ACA Festival of American Music 2008

Festival 2008 Kudos!

2008-06-10T09:14:00.000-07:00

We thank everyone who made this Festival happen, including all of the composers, performers, and our wonderful audiences for all five concerts. Please visit our myspace page for a look at more photos (and videos!) from the 2008 festival. I'm especially grateful to David Fulmer and Marc Williams, of Second Instrumental Unit (pictured above), and to our ACA staff, Daniel Cords, Paul Kerekes, and Liam Harte, for going beyond the calls of duty.

I wish you all a wonderful summer. -Gina Genova, General Manager, ACA

ACA Festival of American Music 2008

2008-04-06T15:30:00.000-07:00

Where: Leonard Nimoy Thalia
at Peter Norton Symphony Space
2537 Broadway (at 95th St.)
New York, NY 10025

Concert Schedule:

Wednesday, June 4 at 7:30 PM
Thursday, June 5 at 7:30 PM
Friday, June 6 at 7:30 PM
Saturday, June 7 at 4:00 PM
Saturday, June 7 at 7:30 PM

Buy Tickets at: Symphony Space

Or Call: 212-864-5400
$15 per person $5 students
$ 50 Festival pass (all 5 concerts)

COMPLETE PROGRAM (subject to changes)

_____________________________
Wednesday, June 4th, 7:30pm

Opening night
The New York Virtuoso Singers,
Harold Rosenbaum, Conductor

Mark Zuckerman, Two Browning Settings
Brian Fennelly, Soon Shall the Winter’s Foil
Robert Ceely, Five Contemplative Pieces
Gregory Hall, April
Jody Rockmaker, Yiddish Choruses
Louis Karchin, To the Stars
John Eaton, Duo
Edward Jacobs, When Time
Elliott Schwartz, Two Watterson Poems
Steven Gerber, Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought

____________________________
Thursday June, 5th, 7:30pm

Piano and Chamber Music

Marilyn Shrude, Memorie de luoghi
Nathan Bowen, Cassia
André Brégégère, Vol de nuit
Elliott Schwartz, Suite for Viola and Piano

Fred Cohen, Four Episodes
Anthony Lanman, Il dolce stile nuovo
Gregory Hall, The Waking
Joyce Hope Suskind, Meditations on War and Peace

Nicole Pantos, soprano; Naomi Drucker, clarinet; Christopher Bruckman, piano; Jeannie Im, soprano; Marijo Newman, piano; Marilyn Shrude, piano; Maria Sampen, violin; Elliott Schwartz, piano; Tawnya Popoff, viola; Kathy Tagg, piano; Asuka Yamamoto, clarinet; Justin Berrie, flute; Alexandra Zsaz Rutkowski, cello; Chern-Hwei Fung, violin; Adam Forman, percussion; Laurence Goldman, bass.

_____________________________
Friday, June 6th, 7:30pm

String Quartets, Chamber music 
Special Guests, the iO Quartet 
Christina McGann, violin
Erik Carlson, violin
Elizabeth Weisser, viola
Christopher Gross, cello

Richard Brooks, String Quartet No. 3
Scott Winship, Habitual Patterns
Jan Gilbert, Of Heloise: Four Song Settings of the Poetry of Judith Infante
Lewis Nielson, How You Go
Robert Ceely, Two Pieces for String Quartet
Francis Kayali, Trio
John Eaton, String Quartet No. 2

Second Instrumental Unit, David Fulmer, violin;
plus: Nancy Ogle, soprano; Meredith Clark, harp; John Langford, percussion; Gabrielle Athayde, cello; Philipp Staudlin, saxophone; Alex Lipowski, marimba.

____________________________
Saturday, June 7th, 4:00pm

Blitzstein plus ACA/New York Women Composers, Inc.

Margarita Zelenaia, Homage, Suite for Clarinet and Violin
Lisa Hogan, Music for Trumpet, Marimba and String Quartet
Eleanor Aversa, Something Gleamed Like Electrum
Margaret Fairlie-Kennedy, Summer Solstice

Elizabeth Bell, Night Music
Beth Wiemann, Erie, on the Periphery

Marc Blitzstein, Cain (piano, world premiere of 1930 work),

Second Instrumental Unit, David Fulmer, violin; Marc D. Williams, conductor;
plus: Christopher Oldfather, piano; Ben Fingland, clarinet; Marilyn Nonken, piano; Michael Fennelly, piano; Peter Clark, baritone.

______________________________
Saturday, June 7th, 7:30pm

Raoul Pleskow, Piece for 8 Players

Joel Gressel, An Orderly Transition

Burton Beerman, Dialogue
Richard Cameron-Wolfe, A Measure of Love and Silence

Hubert Howe, Symphony No. 3 (II and III)
Robert Carl, A Clean Sweep
Harold Seletsky, Sonata for clarinet and piano
John Melby, In Darkness

Second Instrumental Unit, David Fulmer, violin; Marc D. Williams, conductor;
plus: Jane Schoonmaker Rodgers, soprano; Kevin Blysma, piano; Jacquelyn Familant, soprano; Keith Spencer, baritone; Elizabeth Brown and Robert Carl, shakuhachi; Robin Seletsky, clarinet; Kim Paterson, piano; Linda Larson, soprano; Patricia Sonego, soprano.

