ADVANCEMENT - Key Persons
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- Director, Database Administration and Reporting
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- Assistant Director, Young Alumni Engagement
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- Coordinator for Planned Giving
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- Director of Advancement, School of Arts and Sciences / Advancement Officer
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- Specialist, Data and Desktop Support / Advancement Coordinator
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- Executive Director of Advancement Communications / Communications
Bill McAdams Jr. was a self-proclaimed "jock who did drama" before heading to Hollywood to work in film.
During his senior year at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where he played baseball, Bill took a train up to Camden Yards in Baltimore with his senior baseball picture and handed it to the casting director of the film Major League II. The next day, he was hired as a utility baseball player on screen and worked steadily for two months earning his first film credit.
Soon after, his career took off as a stand-in for Matt Damon on such films as The Rainmaker, Good Will Hunting, Rounders and Dogma. He also gained "hands on" experience by working with various Academy Award-winning actors, writers, directors and cinematographers including Steven Spielberg, David Lynch and Francis Ford Coppola.
After the tragic death of his younger brother in a motorcycle accident, Bill settled in on his genre, message driven films, and made two back-to-back. The first was about Jose Canseco, his late brother's favorite baseball player. Jose Canseco: The Truth Hurts went on to win the Best Documentary Feature Movie Award at the prestigious Hot Springs Film Festival. His second film, Gallows Road, starring Kevin Sorbo and Ernie Hudson, won Best Picture at The International Christian Film Festival in 2015. Since, he has carved out quite an impressive resume as an actor, director and producer with an ever-expanding filmography.
Bill says his latest film, God's Here, is his most personal project to date. Inspired by a true story, the movie follows Jack Gilmore, a decorated firefighter and man of deep faith whose wife and son are killed in a texting-and-driving crash three weeks before Christmas. In the wake of his loss, Jack is charged with a DUI and required to complete community service, during which he meets a young girl with whom he shares a conflicted and painful past. Meanwhile, as Detective Kent Powers investigates the fatal accident, he uncovers a shocking revelation that personally ties him to the case
We are excited to have Bill join us today to discuss his time at Catholic University, his career, and the process of creating God's Here.
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- Assistant Director of Advancement Events
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- Senior Director of Advancement Services
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- Senior Associate Director, Career Development and Professional Networking
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- Senior Associate Vice President and Chief of Staff for University
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- President
- Director of Diocesan Engagement
My name is Dennis Strach, and I serve as the University's Director of Diocesan Engagement.
Today I'm joined by Sir James MacMillan, internationally-renowned Scottish composer and conductor of classical and sacred music, and founder of the The Cumnock Tryst Music Festival.
Those within the music world will no doubt be familiar with his extensive work, but even for our listeners who may not be as familiar with orchestral or choral music, one might highlight Sir James' piece "Who Shall Separate Us," which he composed for the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II; or perhaps his Mass setting, written for Pope Benedict XVI's apostolic visit to Great Britain in 2010; or even "Tota pulchra es," which was commissioned for the American Guild of Organists National Convention and premiered here on our campus at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.
He's an incredibly talented, thoughtful, and humble man, and we're blessed to have him with us at Catholic University for this conversation.
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- Associate Director, Donor Funds and Data Analysis
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- Director of the Conway School of Nursing
- Director of the University
"Once we had that established relationship funding Ms. Moore's project, we began to explore ways we could expand what we were doing in that context," Ayers continued. He thought it was a prime opportunity to honor Dr. Caceres.
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- Assistant Director of Stewardship and Donor Relations
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- Director of Advancement, School of Nursing and National Catholic School of Social Service
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- Assistant Director, Leadership Annual Giving, Schools of Architecture and Engineering
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- Coordinator for Annual Giving / Advancement Coordinator Annual Giving
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- Assistant Director, Digital Content, Advancement Communications / Communications
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- Assistant Director, Affinity Programming
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- Executive Director of Planned Giving
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- Assistant Vice President, Strategic Alliances
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- Assistant Director of Leadership Annual Giving for Athletics
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- Senior Director of the Annual Fund
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- Coordinator, Alumni Engagement
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- Assistant Director for Gift Acceptance
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- Assistant Director of Talent Management
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- Assistant Dean of Advancement for the Busch School of Business / Advancement Officer
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- Associate Vice President for Diocesan Relations and International Engagement
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- Director of Advancement Events
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- Senior Advancement Coordinator
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- Assistant Director, Leadership Annual Giving, Schools of Philosophy and Canon Law
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- Director of the National Collection / Advancement Officer
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- Assistant Director of Relationship Management and Pipeline Development
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- Gift Analyst for Advancement Services
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- Associate Director, Advancement Communications / Communications
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- Associate Director, Annual Giving, Print Marketing
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- Assistant Dean of Advancement, Columbus School of Law / Advancement Officer
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- Coordinator, Columbus School of Law / Columbus School of Law
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- Coordinator for Student Experience and Family Engagement / Advancement Coordinator
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- Associate Director, Student Experience and Family Engagement
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- Director, Proposal Management and Strategic Writing
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- Coordinator, School of Arts and Sciences / Advancement Coordinator
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- Assistant Vice President of Strategic Information Management
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- Senior Director of Advancement Talent Management
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- Senior Associate Director for Advancement Services
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- Senior Director of Advancement for the Division of Athletics / Advancement Officer
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- Assistant Director, Institutional Partnerships and USCCB Office Manager
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- Associate Vice President for University
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- Associate Director, Annual Giving, Digital Marketing
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- Senior Associate Director, Alumni Engagement
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- Assistant Director, Leadership Annual Giving, School of Arts & Sciences
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- Coordinator for the Busch School of Business / Advancement Coordinator
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- Senior Associate Director, Institutional Partnerships
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- Executive Vice President for University
It's a very good question, because I really did realize quite early on that I wanted to be a composer, although I didn't know what that really meant or involved. So how did I know about composing? How did I know about composers?
