Reynaldo Reyes to receive President’s Award at Winter Commencement
TOWSON, Md. (Dec. 9, 2009)—Reynaldo Reyes, professor of music, will receive the annual President's Award for Distinguished Service to the University during Commence Exercises on Jan. 10 at the Towson Center.
Now in his fifth decade with the Department of Music, Reyes’s virtuosity, scholarship, teaching mastery and humanitarian zeal are celebrated around the world.
Identified as a musical prodigy as a child in the Philippines, he has been studying and teaching piano nearly all his life. He entered the University of Santo Tomas Conservatory of Music at age 13 and earned his Bachelor of Music degree at 17. He continued his studies at the Conservatoire Nationale Superieur de Musique de Paris, where he obtained the coveted Premier Prix du Piano, and at the Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University, where he earned his master’s degree and artist’s diploma.
He is a winner of many prestigious contests, including the International Piano Competition in Rio de Janeiro, the International Piano Competition in Bolzano, Italy, and the Marguerite Long-Jacques Thibaud Internationale Piano Competition in Paris. His concertizing has taken him to the Netherlands, Panama, Singapore, Germany, England, Russia, Hungary, Brazil, Canada, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea.
In 1962, as an adjunct member of the Department of Music faculty, he taught four students in a basement studio in Van Bokkelen Hall. He began his full-time academic career as an assistant professor in 1967. During the years that followed, he established himself as a master teacher esteemed by all for his ability to inspire as well as instruct. Many of his former students now teach and perform in the United States and abroad; several have won international piano contests.
He was promoted to associate professor in 1970 and attained the rank of professor in 1978. His service to the university includes 18 faculty search committees, including six in the past six years. In 2004 he established the Reynaldo Reyes Scholarship Fund, to which he donates all the receipts from his performances of Beethoven’s monumental 32 sonatas.
As a member of the faculty, Reyes has performed 45 solo concerts and participated in more than 50 collaborative recitals with his Towson colleagues. He is a member of the Baltimore Trio, a Towson University resident trio, which has given a yearly concert for the past 26 years.
Reyes is an ardent believer in the power of classical music to transform lives. For years he has devoted his time and considerable talents to performing for local retirement communities, as musical director for the Dickeyville, Md., Concert Series, as a reading-aid volunteer at Pleasant Plains Elementary School, and as a member of the Knights of Columbus-Newman Center. For 20 years he served as official accompanist for the Metropolitan Opera Company Regional Auditions in Washington, D.C.
As an unofficial international ambassador for Towson University, he has for years devoted himself to educating diverse audiences through concerts, lectures and other outreach activities. In the Philippines, for example, he and a former student have performed more than 300 free concerts at venues ranging from well-appointed auditoriums to rural town squares in remote parts of the island archipelago. Last year his native country bestowed upon him the Aliw Award for outstanding service to the Philippines.