School Of Music

Leslie Dragan, a 2003 Liberty High School graduate, has been awarded the Stewart W. Myers Memorial Scholarship from Stu's Music in Westminster. She participated in the Maryland All-State Orchestra all four years of high school. She was principal viola in her junior and senior years and All-Eastern principal violist. In her junior year, she joined the Greater Baltimore Youth Orchestra and won the concerto competition. As a senior, she joined the Peabody Preparatory Orchestra. Dragan is attending an intensive music program at Boston University's Tanglewood Institute.

Metaphor The lowdown: The jazz quartet Metaphor released its debut album, Temporary Suspension, which features a mixture of contemporary jazz and chamber music, as well as African, Afro-Cuban, rock and hip-hop, this month. The group gives two performances tomorrow at An die Musik. If you go: The concerts are at 8 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. An die Musik is at 409 N. Charles St. $5-$10. Call 410-385-2638 or go to andie musiklive.com. Art exhibit The lowdown: The Caryn Martin: Atmospheric Abstractions exhibit runs at the Creative Alliance Wednesday through Aug. 16. Martin's works consist of several quasi-monochrome and almost abstract landscapes.

Cellist Troy Kenneth Stuart loves the instrument's soundHow would you like to play Carnegie Hall, meet Yo-Yo Ma and win a music scholarship -- all before turning 25?How, in other words, would you like to be Troy Kenneth Stuart?The cellist from West Baltimore likes it just fine, thank you very much.In fact, he says, "I love what I do so much sometimes I feel selfish."Today at 5 p.m. he'll share his passion for classical music during a free concert at the Eubie Blake Cultural Center.A self-described late bloomer, he grew up listening to everything from pop to gospel but didn't take up the cello until he was 13. "I loved the size of it and the sound of it. It fit my personality," says the outgoing 24-year-old.

Keyontia R. Hawkins, a 17-year-old soprano just graduated from the Baltimore School for the Arts, takes a step forward in a promising career with a performance at 8:30 tonight at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall in Washington.Recently named a Presidential Scholar, the nation's highest honor bestowed on graduating seniors, the Overlea resident has been invited to take part in Presidential Scholars National Recognition Week (June 15-20) in the nation's capital and will be honored by President Bush and members of the administration and Congress.

NEW YORK -- William Schuman, one of the most influential figures in American music in the past 50 years, died Saturday at 81.Mr. Schuman won two Pulitzer Prizes for his compositions, including the first Pulitzer ever awarded for music. He also was the president of the Juilliard School of Music during its greatest period of growth after World War II; was president of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts from its opening day in 1962 until 1969; and was instrumental in the creation of the Juilliard String Quartet, the Mostly Mozart Festival, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the New York Film Festival.

The student: Jay Brimley, 17 School: River Hill High Special achievement: Played violin with professional musicians at the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra's (BCO) Side-by-Side concert. Top high school players from the Maryland All-State Orchestra were selected to rehearse and perform with the BCO in February. What he learned from the BCO musicians: "Musical maturity. Instead of playing the music just to get the notes right, it's playing the music because you like it and because you want to get better."

With its swirling instrumental colors and irresistible surges of melody spinning out musical "Tales of the Arabian Nights," Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade is one of the most exotic, best-loved orchestral showpieces of them all. True to the work's pictorial elements, the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra's performance of Rimsky-Korsakov's exotic masterwork Saturday evening provided an interesting portrait of where the ASO stands in Year Two of conductor...

The Performing Arts Association of Linthicum continues its concert series at 3 p.m. Sunday with the Washington Brass playing music that spans 300 years.Selections range from a canzone by Giovanni Gabrieli, who lived from 1557 to 1612, to compositions by jazz pianist Fats Waller.Formed in 1991, the chamber ensemble appeared recently at the Kennedy Center in Washington, Epcot Center in Florida, Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown University and the National Cathedral.The group relies on Navy musicians.

Jacob Druckman,a conductor, composer and teacher who won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize in music, died of lung cancer Friday at the Yale Health Service in New Haven, Conn. He was 67.The composer spent most of his career teaching at universities, including Juilliard, Brooklyn College and the Yale School of Music. He was appointed chairman of the composition department at Yale in 1976, where he remained a professor of music until his death.Mr. Druckman's first large-scale orchestral work, "Windows," was premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1972, and won that year's Pulitzer Prize in music.

Gloria Sturgis StokesMusician, teacherGloria Sturgis Stokes, a retired teacher and music department head in the Baltimore public school system, died Friday at Bon Secours Hospital of complications from diabetes. She was 71.Mrs. Stokes, who played piano, violin and other instruments, started as a music education teacher in 1949 and retired in 1982 as head of the music department at the old Clifton Park Junior High School, where she had taught for about 10 years.The former Gloria Sturgis was born in West Point, Va., and reared in Baltimore, where she graduated from Dunbar High School.