Stamps family to fund new scholarship for incoming freshmen in Frost Music School

A new program instituted at the Frost School of Music will give a select group of incoming freshman the opportunity to work together for the four years of their undergraduate career.

It will start in the fall and be funded by the Stamps Family Foundation Scholarship, a donation from philanthropists Roe and Penny Stamps.

Six years ago, the Stamps also funded a series of visiting artists on campus that included musicians, composers, and producers.

The inaugural group will be a jazz quintet. A string quartet along with brass and woodwind quintets will follow in the three years after that.

The students within these groups, which will total about 19 for the first four years, will have the unique opportunities of working together for extended periods of time as well as getting special mentoring from faculty and guests.

“It’s not atypical to have graduate-level string and brass quartets,” Frost School Dean Shelton Berg said. “But to have classical and jazz chamber music groups at the undergraduate level interacting with each other will be very unique.”

The groups will also have the opportunity to perform at various local, national, and even possibly international venues as well as being recorded.

One of their earliest performances will be during the Frost School’s Festival Miami. Here, the students will possibly perform with jazz legend Gary Burton.

The Stamps Family Foundation Scholarship Fund gives the Frost School of Music a competitive edge in the search for the most talented artists in the country.

“We are probably the broadest music school in the country that does so many things so well,” Berg says. “We have every opportunity to be the most pragmatic school in the country–the place students will want to come if they’re brilliantly talented and want to make sure they are prepared for a career in music.”