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Dr. Robert Vodnoy
is the Director of Orchestral Activities/Associate Professor of Strings at
Northern
State University, where he began teaching in
August, 2005. His duties include directing the Aberdeen University/Civic
Symphony and NSU Chamber Orchestra, and teaching History of Music III/IV and
String Methods. He teaches applied violin, viola, cello and double bass. In
the spring, 2009 semester, he will also teach
Introduction to Arts Management.
Vodnoy is in his ninth season as the Music Director of the Whiting Park
Festival Orchestra, a summer festival located twenty minutes from Chicago in northwest Indiana which runs from mid-July through Labor
Day. During the summer, he also teaches a graduate Fine Arts course at
Valparaiso University where he was an adjunct assistant professor of music
from 1998-2005. Vodnoy is President-Elect of the South Dakota Chapter of the
American String Teacher Association. In the summers of 2007 and 2008, he was
the Guest String Orchestra Conductor for the Rushmore Junior High Music
Camp. Other conducting activities in the Great Plains have included
conducting the South Dakota All-State Strings Honors Orchestra at the 2007
SDMEA Conference in Brookings and the North Dakota All-State String Festival
in Bismarck in 2006.
Dr. Vodnoy holds a B.M. summa cum laude and M.M. in composition from
Hartt College of the University of Hartford, and a D.M. in Orchestral Conducting from
Indiana
University. He studied
conducting with Charles Bruck at the Monteux Center for Conductors and Orchestral
Training from 1968-72. His orchestral compositions include Heart of Fire
(2005), Moving Bridges (2001), Warrior (1997), and
Generations (1996). Heart of Fire was premiered in 2005 by the
Southwest Michigan Symphony Orchestra under Vodnoy’s direction, and received
its second performance in 2006 by the Valparaiso University Symphony
Orchestra under Dr. Dennis Friesen-Carper. It is scheduled for performances
in 2008-09 with the South Dakota Symphony and the Omaha Symphony.
Vodnoy has guest conducted numerous orchestras throughout the United States,
including the Bellevue Philharmonic Orchestra, Billings Symphony,
Mississippi Symphony, Jacksonville Symphony, the Orchestra of the Colorado
Music Festival, and the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra. Internationally,
he has guest conducted the Orchestra of the Zhejiang Song and Dance Theatre
(China), Czech National Symphony, Orchestra
Sinfonica de Sanremo, National Philharmonic of Taiwan, Seoul
Philharmonic, and the Jönköping Symphony. In 2001, he formed the American
International Youth Orchestra and led it on a three-city tour of China. He was the Music Director of
the Southwest Michigan Symphony Orchestra from 1975-2005 and Music Director
of the Northwest Indiana Symphony Orchestra from 1976-96. He has conducted
performances with artists such as Itzhak Perlman, Andre Watts, Marilyn
Horne, and with the Grand Rapids Ballet, the Michigan Opera Theatre, and the
Indianapolis Ballet Theatre.
Vodnoy toured northwest Indiana and
northern
Michigan with violinist Eric Lawson, performing
violin duo concerts in Whiting and Valparaiso,
Indiana and Alpena and Glen Arbor, Michigan. He performs
regularly in recital at Northern State University. He was a member of the
Hartford Symphony Orchestra from 1969-72. At Indiana University, he studied violin with Urico
Rossi, first violinist of the Berkshire String Quartet. Vodnoy performs on a
1932 Iginio Siega violin.
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