________________________________

ACA Festival Press Release 2008

2008-04-06T11:58:00.000-07:00

printable PDF version here

For Immediate Release May 15^th, 2008
The American Composers Alliance Presents

NEW MUSIC MATTERS!
Festival of American Music 2008, June 4-7
Leonard Nimoy Thalia at Symphony Space

Five Live Concerts
More than 30 award-winning composers and performers

NEW: Harold Rosenbaum to receive the 2008 Laurel Leaf
Award from ACA

As always, this year’s festival reflects the extraordinary stylistic diversity of both upcoming and well-established composers from all over the United States. Festival composers and performers will come together from all points north, south, east, and west-- New York, California, Maine, Ohio, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Minnesota, Arizona, New Mexico, France, and South Africa.

Please join us for these rousing events:

Wed. June 4th, 7:30 pm

This year, opening night is rare event concert--all new choral works performed by one of New York's finest professional choral ensembles, the New York Virtuoso Singers, with conductor Harold Rosenbaum will feature music by MacArthur Foundation "Genius" award recipient, John Eaton; Gaudeamus Foundation award recipient, Elliott Schwartz; and American Academy of Arts and Letters Award recipients Louis Karchin (a composer of "fearless eloquence" --The New Yorker), and Edward Jacobs, among others. During this concert, ACA will present the 2008 Laurel Leaf Award to conductor Harold Rosenbaum, for his longtime dedication to fostering and promoting new works by American composers.

Thurs. June 5th, 7:30pm

On Thursday, works by younger composers will be presented alongside established ACA composers, and will juxtapose Tony Lanman’s “The New Style” and Nathan Bowen’s Cassia, a short burst of a piece for six players, with Elliott Schwartz’s Suite for Viola and Piano, and Joyce Hope Suskind’s moving Meditations on War and Peace. A-List performers, Nicole Pantos, soprano, Kathy Tagg, piano, and Laurence Goldman, double bass, among many others, will create a memorable event.

Friday June 6, 7:30pm

World premiere string quartets and other chamber works will fill Friday evening with Jan Gilbert’s Of Heloise: Four Song Settings of the Poetry of Judith Infante (Nancy Ogle, soprano solo), along with quartets by Richard Brooks and Robert Ceely, plus How You Go, a fantastical line-drawing in sound, for cello, percussion, and harp, by Lewis Nielson.

Saturday June 7, 4pm

Saturday afternoon, another world premiere, the complete piano version of Marc Blitzstein’s ballet, CAIN (1930), shelved by Stokowski due to funding cuts during the Depression, and never brought to life until now. Blitzstein considered this one of his greatest works. Plus, a rich variety of other chamber music, including Elizabeth Bell’s Night Music for piano, Margaret Fairlie-Kennedy’s large ensemble piece, Summer Solstice, and Beth Wiemann’s work for clarinet and piano, Erie, on the Periphery, performed by Ben Fingland and Marilyn Nonken.

Sat. June 7th 7:30pm

The final concert on Saturday evening will bring electronics into Thalia with John Melby’s In Darkness, for Patricia Sonego, soprano, and computer playback, and Joel Gressel’s, An Orderly Transition, also for soprano and computer-generated sounds. We will hear the completion of Hubert Howe’s Symphony No. 3, the first movement of which was presented at last year's festival, in which the composer carefully works out related sonorities in contrasting instrument groups. Longtime ACA member, Raoul Pleskow, will premiere his new Piece for 8 instruments, which he compares to a mini trumpet concerto for small forces.

Also on Saturday evening, Robert Carl’s A Clean Sweep, is a work for shakuhachi flutes and electroacoustic accompaniment, generated by the MAX/MSP program. The flutes will be played by Elizabeth Brown and the composer. Richard Cameron-Wolf’s cantata, A Measure of Love and Silence, features the poetry of Tatyana Apraksina. Burton Beerman (“excellent ear for sound color” –Village Voice) presents a new work for soprano voice and piano, featuring a text by award-winning playwright Raymond Brent Beerman—an expressive conversation between the writer and his teenage son.

All concerts take place at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia at Symphony Space,

2537 Broadway at 95^th Street, in Manhattan.

Buy Tickets at: Symphony Space
Or Call: 212-864-5400 box office
$15 per person
$5 students
$ 50 Festival pass

For all inquiries, contact:
Gina Genova, General Manager
American Composers Alliance
648 Broadway, Rm 803
New York, NY 10012
(212) 925-0458 Tel
(212) 925-6798 Fax

Email to: festival[at]composers.com

http://acafestival.blogspot.com

www.composers.com

www.myspace.com/americancomposersalliance

Spring Festival 2008

2008-04-04T10:55:00.000-07:00

SAVE THE DATES! JUNE 4-7

2008-04-03T14:55:00.000-07:00

Buy Tickets at: http://www.symphonyspace.org/series/126

Or Call: 212-864-5400

$15 per person $5 students
$ 50 Festival pass (all 5 concerts)

WEDNESDAY through SATURDAY, JUNE 4-7, 2008

7:30 PM Wed, Thurs, Fri
4:00 PM and 7:30 PM Sat.

