Howard Mayer Brown Award

2025 Recipient: Kenneth Slowik

Since 1972, Kenneth Slowik has consistently sought to bring HIP values not only to music of the Baroque and Classical eras, but to later repertoires as well. During his studies in Chicago he led Fiori Musicali (with which his teacher Howard Mayer Brown occasionally appeared as recorder soloist) while also being active as a studio musician. In 1976, he became the founding cellist of the Smithsonian Chamber Players. Following Fulbright-funded studies in Austria with Nikolaus Harnoncourt and August Wenzinger, he moved to Washington, DC, assuming artistic directorship of the Smithsonian Chamber Music Society (SCMS) in 1984. With the resident ensembles of the SCMS Slowik has performed over 1,000 Museum concerts (and has presented over 350 pre-concert lectures, earning him the coveted Smithsonian Distinguished Scholar Award) and given over 250 concerts in forty-three states and thirteen countries.

Slowik played with Jaap Schroder in the Smithson Quartet for fourteen years, recording a dozen Haydn quartets, the Mozart “Haydn” set, and the first period-instrument recording of the Beethoven Op. 18 quartets. Since the late 1990s he has anchored the Axelrod Quartet, which performs on the Smithsonian’s gut-strung Stradivari and Amati instruments. For over a dozen years he played with Anner Bylsma’s Amsterdam-based Archibudelli ensemble, which joined the Smithsonian Chamber Players in recordings of 19th-century works by Schubert, Mendelssohn, Niels Gade, Louis Spohr, Georges Onslow, Brahms, and others.

With Lambert Orkis and Marilyn McDonald, his Castle Trio colleagues of over thirty years, Slowik recorded the trios of Beethoven, plus works of Schubert, Schumann, Dvorak, and Smetana, employing a variety of appropriate period pianos. He plays the baryton in another well-recorded trio of long standing, the Esterhàzy Machine. On the viola da gamba, he has recorded solo viol music of Marin Marais, consort music of Purcell and Lawes, chamber music of François Couperin, and various solo and ensemble works of Bach. As fortepianist, he has recorded the major Lieder cycles of Schubert and Schumann with Max van Egmond, John Elwes, and William Sharp.

Slowik has brought his HIP sensibilities to large-scale modern- and period-instrument ensembles alike, as conductor of the Smithsonian Chamber Orchestra (since 1985) and the Santa Fe Pro Musica Chamber Orchestra (1998-2004), and as guest conductor throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe, and in South Africa. His discography in this capacity includes repertoire ranging from Bach’s St. John Passion through HIP interpretations of works of Mahler, Schönberg, and Stravinsky.

Slowik has influenced hundreds of students, serving since 1993 as the Artistic Director of the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute and on the adjunct faculty of the University of Maryland since 1979; teaching for decades at Québec’s Domaine Forget and for the American Bach Soloists; and lecturing, conducting, or giving masterclasses at Juilliard, Eastman, SUNY Stony Brook, the University of Michigan, the San Francisco Conservatory, the University of Warsaw, and Indiana University. In 2019, he devised an ongoing series of Haydn Quartet Academies at the Smithsonian, to which will be added a succession of 19th-century orchestral Academies beginning in October 2024.

I’m touched and honored to receive this award, named for one of my mentors, Howard Mayer Brown, in whose University of Chicago collegium I was exposed some fifty-plus years ago to the challenges and rewards of performing Renaissance music, and in whose organology courses I learned various methodologies of approaching the intimate relationships between instruments and repertoires that helped steer my subsequent career. Seminars with Robert Marshall exploring the original parts for Bach cantatas, and with Edward Lowinsky looking at problems in Josquin, made me appreciate differing intellectual ways of confronting masterpieces of the past, and I realized that the kinds of questions raised in so doing could also be asked concerning later repertoires. I was privileged to serve on one of the first incarnations of the EMA board, but for me, “early music” has always been more a state of mind than a chronological construct. The irrefutable evidence of early recordings tells us that the accepted “modern” way of playing Brahms, or Mahler, or even early Schönberg, differs from what those composers would have expected to hear. 

Another of my mentors, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, titled his memoir of the work of the Concentus Musicus Wir sind eine Entdeckergemeinschaft, “We are a community of discoverers.” I strongly embrace the importance of discovering anew what makes the music we love speak across the centuries to us with such immediacy, what Albert Fuller liked to call “the now of then, the then of now.” I’ve enjoyed decades-long relationships with great colleagues sharing these voyages of discovery, in the Smithson and Axelrod quartets with violinists Jaap Schroeder, Marc Destrubé and Mark Fewer; in the Castle Trio with Marilyn McDonald and Lambert Orkis; in Archibudelli with Anner Bylsma and Vera Beths; at the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute and the Smithsonian with James Caldwell, Catharina Meints, and James Weaver; in one-on-one collaboration with singers such as Max van Egmond, John Elwes, and Jeffrey Thomas; and with the scores of other exceptional musicians I’ve met along the way in chamber, vocal, or orchestral settings, or as my students. I thank EMA for recognizing my small accomplishments in the field, and for affording encouragement to all others who plow the same furrows!

– Kenneth Slowik

Past Recipients