Alumni Gazette

Alex Johnson ’19 has gone from being a complete novice at the carillon to winning one of the instrument’s top competitions—a journey that began with taking a tour of the River Campus as a high school student just a few years ago.

Johnson, who graduated in May, took the top prize this summer at the international Queen Fabiola Carillon Competition, an event held every five years at the Royal Carillon School in Mechlin, Belgium.

Doris Aman, Johnson’s former mentor and coordinator of the University’s Carillon Society, describes the competition as the equivalent of top global competitions in violin or piano, or the Olympics in athletics.

One of 16 candidates—from Australia to Russia and the United States—who registered for the competition, Johnson is studying at the Royal Carillon School this year on a Belgian-American Educational Foundation fellowship.

While at Rochester, the Coppell, Texas, native and physics major mentored and played in the Carillon Society, was a member of ensembles with the Department of Music and the Eastman School of Music, and won the University’s 2019 Charles Zettek Carillon Composition Award.

Presidential People

Julie White ’13W (PhD), most recently a senior vice president at Onondaga Community College in Syracuse, has been named president of Pierce College Fort Steilacoom in Lakewood, Washington. With about 16,000 students, Pierce College operates two campuses at Fort Steilacoom and at Puyallup, along with a teaching center and a campus at an area high school. Pierce College Fort Steilacoom was recently named one of the Top 10 community colleges in the nation by the Aspen Institute. White began her appointment this summer. . . In other presidential news, Daan Braveman ’69 has announced that he will step down as the chief executive at Nazareth College in Pittsford, New York, in June 2020. He’s finishing his 15th year as president, the longest serving president in Nazareth’s history.

‘Bat Out of Hell’ Lands in New York

A Broadway-style musical that has starred Andrew Polec ’12 since its first production two years ago roars into New York City late this summer. Developed by Jim Steinman, who wrote the music and lyrics for Meat Loaf’s late-1970s album, Bat Out of Hell, the stage production of Bat Out of Hell: The Musical was scheduled to run through September 8 at New York City Center. Playing the role of Strat, the leader of a gang trying to survive in a postapocalyptic world, Polec has been with the production since its first performances in Great Britain in 2017.