World premiere chamber music by more than 30 award-winning American composers --- at New York City's Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre at Symphony Space, Broadway at 95th St.

Composers and Artists scheduled:

The New York Virtuoso Singers*, Harold Rosenbaum, conductor
Second Instrumental Unit, David Fulmer, director,
Marc D. Williams, conductor
Hubert S. Howe, composer and artistic director
Special Guests: New York Women Composers, Inc.

Featuring works by:
Eleanor Aversa, Burton Beerman, Elizabeth Bell, Richard Brooks, Richard Cameron-Wolfe, Robert Carl, Robert Ceely, Fred Cohen, John Eaton, Margaret Fairlie-Kennedy, Brian Fennelly, Steven Gerber, Jan Gilbert, Joel Gressel, Gregory Hall, Lisa Hogan, Hubert S. Howe, Edward Jacobs, Louis Karchin, John Melby, Lewis Nielson, Raoul Pleskow, Jody Rockmaker, Elliott Schwartz, Harold Seletsky, Marilyn Shrude, Joyce Hope Suskind, Beth Wiemann, Margarita Zelenaia, and Mark Zuckerman.

*Funding courtesy of the Argosy Foundation
*Additional support from the Alice M. Ditson Fund, BMI, the City University Research Foundation, the Marc Blitzstein Estate, New York Women Composers, Inc., and New York University GSAS Music Department.

2008 Laurel Leaf Award goes to Harold Rosenbaum

2008-04-02T12:26:00.000-07:00

For Immediate Release
May 15^th, 2008
PRESS CONTACT:
Gina Genova/American Composers Alliance
www.composers.com
Phone: (212) 362-8900
Email: festival@composers.com

PDF version of this press release link here.

American Composers Alliance
Announces

The 2008 Laurel Leaf Award to
Harold Rosenbaum

Wednesday, June 4 at 7:30PM at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia at Symphony Space, as the highlight of the ACA Festival of American Music 2008

American Composers Alliance is delighted to announce that conductor, Harold Rosenbaum, will be this year's recipient of the prestigious Laurel Leaf Award, to be awarded during the upcoming ACA Festival of American Music. The Laurel Leaf Award has been presented annually since 1951 to individuals and organizations in recognition of distinguished achievement in fostering and encouraging the performance of new American works. Among the recipients of the Laurel Leaf have been the Juilliard String Quartet, Leonard Slatkin, Gunther Schuller, Leopold Stokowski, George Szell, Minnesota Composers Forum, the American Music Center, the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group and, last year, cellist Fred Sherry (the complete list is available on the ACA website.

Mr. Rosenbaum has distinguished himself as a major champion of contemporary music through both his commissioning and performance of the works of many American composers, both celebrated and emerging, particularly with his professional choral ensemble, The New York Virtuoso Singers, which he founded, now in its 20^th performing season. A tireless proponent and advocate for contemporary composers and American composers in particular, he has created an annual choral composition competition, has commissioned twenty works, has conducted over 200 world premieres (including works by Ravel, Schnittke, Henze, Berio, Perle, and Harbison), and has recorded contemporary choral music for SONY Classical, Albany, CRI, Bridge, Koch International, Capstone, and DRG. He is also a three-time recipient of the ASCAP/Chorus America Award for Adventuresome Programming of Contemporary Music, and a recipient of Chorus America's American Choral Works Performance Award.

"In that domain of the performance of contemporary music which has been most neglected and least supported in this country, there is no choral group which has been more able and willing to perform responsibly the most demanding and knowing of contemporary works than The New York Virtuoso Singers, under the guidance of a sophisticated and understanding conductor. Not only do they deserve and require support, but the fate of contemporary choral music is largely contingent on such support." -Milton Babbitt

Maestro Rosenbaum has made a true difference in American musical life by giving American music respect and a significant place in his repertoire. American Composers Alliance, an association of American composers founded by Aaron Copland in 1937, is pleased honor him for his longstanding achievements on behalf of American composers.

