March 6, 2009

• Open to the public

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) music students will participate in a virtual master class with opera legend Marilyn Horne via Internet2 at 4 p.m. Thursday, March 19, in the UAB Mary Culp Hulsey Recital Hall, 950 13th St. S., Birmingham. The class is open to the public. For details, call 205-934-7376.

The UAB Department of Music is participating in conjunction with the University of Alabama in Huntsville Department of Music, which is presenting the master class. The master class with Horne is made possible through the Huntsville Chamber Music Guild.  

The Internet2 master class is an amazing opportunity for students and is a great tool for distance learning, said University Professor Henry Panion III, Ph.D., director of UAB's music technology program.

"This technology makes the world much smaller and enables noted artists such as Marilyn Horne to be accessible in places where it may not have been feasible before, either because of schedule, finances or both," Panion said. In 2000, Panion produced the first professional recording using Internet2 with musicians here and in New York, Miami, Los Angeles and Atlanta. Internet2 is a non-profit consortium led by more than 200 universities that develops and deploys advanced, high-performance network applications and technologies for education, research and the next-generation public Internet.

One of the nation's most beloved opera singers, Horne became increasingly concerned about the diminishing recital opportunities for young singers, due largely to decreases in government funding of the arts, the diminishing of arts education programs in K-12 schools and the entertainment industry's aggressive promotion of non-classical genres. Horne founded the Marilyn Horne Foundation Inc. in 1993 to give young singers the same opportunities she had and to ensure that vocal recital remains a viable and living art form in this country.