Samuel Heifetz, Adjunct Professor of Music
For the past four years, the First Friday Concert series has been held every first Friday of the month from noon to 1 p.m. in Grey Towers Castle’s Mirror Room. The series boasts an array of talented musicians, both Arcadia faculty and artists outside of our community. Here, Adjunct Professor Samuel Heifetz, who coordinates the series, tells us more.
Explain your process for coming up with the themes for each concert and deciding who to invite.
It is complex, and it goes from different points. For example, in October, we traditionally have a jazz ensemble concert made up of Arcadia professors. The program is created by all of us. The musicians communicate with one another, suggesting different compositions to play. For some concerts, the performers decide on a theme together, like “Dance and Classical Music” or “Variations.”
For the fall season, the first three concerts were based on three different groups: jazz, piano duo, and romantic strings. For romantic strings, ‘romantic’ defined the choice of repertoire, which was romantic composers. Our spring season was defined by many things. The first concert was themed around Black History Month, and the second and third were solo concerts in which the performers decided the themes by themselves.
What is one thing you would like Arcadia to know about the First Friday concert series?
I would love for more students and faculty to come to the concerts. We usually have a full house for these performances, but it’s mostly people from the community. We are advertising and doing everything we can to get the word out, but a lot of the people who go to or work at this school still don’t know about the concerts.