For all inquiries, contact:
Gina Genova, General Manager
American Composers Alliance
648 Broadway, Rm 803
New York, NY 10012
(212) 925-0458 Tel
(212) 925-6798 Fax

festival@composers.com

http://acafestival.blogspot.com

www.composers.com

www.myspace.com/americancomposersalliance

Zsaz Rutkowski, cellist

2008-04-01T18:27:00.000-07:00

Zsaz Rutkowski is a native of Long Island, New York. She began playing cello at the age of ten and started private lessons at the age of 16. She received her bachelor of music degree from the Manhattan School of Music where she studied with Marion Feldman. She is now in the master’s degree program in performance with Marcy Rosen at the Aaron Copland School of Music. Zsaz is the recipient of numerous awards and scholarships, and presently serves as the principal cellist of the Queens College Orchestra and is a member of the Balsam Trio. She has participated in master classes with Karen Tuttle and the Borromeo String Quartet at the NYU String Quartet Workshop. Zsaz is currently on the cello and chamber music faculty at the Manhassett School of Music. This summer she will be participating in the Institute and Festival of Contemporary Performance at Mannes College.

Benjamin Fingland, clarinet

2008-04-01T11:17:00.000-07:00

With performances capturing "spiritedness and humor", "unflagging precision and energy" (The New York Times) and playing described as "something magical" (The Boston Globe), Benjamin Fingland interprets many styles of music on a variety of clarinets. An avid proponent of new music, he has premiered numerous works in recital at such New York City institutions as Merkin Concert Hall and the Museum of Modern Art, and internationally at Japan's Kyoto Music Festival and festivals in the Ukraine, Russia and South America. In addition to being a founding member of the critically-acclaimed new music collective counter)induction, he plays frequently with the landmark contemporary music group Continuum, and has also performed with Ensemble 21, The Locrian Chamber Players, the Argento Chamber Ensemble, the American Modern Ensemble and Sequitur. He has collaborated, recorded, and toured with a wide array of contemporary artists – ranging in scope from Pierre Boulez and the Ensemble Intercontemporain to jazz legend Ornette Coleman and pop icon Sir Elton John. Mr. Fingland is a former principal clarinetist of both the New Haven Symphony Orchestra and the Prometheus Chamber Orchestra in Manhattan. He is also a founding member of Piaclava - a touring clarinet, viola, and piano trio dedicated to educational outreach. He holds Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from The Juilliard School, and currently serves on the faculties of the Third Street Music School Settlement and the Children's Orchestra Society in New York.

Adam Forman, percussion

2008-04-01T09:00:00.000-07:00

Percussionist Adam Forman will be entering his senior year at the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College. He currently studies with Michael Lipsey and has studied under Joe Gramley and Matt Ward. He has performed the Daniel Adams Concerto for Marimba, and also enjoys playing the music of Carter, Cage, Takemitsu and many others. In addition to classical music, he has studied afro-cuban percussion with Carlos Gomez and has played in many rock, jazz, and theater groups.

Patricia Sonego, soprano

2008-03-31T19:49:00.000-07:00

Patricia Sonego, soprano, (www.patriciasonego.com) made her operatic debut in New York City in the world premiere of American composer Jack Beeson's Sorry, wrong number with the Center for Contemporary Opera under the baton of Richard Marshall, for which she received an enthusiastic review from Robert Prag of Opera News. The performance was recorded for Albany Records and released in May 2008.

A champion of contemporary, avant garde, improvisational, and electroacoustic music, Ms. Sonego is in demand to premiere new works, many of which have been composed for her. In a new arrangement dedicated to her by the composer Terry Winter Owens, she gave the world premiere of Messages for Raoul Wallenberg at Carnegie Hall, Weill Recital Hall, with Alaria chamber ensemble. For the third consecutive year Patricia has been invited to perform at the ACA Festival of American Music. In 2007, she premiered songs by Michael Rothkopf for soprano and live computer playback and songs by Raoul Pleskow with piano. She also performed Harold Seletsky’s chamber work, Apathy. Award-winning ACA composer John Melby first became acquainted with Patricia when she stepped in last minute to perform his Wordsworth Songs for soprano and computer in 2006. This year she is honored to be giving the world premiere of In Darkness, a work for soprano and computer written expressly for her by Melby.

Patricia also performs regularly with the ensemble Le Nuove Musiche, having recently returned from an engagement at the medieval Castillo de Jesus Nazareno in Almeria, Spain, where she performed works from the early Baroque. Patricia is the co-founder and Artistic Director of Reizen Ensemble (www.reizenensemble.com), a new music group that performs cutting edge and accessible newly composed works for soprano and chamber ensemble by both emerging and established composers from around the globe. She is also the founder and managing director of Joy of New Music, Inc., an organization dedicated to the composition, promotion, and performance of new music (www.JoyofNewMusic.com).

Marc Blitzstein "CAIN" (1930)

2008-03-31T10:02:00.000-07:00

“…Wild, dissonant, percussive”

This performance of CAIN, by Marc Blitzstein, constitutes a world premiere event of a work not fully heard since it was completed in 1930. The composer performed individual movements of this piano version of the ballet at various WPA venues and on the radio in the 1930s, but this is the first time all twelve movements, with singer, have been realized in a live performance.

The manuscript score languishes in the Blitzstein Collection at the Wisconsin Historical Society—a raw gem that has somehow fallen through the cracks. How could there be a major work by Blitzstein that has never been studied, performed, or recorded in its entirety?

