary music, rhythm, and computers and completed his doctorate.

Koppelman explains that music technology takes many forms: the commercial side of recording and production; computer-aided-instruction; music notation software as well as burning cds, editing audition tapes. Then, his face lighting up, he says, “there is a small part: using technology in live performance in a creative way, doing things you just can’t do with acoustic instruments. My background as a performer makes this the most interesting part for me.”

For Koppelman, music technology is “like one big multifaceted instrument, which expands what you can do in real time, live in front of an audience.” And he does perform in front of a live audience on a regular basis. In addition to solo appearances, he and his wife, Ruth Neville, comprise duo runedako, performing a repertoire that ranges from “traditional literature for two pianos and piano four-hands to interactive works for piano, electronics, and computer.”

All music majors run into Koppelman in his Introduction to Music Technology course. In that class, in addition to introducing digital audio, MIDI, notation, and multimedia applications, he teaches about binary numbers and how computers process information. At that point, he jokes, he often sees students fall into two different types: “those who love math and those who, uh, don’t.”

His advanced courses are entirely different. They are filled with students whom he calls “the geeks, but in a good way,” those who like working with computers and electronics, solving puzzles and experimenting. “If you like that,” he says, “and love sound, then music technology is for you.”

Koppelman hails from fairly large educational institutions. And yet he seems to have settled in quite well at Furman, which he describes as “smaller than my high school.” He says that an experience in his first week set the tone for his professional life at Furman. “I was walking across campus and saw [President] David Shi. At these other places, you could go years and not see the president, so I was wondering if he would even remember who I was. To my surprise, he said to me, ‘Hi, Dan. I listened to your CD last night.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, I could really like it here.’”

He likes his students as well, and he characterizes them as “creative, talented, interested and interesting.” This year, he has eight students focusing on music technology, students who are “really enthusiastic, to the point of fighting over time in the advanced studio.” These students have discovered what Koppelman did in his combination of music, math and gadgets: “It’s one way of being a real 21st-century musician.”

In 2005, Koppelman was one of two Furman professors selected to receive a prestigious ‘Career Enhancement’ grant, funded by the Mellon Foundation. In addition to funding lectures and performances as far afield as Paris and Odessa (Ukraine), this award enabled him to commission four new compositions, which were premiered as part of a week-long “live sampling festival”—involving faculty colleagues, students, guest composers, and a visiting artist from Amsterdam—at Furman in May, 2006.

Koppelman recently released Escapement, a 2-disc CD/DVD set of 21st-century music for piano and electronics, which documents work he did while on sabbatical in 2003.

Professor Trudy Fuller (Voice)

When Trudy Fuller is teaching voice students at Furman, she pulls parallels from a lot of different areas: athletics, acting, literature, history, even archaeology. Singing, she says, is more than just, “Stand and Deliver.”

For Fuller, it’s a combination of the necessary abdominal strength and flexibility, the proper technique to avoid injury, the extremes way outside of speaking voice range. It’s a constant discovery in finding out the nature of a student’s voice, and then encouraging that student to not only sing, but play the part. And, it’s the literature, the history, the knowledge of what’s gone on before.

When all those things come together for someone, “that person can be formidable on the stage,” she says.

And she should know. She’s been fairly formidable on the stage herself, having appeared with such major American opera companies as the Houston Grand Opera and the Lyric Opera of Chicago. And she’s been a major influence for some formidable voices such as mezzo-soprano Betsy Bishop, profiled on the student profiles page.

A graduate of the University of Arizona where she earned a doctoral of music arts in vocal performance, Fuller grew up playing piano, flute and saxophone. Her formal vocal training began at the University of Northern Colorado, where she received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees. She also studied in Chicago at the Center for American Artists, where she trained for opera. In addition to voice, she says, ballet movement, fencing and personal coaching rounded out her studies.

Fuller has been at Furman since 1983. In 2003, she received the Alester G. Furman, Jr., and Janie Earle Furman Award for Meritorious Teaching. She’s clearly telling the truth when she says, “I love acting. I love singing. I love music.” But her eyes light up when she talks about the students she teaches.

“You get to know them,” she says. “You see them weekly, more than weekly. You see them grow. They come in undecided. And there are so many opportunities at Furman…recitals, concerts. The faculty here helps them decide where their niche is.”

The scores of successful graduates who have studied with her and the fortunate voice students who make up her current studio share the good fortune that Trudy Fuller found her own niche at Furman.

 

Professor Steven Walter (Guitar)

As a teenager, when Steven Walter asked for a guitar, his dad thought it was just another phase, and he told him that if we wanted one, he’d have to build it himself.

He had no idea what he had started.

Walter and a friend, whose father was an amateur cabinet maker, set out to build a classical guitar. His friend’s guitar was meticulous, but never completed. “I got mine done,” he says, “but it was like Picasso’s guitar— asymmetrical. But it worked. It was mine.”

And that guitar was the first of many. “I’d build one, play that one, build another one, sell that. I did that all the way through college and my first year of grad school.” His second year at Boston Conservatory, his parents gave him a concert-quality instrument and he quit building for the next six years, finishing his master’s degree and beginning his doctoral studies at Florida State.

At Florida State, he found himself one of 50 guitar majors and none of them knew how to fix guitars. “So I began repairing,” he says. “I learned a lot about what made really fine instruments. Plus it paid for my rent and my wife’s engagement ring.”

Repairing instruments got him back into building them, and after his 16th or 17th, he realized the ones he was building were as good or better than the one he was playing. He’s been playing his own ever since, and building more, four at a time.

Walter has been at Furman since 1997, teaching music appreciation and music history in addition to giving guitar lessons, building guitars and performing. Teaching at Furman, he says, is fun and challenging. “Furman isn’t a school where you have to stay a few days ahead of the students; here, you have to stay a few years ahead.” He characterizes music majors at Furman as “a pretty driven group,” undergraduates who perform at a high level.

Master craftsman, gifted teacher, acclaimed performer. What gives him the most satisfaction? That all depends on when you ask the question. Summers, he works on building guitars, up to his elbows in wood shavings. In the fall, teaching is more consuming, and guitar building gets put on hold till Christmas break. Most of his concerts are in the winter and spring, when he’s not building guitars, since that process results in nicked fingernails, problematic for a concert guitarist.

Most days, though, he’ll tell you it’s a combination of all three, punctuated by the challenge of raising two children, now four and two. That has added a new dimension to his life and to his music, particularly preparing for concerts. “The level of concentration to memorize an hour or more of music is really challenging with the freneticism of small children in your life,” he says.