Sigma Alpha Iota

sai-national.org • Summer 2024 3 Music Notes We are pleased to welcome Angela Silver as the new Editor of PAN PIPES, beginning with the Fall 2024 issue. As a musician working in publishing, Angela is thrilled to accept the role. She is an initiate of the Sigma Omega chapter at Susquehanna University, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing. Despite the degree, she spent much of her time in the music building as a member of the symphonic band and stadium band, and also took private flute lessons. Angela went on to receive a Master of Science in Publishing and has spent a career in Book Production across various companies. But she never let go of her musical roots — she affiliated with the New York Alumnae Chapter right out of college, serving as Vice President-Membership, Editor, Recording Secretary, and Webmaster across the years. She also previously affiliated with the Central New Jersey Alumnae Chapter, and she was an active member of the chapter's flute choir. Most recently, Angela has served as a Grant Director for SAI Philanthropies, Inc., overseeing the International Study Grant for Graduate Students. She is a recipient of the Sword of Honor and Rose of Honor. Angela continues to play all variants of flute, from piccolo to bass. Wherever she's lived, she's found a local group or parish to offer her musical skills (and is always trying to form a flute choir). She currently lives in New York with her husband. New PAN PIPES Leadership Arts icon and activist Yoko Ono is this year's recipient of the prestigious Edward MacDowell Medal. Ono, whose ground-breaking and influential career as an artist began in the downtown New York scene in the early 1960s and has continued across seven decades, has developed a body of work encompassing performance, experimental filmmaking, conceptual and participatory art, music, visual arts, and global peace activities. The breadth of her pioneering work runs from the avant-garde to the pop and dance music charts. "It's an incredible honor that my mother, Yoko Ono, will be awarded the MacDowell Medal," said her son Sean Ono Lennon. "The history and list of past recipients is truly remarkable. It makes me very proud to see her art appreciated and celebrated in this way." MacDowell, the nation's oldest and preeminent artist residency program, has awarded the Medal annually since 1960 to giants of the art world, selecting individuals who have had an indelible impact on culture. "MacDowell is honored to celebrate Yoko Ono for her groundbreaking, distinctly inventive, and enormously influential interdisciplinary art," said Madam Chairman of the Board, Fellow, and best-selling author Nell Painter. "There has never been anyone like her; there has never been work like hers. Over some seven decades, she has rewarded eyes, provoked thought, inspired feminists, and defended migrants through works of a wide-ranging imagination. Enduringly fresh and pertinent, her uniquely powerful oeuvre speaks to our own times, so sorely needful of her leitmotif: Peace." Painter will present the 64th MacDowell Medal to Ono's long-time music manager David Newgarden in a brief ceremony on Medal Day, Sunday, July 21. Ono, the first Asian woman to receive the honor, joins a notable cohort of past Medal recipients, including Robert Frost (1962), Willem de Kooning (1975), Isamu Noguchi (1982), Louise Bourgeois (1990), Stephen Sondheim (2013), Toni Morrison (2016), David Lynch (2017), and Art Spiegelman (2018). "Her seminal performance work Cut Piece confronts issues of gender, class, and cultural identity, immediately becoming the feminist classic it remains," added Painter. "Early in the Vietnam War, Ono and her husband John Lennon collaborated on 'Give Peace a Chance' and 'War Is Over,' adding 'If you want it.' Words we cherish right now. Only one other interdisciplinary artist, Merce Cunningham in 2003, has received the Edward MacDowell Medal. We are thrilled that Yoko Ono has honored us in this way." (Press Release, April 22, 2024) For more information, visit www.macdowell.org Yoko Ono Yoko Ono Pan's Cottage at MacDowell Pan's Cottage at MacDowell News from MacDowell

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