Marilyn Shrude

Chicago-born composer Marilyn Shrude received degrees from Alverno College and Northwestern University, where she studied with Alan Stout and M. William Karlins. Among her more prestigious honors are those from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Rockefeller Foundation, Chamber Music America/ASCAP, Meet the Composer, National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. She was the first woman to receive the Kennedy Center Friedheim Awards for Orchestral Music (1984) and the Cleveland Arts Prize for Music (1998).

Since 1977 Shrude has been on the faculty of Bowling Green State University, where she teaches and currently chairs the Department of Musicology/Composition/Theory. She is the founder of the MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music (at Bowling Green), an international organization for the promotion of contemporary music, and past director of its Annual New Music & Art Festival. She continues to be active as a pianist and clinician with saxophonist John Sampen. In 2001 she was named a Distinguished Artist Professor of Music.

Memorie di luoghi… (2001) for Violin and Piano
I. Tangled paths
II. Water…still and disturbed
III. Born of mountains

Memorie di luoghi… (Memories of places) (2001) is a nostalgic recollection of times remembered. This essay in sound could be about many places, but in this instance recalls my residency at the Rockefeller Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy. These breath-taking and dramatic surroundings were the inspiration for the individual movements: I. Twisted paths, II. Water…still and disturbed, and III. Born of mountains. As is typical of my music, the work is “highly linear, featuring layered constructions, timbral contrasts and intervallic transformations in both tonal and atonal contexts” (Natvig, Grove). Memorie di luoghi… is dedicated to my daughter, Maria Sampen, who premiered the work with me in its entirety at the 22nd Annual New Music & Art Festival, Bowling Green State University in October 2001.