Juilliard School Fall Festival Offers New Work Inspired By Folk Music

The 2025 fall festival of the Juilliard School will conclude tonight with the performance of a new work, ”Departing.”

Curated and conducted by creative associate Barbara Hannigan with choreography and staging by Bobbi Jene Smith, “this interdisciplinary program will celebrate artists who were inspired by traditional folk music, including Ligeti, Bartók and Ruth Crawford Seeger, many of whom journeyed elsewhere in search of new beginnings but held fast to their roots. This program highlights creative connections from old to new and features Juilliard students in music, dance and drama who hail from all around the world,” the school said.

“It is particularly appropriate for this to be happening at Juilliard, whose students come from all over the country and across the world, each bringing their own histories and traditions with them,” it added.

Also collaborating with Hannigan are Grammy winner Rhiannon Giddens and dancer/choreographer Michelle Dorrance.

Other composers’ works that will be heard during the evening include John Luther Adams, Paul Simon and Bach.

In an interview this week with Forbes.com, Grammy Award-winning soprano and conductor Hannigan, who grew up in Nova Scotia, Canada, and currently lives in Finistere, on the northwest coast of France, said, “It’s interesting for me because I left my home province when I was 17 and I left Canada when I was 23 or 24. And I’ve been a foreigner, which is funny because my name Barbara, it means foreigner, you know, from ‘barbarian.’ 
And I have been a foreigner, whether it was the 20 years I spent in Holland or the last 10 years that I’ve spent in France, so more than half my life, I’ve been away from home. And I was I was talking to the Juilliard kids yesterday about that, what it’s like to live on foreign soil. 
And no matter how how long you’ve lived there or how many friends you have or whatever roots you’ve put down, you’re still from away.”

Juilliard president Damian Woetzel said “Departing” also was inspired by “the idea of having such a global community, and how in so many ways what we can do together is so much more than what we can each do individually.”

The program will focus on “tradition and innovation,” he added, noting that the fall festival is “meant to be a gateway to the rest of the year.”

Located at Lincoln Center in New York City, Juilliard offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in dance, drama (acting and playwriting) and music (classical, jazz, historical performance, and vocal arts).

Over 800 artists from 42 states and 50 countries and regions are enrolled in the school’s college division, where they appear in over 800 annual performances in the school’s five theaters; at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully and David Geffen halls and at Carnegie Hall; as well as at other venues around New York City, the U.S. and the world. The school also offers courses to elementary through high school students, a continuing education program and a collaborative program with the Tianjin Juilliard School in China.