There are many such works lost in the stacks of archives around the world, and yet, this one, by such a well-known composer, which centers on the universal theme of the biblical brothers, Cain and Abel, seems especially potent. There is a full score, orchestrated by the composer for the largest of orchestra forces, with lengthy descriptive notes, a piano reduction you will hear at this concert, and a partially completed “theatre” orchestration for a small ensemble. With all of this work completed, it seems that CAIN was a work dear to Blitzstein. Blitzstein biographer Eric Gordon has written that Blitzstein felt that CAIN was one of his “best” works overall.

Notes by the composer, taken directly from the manuscript score:

CAIN is a tragic ballet. Its philosophy is that we are all killers, and that murder is our heritage; its action depicts the killing of Abel by Cain, and the subsequent killing of Cain by his own descendant, Lamech. The first scene is in Eden. Then comes an interlude showing Cain wandering “over the face of the earth” as punishment for his crime. The second scene shows the sons of Cain, a murderous tribe, in their city Henoch; a riotous and drunken festival culminates in the slaying of Cain. Thus murder, begun in our world by Cain, is perpetuated through the ages: we are all the sons of Cain.

The ballet is divided into two scenes and an interlude; music is continuous throughout. Scene changes take place within the audience’s view; there is no curtain until the final one. The performers are a group of solo and ensemble dancers, and one singer, Jehovah, whose voice (baritone) is heard from an amplifier placed at the top-center of the auditorium, above the audience.

Scenes

I. Eden. Pastoral calm, a suggestion of the evil to come. There is a primitive altar.

Interlude. Space—and endless road.

II. Henoch. City of wantonness, blood and lust.

Characters

Abel Adam Eve Cain Cain’s Wife

Jehovah

Henoch Irad Maviael Methusael Lamech

Noema The Stripling People of Henoch (ensemble)

Synopsis of Numbers.

I. Eden.

1. The Young Son. (Abel, then Adam and Eve) A few measures after the opening the curtain rises, disclosing Abel, who fondles a lamb he is about to sacrifice to Jehovah. He is a young wistful innocent and does not want to kill the lamb; he dances mournfully around, holding it in his arms. Adam and Eve appear. They urge Abel on and finally prepare to watch the ceremony.

2. Abel Offers the Lamb. (Abel) The fervent adolescent; he performs the rite simply, with great devotion. A “sign” from Jehovah indicates that the offering has been accepted. Exit Abel, Adam and Eve, right.

3. a. Cain and His Wife. (Pas de deux) They enter, left; Cain first, bearing the “fruits of the field,” arrogant, with passion in his eyes; his wife follows him, carrying a basket; she is a humble, shrill creature. They set down the baskets; he prepares to make his offering to Jehovah.

b. Cain’s Offering. (Cain.) It is a haughty, proud, yet earnest ritual; finished, he sinks upon his knees to await the result.

c. The Response. (Cain’s Wife.) She discovers that the offering has been rejected; her terror; she finally informs Cain, and flees.

4. The Two Brothers. (Cain, Abel.) Cain calls out Abel and kills him. This is to be a trance-like, hypnotic murder; we never know precisely at which point Abel dies. Cain goes into a blind rage, having been by turns sly and furious, and begins to beat Abel with his fists. He never stops beating him until the voice of Jehovah calls down.

5. Dialogue. (Jehovah, the voice; the answers are danced back by Cain, the mime.) Jehovah: “where is thy brother Abel?” Cain looks up: his eyes grow crafty: he mimes: “I know not; Am I my brother’s keeper?” He stands in front of Abel’s body, hiding it. Jehovah: “What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth to me from the earth.” Cain now lets the body be exposed; Cain mimes defiantly: “Yes, I killed him.” Jehovah: “Now therefore, cursed shalt thou be upon the earth, which has opened her mouth and received the blood of thy brother at thy hand. When thou shalt till it, it shall not yield to thee its fruit.” Cain sneeringly indicates that the fruit he offered has already been rejected by Jehovah; to what purpose, then, further imprecations? Jehovah: “A fugitive and vagabond shalt thou be upon the earth.”

Now Cain becomes frightened; he visualizes (in mime form) his solitary wanderings over the earth, and the revenge sought upon him by other people for his crime. Jehovah: “But whosoever shalt kill Cain shall be punished sevenfold.” At this point the mark symbol of Jehovah’s wrath is put upon Cain, to distinguish him from all others. (This is the most important effect in the ballet, and must be carefully thought out by regisseur and choreographer. It is repeated in multiple form at the final curtain; it must be instantly understood but a shock.)

6. Imprecations and Sorrowing. (Adam, Eve, Cain’s Wife, Cain.) After the fury of Jehovah, the minute, insect-like fury of man, Eve wails; Adam storms; Cain’s wife waits, in an agony of apprehension; Cain himself is beaten. At length Adam and Even drive Cain and his wife out of Eden, and remain mourning their dead son.