Well, I think it might have been a gradual thing, and I'm certainly not the first or only artist who talks about external motivation, external inspiration. The concept that inspiration being a spiritual thing is deep in our culture.
All of those things. It's been a gradual evolution, not just of thinking and reading, but of learning. Learning what it means to be a composer, learning about music's place in the world and in society, and the necessity for listeners to sacrifice something of themselves to the power of music.
It's an interesting question. The relationship between educators, whether in universities, colleges, or conservatories, and imaginative students who want to be composers raises the question: Can composition be taught? And, more specifically, how do you teach composition? I don't know.
Chant holds an interesting place in society and the church today. I've noticed in recent years that the secular world has rediscovered chant, not for religious reasons, but often for aesthetic ones. About 20 years ago, I observed that many younger people were buying recordings of chant, and it was starting to appear on radio stations, not just classical ones. There was this desire for relaxation, for reflection, that chant enables.
Apparently-not that I know anything about club culture-but my children's generation tells me that when they visited clubs, which were full of very noisy, deafening music, some would retreat to a quieter room where Gregorian chant would be played. So, the secular world has rediscovered chant at the same time that the Catholic Church was abandoning it. There's a lesson there for the Church. What is it about chant that appeals to the secular world? What makes it beautiful to them, while some in the Church wanted to abandon it?
I suppose in some ways people regard me as being unusual as far as I relate to modern culture. I'm writing music for the modern world, and yet I'm very much not just a person of spiritual dimension, but a person of faith that is actually a practicing Catholic. People regard that as odd. At one time it was not odd, it was the expected thing. And, in the past, some of the composers I've mentioned would divide the time between writing for the secular world and writing for the church. In a strange way, I still do that, although most of my work is for the secular world. But I do love the Church, and sometimes I write music for the liturgy as well, and I regard that as a very important part of it.
So, bringing that narrative to the wider world of contemporary music or contemporary classical music, the world of composers and performers of modern music, it's an interesting conversation, an interesting series of conversations to be had. But the first thing I tell the skeptics amongst my fellow music lovers is that I'm not alone. There are loads of composers still alive, and some of the great composers of the 20th century were profoundly religious men and women. I point to the likes of Stravinsky, who fell in love with the Catholicism of the West when he came from Russia to Europe. He said the mass, he said the Psalms, he said little prayers. The other great polar opposite in early modernism, Schoenberg, converted and practiced Judaism when he left Germany, and his later music is infused with Jewish theology and spirit.
The great American iconoclast John Cage chose to study with Schoenberg. He was a major musical thinker in the 20th century. He saw in Schoenberg a fellow mystic. He found his own path to the sacred through the ideas and, indeed, the religions of the Far East. So it's not just Christianity that is apparent and vibrant in modern music and culture. There's lots of other religions too, Judaism and so on. There's a whole range of composers who are profoundly religious, and specifically Christian, who came after Shostakovich, behind the Iron Curtain, the post-Shostakovich modernists. Arvo Pärt is still alive in Estonia and I've been in his company recently. He had to leave Estonia because he took a stance against the Soviet State-enforced atheism by writing religious music and challenging the dogmas of an anti-religious society and politics.
Well, when I got the call, I wasn't told what it was about. I was just asked to come to a meeting at Westminster Abbey. And it was the music staff of the Abbey who presented the opportunity: Would I write an anthem for the Queen's funeral? As you say, this was 2011, 11 years before she died. I was told, if I accepted, it would be this text, which is one of her favorite texts from Scripture: "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ." But I could not tell anyone about it, it had to be kept a secret. There would be trouble if it got out that these things were being planned.
But the thing is, there's a whole range of things being planned. All the obituary programs were recorded years before she died. If anybody saw it on the television, even those BBC angles were rehearsed over a long period of time. It was like a work of art, perfecting the different angles and so on. So everything was prepared for years in advance, including this.
I wrote the piece quickly, delivered it, the publishers got the music to the Abbey, and the music went straight into their drawer for the next 11 years, until it was produced again when she died. I didn't actually attend the funeral. I was invited to, but my wife had broken her foot at the time, so I stayed behind with her.
I watched it on television, along with four billion viewers who watched the live broadcast of the Queen's funeral. I had a real "pinch me" moment when I was told that number, because I don't think a composer has ever had a live audience of four billion for a new piece of music, and it won't happen again.
It's something you get better at through practice over the years. When I was younger, I was more reticent about making final decisions, but now I make them more readily. I would revise things a lot after hearing them, because you hear your mistakes-but you learn through them. As you get older, you make fewer mistakes. You develop confidence and a sense of having lived the life of music much more. By the time you're in your sixties, you're more at ease with putting the double bar at the end of a piece and handing it over, compared to when you were in your twenties.
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- Assistant Director, Leadership Annual Giving, Busch School
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- Assistant Director of Student Experience and Family Engagement / Advancement Officer
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- Assistant Director of Advancement Events
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- Coordinator for the Department of Athletics
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- Associate Vice President, Schools