The Hartt School Honors Retiring and Departing Faculty

The Hartt School Honors Retiring and Departing Faculty

The Hartt School honors and recognizes four of its longtime faculty members who are retiring or leaving the University at the end of this academic year.

Thank you Robert Black, Robert Carl, Steve Davis, and Tracey Moore for your years of service to The Hartt School and your contribution to the success of our students. All of us at Hartt and the University of Hartford wish you the best on your next endeavors.

Robert Black, Professor of Double Bass, has been a mainstay at The Hartt School. As a graduate student through his appointment as a Hartt professor, Robert’s interests have ranged from traditional orchestral and chamber music to solo recitals of cutting-edge music, collaborations with actors, music with computers, movement-based improvisations with dancers, and live-action painting performances with artists.  Robert is a current and founding member of the Bang On A Can All Stars, New York City’s hard-hitting music ensemble.  His commissions, collaborations, and performances include work with noted musicians from John Cage to D.J. Spooky, Elliott Carter to Meredith Monk, Cecil Taylor to Paquito d’Rivera, as well as many young, emerging composers. A recipient of numerous grants and awards, Robert received the Degree of Comendador - Mérito Cultural e Artistico from the Fundação Educacional, Cultural e Artistica Elezar de Carvalho in recognition of twenty-five years of distinguished contributions to the cultural and artistic life of Brazil. He also received a Bessie Award for his collaborative work with Yoshiko Chuma and the School of Hard Knocks.  His recital activities frequently take him to five continents, and he has appeared at major festivals (Takefu International Music Festival, Japan; Festival de Eleazar Carvalho, Fortalzea, Brazil; Colombo-Catalan Festival, Medellin, Colombia; the Helsinki Festival; NYYD, Estonia; etc.). He has been featured on radio and television broadcasts (Asia Live, Singapore, VPRO, Holland; NPR, United States; CBC, Canada; etc.) and been an artist-in-residence (Omnibus, Tashkent, Uzbekistan, American Center, Paris; the Banff Centre, Canada; Studio P.A.S.S., NYC).

The works of Robert Carl, Professor of Composition and Music Theory, have been performed throughout the United States and Europe and have been published by American Composers Alliance, Boosey & Hawkes, Northeastern Music, and Apollo-Edition.  Robert was co-director of the Extension Works new music ensemble in Boston for ten years and writes extensively on new music for Fanfare Magazine.  Along with a series of scholarly articles on new music sociology, theory, and aesthetics, he has written a work on Terry Riley’s In C, published by Oxford University Press.  Robert has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships including the C.D. Jackson Award in Composition, National Endowment for the Arts, American Composers Alliance Recording Award, CT Commission on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship, American Academy of Arts and Letters Charles Ives Fellowship, and the Copland Heritage Foundation Copland Award.

Steve Davis, Associate in Music - Jazz Trombone, graduated in 1989 from The Hartt School’s Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz.  It was with McLean’s guidance and recommendation that Steve landed his first major performance with Art Blakey in New York City.  Steve is widely regarded as one of today’s leading voices on the trombone with his lyrical, hard-swinging style, which gained him broad recognition. Steve has released twenty albums including: Think Ahead, Say When, For Real, and Gettin’ It Done in addition to over 100 recordings with leading jazz musicians including: Chick Corea, Freddie Hubbard, Horace Silver, Cedar Walton, and Hank Jones. In 2018, his original composition, “Optimism”, was included in Christian McBride’s Grammy Award winning album Bringin’ It . Steve’s latest release with his sextet is Correlations. Steve performs internationally with Dizzy Gillespie’s All-Stars and has appeared on The Jimmy Fallon Show with Steve Wonder and at the White House Tribute to Ray Charles (PBS).

Tracey Moore, Professor of Theatre, joined the Hartt Theatre faculty after a significant performance career that included two National Broadway Tours: Camelot with Richard Harris and Ragtime in the role of Emma Goldman.  She has appeared Off-Broadway in Señor Discretion by Frank Loesser, I Will Come Back (with music by Timothy Gray), and in the title role in Blitzstein’s Regina, at the York.  Tracey is known for her work with new musicals.  She created the role of Mary Magdalene in the Pre-Broadway workshop of Kevorkian Café and workshopped the role of Red for The People in the Picture which opened on Broadway in 2011. She has developed roles at the BMI Musical Theatre workshop, the ASCAP Music Theatre Workshop, and the New York University Musical Theatre Writing program. Tracey's book, Acting the Song (now in its second edition) and a new Student Companion to Acting the Song, are used in university musical theatre programs across the county. Tracey has written articles and essays for The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Studies in Music Theatre, Dramatics magazine, Methods: A Journal of Acting Pedagogy, Teaching Artist Journal, and Teaching Theatre journal.