7. Interlude. (Cain, Cain’s wife.) Cain wanders “over the face of the earth.” A slow, unvarying tread, at once collapse and resignation. (The lights grow gradually dimmer, so that at the finish there is practically no light. Scene in one.)

II. Henoch. City of Cain.

8. Building of the City. (Cain, then Henoch, then Irad, then Maviael, then Mathusael, then Lamech.) This is the scene of the generations: “Cain begot Henoch, Henoch begot Irad,” etc., etc. Cain pulls his son Henoch from the wings, he in turn pulls his son Irad out, and so on. They all do a grotesque dance, each in his own character, of the tribe of Cain. (This scene starts quite dark—spotlights for the soloists?—and grows lighter as the dance progresses. Behind the dancers the city is being built; huge blocks are placed one upon another; people emerge, more and more of them; until at the end of the dance, the stage is crowded and the light is dazzling. Cain should disappear during this scene.

9. Festival. (Ensemble.) The crowd in a drunken orgy celebrates the building of the city. (A stylized, not a realistic scene)

10. Dance of Noema. (Pas seul) The young daughter of Lamech dances for the crowd. She is an adolescent, the feminine counterpart of Abel (in the first half), but a bit more voluptuous and knowing. She plays small cymbals as she dances.

11. Slaying of Cain. (Cain, the Stripling, Lamech) Cain rushes out on the stage, in rags. He is pursued by a stripling, who, while hunting, has mistaken him for a wild beast. The youth motions to the people on the stage to kill Cain. Lamech, who has been watching Noema dance, turns, and kills Cain, who falls. They turn the body over, and discover by the “mark” that it is Cain who has been killed.

12. a. Lamech and the Stripling. (Pas de deux) The crowd, in fury because Cain has been murdered, turns upon Lamech, who rushes for the youth. The people stand by: Lamech flogs the youth who dies.

b. Finale. (Jehovah, Lamech, ensemble) Suddenly the voice of Jehovah again cries down: “What hast thou done?” Consternation: everybody tries to escape the voice, which goes on relentlessly: “Sevenfold vengeance shall be taken for Cain; but for Lamech seventy times sevenfold.” Lamech now receives the mark of Cain; the people sink to the ground, burying their faces in fear, Jehovah’s voice again: “Now therefore cursed shalt thou be:” The people slowly raise their heads (one group, then another group). On the brows of all is seen the mark of Cain. The curtain slowly falls, as new heads are raised, showing the awful mark, with Jehovah bellowing until the very end: “Now therefore cursed shalt thou be upon the earth!”

The End

To purchase the music score to CAIN, by Marc Blitzstein, for piano and baritone, please contact the American Composers Alliance, distributor, at info[at]composers.com

Marc Blitzstein (1905-1964) was born in Philadelphia, the son of affluent parents. His musical gifts were apparent at an early age, and he had performed a Mozart Piano Concerto by the time he was seven. He went on to study piano with Alexander Siloti, (a pupil of Liszt and Tchaikovsky), and made his professional concerto debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra in Liszt’s E flat Piano Concerto when he was 21.

After studying composition at the Curtis Institute of Music, he continued his studies in Europe with Arnold Schoenberg in Berlin (with whom he did not get on), and Nadia Boulanger in Paris (with whom he did).

Despite his later political beliefs, he was, in the early years of his career, a self-proclaimed and unrepentant artistic snob who firmly believed that true art was only for the intellectual elite. He was vociferous in denouncing composers - in particular Kurt Weill - whom he felt debased their standards to reach a wider public.

His works of this period, mostly pianistic vehicles such as the PIANO SONATA (1927), CAIN (1930), and the PIANO CONCERTO (1931) are typical of the Boulanger-influenced products of American modernism - strongly rhythmic (although in Blitzstein's case, not influenced by Jazz), and described by himself as "wild, dissonant, and percussive."

Yet, a new aesthetic was taking shape in the early thirties, one that sought to make art useful and communicative to all audiences, and not just the "anointed in Carnegie Hall". Along with contemporaries such as Steinbeck and Copland, Blitzstein came to believe that “art for art’s sake” was creating a vast gulf between artist and audience.

Fundamental to the formation of these beliefs was the critic and novelist Eva Goldbeck (born in Berlin in 1901).

They had met in 1928, and travelled together throughout Europe. She was the dedicatee of his CAIN, his ROMANTIC PIECE FOR ORCHESTRA, and his STRING QUARTET. They married in Philadelphia on March 2nd, 1933, Blitzstein's twenty-eighth birthday.

The political opera was THE CRADLE WILL ROCK, and the sensational premiere, under Orson Welles' direction, made Blitzstein a famous man. Finding inspiration from his newly discovered political consciousness, THE CRADLE WILL ROCK was followed by further political works, most notably the radio play I’VE GOT THE TUNE (1937), dedicated to Welles, and the musical play/opera NO FOR AN ANSWER, first performed in 1941.It was during this period that the endeavors of a brilliant young student came to his notice through a production at Harvard of THE CRADLE WILL ROCK. It was in 1939 that Blitzstein first met Leonard Bernstein, and the two formed a musical and personal bond of immense importance to both.

During World War Two, Blitzstein joined the US Army Eighth Air Force. He had no reservation about joining in the fight against fascism, and his abilities were used as music director of the American broadcasting station in London.

In 1958, Blitzstein received a subpoena to appear before the HUAC, the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Appearing first in a closed session, Blitzstein admitted his membership of the Communist Party (which had ceased in 1949), and, challenging the right of HUAC to question him at all, refused either to name names, or co-operate any further. He was recalled for a further public session, but after a day anxiously sitting in a waiting-room, he was not called to testify.

Blitzstein's last projects were two one act operas, IDIOTS FIRST, and THE MAGIC BARREL, both adaptations of short stories by Bernard Malamud, and SACCO AND VANZETTI, a commission from the Metropolitan Opera, New York.

Blitzstein was beset by thugs while on a long holiday in Martinique, and died, tragically, on January 22nd, 1964.

Leonard Bernstein, learning of Blitzstein's death as he was in his dressing-room preparing for a concert, dedicated the performance of the Eroica he was about to conduct to Blitzstein's memory, and wrote the following of his friend; "(He) was so close a personal friend that I cannot even begin to measure our loss of him as a composer. I can only think that I have lost a part of me, but I know also that music has lost an invaluable servant. His special position in musical theatre is irreplaceable."

Excerpted from author John Jansson, www.marcblitzstein.com, with permission.

Aaron Copland on Marc Blitzstein:

Marc Blitzstein once described himself as "addicted to the theatre." But he was much more than a theatre composer in the Broadway sense. He was an intellectual-complicated and difficult at times-and a greatly gifted musician. A piano prodigy in his teens, he also composed remarkably well at an early age. After studies with Scalero at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, and later with Boulanger and Schoenberg in Europe, he was well on the way to being a leader of his generation as a concert composer.

Gradually, for reasons best known to himself, he turned his attention to that most resistant of all musical media - the musical stage. His purpose was not merely to write the words and music of effective theatre pieces; he wanted to shape each piece for his own ends, to shape it for human ends. He took a certain pleasure in needling his audiences, in telling unpleasant truths straight to their faces. To sing these truths only gave them greater poignancy. The moral fervor that fired his work in the depression-haunted ‘Thirties resulted in the writing of The Cradle Will Rock. The opening night of The Cradle made history; none of us who were there will ever forget it.

His later operas, No for an Answer and Regina, were musically more ambitious, with a broader dramatic range. They gave full play to his brilliant gift for musical characterization. He could be sarcastic, parodistic and even derisive at times; but he could also be gentle, tender and tragic. Most important of all, he was the first American composer to invent a vernacular musical idiom that sounded convincing when heard from the lips of the man-in-the-street. The taxi driver, the pan-handler, the corner druggist were given voice for the first time in the context of serious musical drama. This is no small accomplishment, for without it no truly indigenous opera is conceivable. Blitzstein would have been the first to acknowledge his debt to Brecht and Weill, but the fact remains that he gave their theatre an American imprint, an American "tone."

Blitzstein’s life exemplified a truism that needs to be re-emphasized today, namely, that "every artist has the right to make his art out of an emotion that really moves him." Those of our composers who are attracted by the immense terrain of new techniques now available to them would do well to consider that humanity’s struggle for a fuller life may be equally valid as a moving force in the future history of our music. It was the basic motivation for Marc Blitzstein’s art, and resulted in a contribution to American music that is yet to be fully evaluated.

Jacquelyn Familant

2008-03-31T09:12:00.000-07:00

Soprano Jacquelyn Familant enjoys an international career that spans the genres of opera, oratorio and chamber music. The young soprano began her professional career immediately upon graduation from the Curtis Institute of Music when she was engaged by the Staatsoper Stuttgart for a three year principal artist contract. Roles there include her debut as Sandman and the Dew Fairy in Hansel und Gretel , Aloysia in Masaniello furioso, Servilia in La clemenza di Tito, and Euridice in Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo. Other international opera credits include Eurydice in Orphee et Eurydice with the Festival Lyrique-en-Mer, Blonde in Die Entfuehrung aus dem Serail with Opera Brooklyn, Ilia in Idomeneo, Zerlina in Don Giovanni with Modus Opera, and Blanche de la Force in Les Dialogues des Carmelites. Ms. Familant has won numerous awards and scholarships including a prize in the 2006 Charles A. Lynam Vocal Competition. This gifted young performer was also honored in Europe as a Star of Tomorrow by the ARTE Film and Broadcasting Network and featured in an international television portrait.

Ms. Familant has garnered special praise for her interpretations of Baroque and Classical opera roles: for her performance as Aloysia in the critically acclaimed Stuttgart production of Masaniello furioso, Opera News Magazine described her as “a free and unwavering soprano that soars through glittering sunshine.” As Euridice in L’Orfeo, Familant’s performance was described by the Reutlinger General as “compellingly beautiful” and Opernwelt Magazine declared her “a vocally wonderful, flexible and diaphanous Euridice.” For her international telecast performance in Stars of Tomorrow, singing the Gavotte from Manon and as Zerlina in highlights from Don Giovanni, Music Today Magazine singled out the soprano as “the one to watch: a radiant young soprano with a special gift.”

Equally at home on the recital stage, Jacquelyn Familant is known for her commitment to exploring and performing a vast array of concert repertoire. Ms. Familant has performed in recital with Borderless Song, Modus Opera, Staatsoper Stuttgart, Festival Lyrique-en-Mer, the German Consulate of Manhattan, the Vermont Festival of the Arts, and the Chamber Music Society of Philadelphia. In the genre of oratorio, Ms. Familant has sung as the soprano soloist in Mozart’s Requiem, Coronation Mass, & Vesperae Solennes de Domenica, as well as Handel’s Messiah, Orff’s Carmina Burana, Vivaldi’s Gloria, Faure’s Requiem, and the Rutter Requiem. The soprano has a particular affinity for performing modern composition and has collaborated with such composers as Ned Rorem, Stefania de Kenessey, Michael Sydney Timpson, and Donald St. Pierre. Devoted to the preservation and continuation of the classical tradition, Ms. Familant regularly performs contemporary repertoire and has had several pieces written for her including Timpson’s Four Poems of Dorothy Parker and St. Pierre’s Songs on the Poems of e.e. cummings.

Upcoming engagements for the soprano consist of three concerts in May with the American Modern Ensemble at New York City’s Tenri Cultural Institute, as well as the U.S. premiere of Richard Cameron-Wolfe’s cantata A Measure of Love and Silence at Symphony Space this June. In July, Ms. Familant will join flutist Gary Shocker and pianist Hugh Sung in the Summer Stars Classical Music series in Ocean Grove, New Jersey. The soprano looks forward to her Carnegie Hall debut this Fall.

Ms. Familant also enjoys success as a commercial model, actress and voice-over artist: she has appeared internationally in print, television, radio and film. A passionate advocate for music education, Ms. Familant also maintains a private voice studio and is a frequent visiting lecturer at select voice programs around the world.

Jacquelyn Familant was born in Newport News, Virginia and grew up in Clearwater, Florida. She holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the Eastman School of Music and a Master of Music degree from the Curtis Institute of Music.

Philipp A. Stäudlin, saxophone

2008-03-31T08:48:00.000-07:00

Saxophonist Philipp A. Stäudlin, a native of Friedrichshafen, Germany has appeared as a soloist with numerous orchestras and ensembles throughout Germany and Switzerland, including the Basel Symphony, the Niederrheinische Synphoniker, and the Bielefeld Orchestra. He has performed recitals as a chamber musician in Germany, Switzerland, Russia, Austria, Sweden, France, Italy, and the USA, as well as performing at major music festivals in Schlesswig-Holstein, and at Gidon Kremer's Lockenhaus Festival. He was invited to be the representative of German musical culture on a visit to South Korea and Mongolia with Bundespresident Roman Herzog. Mr. Stäudlin has won many awards as both a saxophone soloist and chamber musician in contemporary, experimental, and classical music.

As the youngest competitor, Stäudlin won First Prize as well as the Audience Prize in the Gustav Bumcke International Saxophone Competition. As a member of the New Art Saxophone Quartet he has received First Prize in the Chamber Music Competition of the German Music Foundation and the Artist in Residence newcomer's award with German Radio, in which Jessye Norman received the main award. Graduated from Basel Musikhochschule in 1999, Stäudlin received a Soloist Diploma with Honors, having studied with Marcus Weiss and Iwan Roth. Philipp A. Stäudlin is currently funded by a full scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) to study with Kenneth Radnofsky on the Artist Diploma Program at Longy School of Music. Mr. Staudlin is the soprano saxophonist of the Radnofsky Quartet.Current CD releases with the New Art Saxophone Quartet on the "ars musici" and " enja" labels

iO Quartet

2008-03-31T07:36:00.000-07:00

iO Quartet:

Christina McGann, violin
Erik Carlson, violin
Elizabeth Weisser, viola
Christopher Gross, cello

Christopher Oldfather

2008-03-30T16:56:00.000-07:00

Christopher Oldfather has devoted himself to the performance of twentieth-century music for more than thirty years. He has participated in innumerable world-première performances, in every possible combination of instruments, in cities all over America. He has been a member of Boston’s Collage New Music since 1979, New York City’s Parnassus since 1997, appears regularly in Chicago, and as a collaborator has joined singers and instrumentalists of all kinds in recitals throughout the United States. In 1986 he presented his recital début in Carnegie Recital Hall, and since then he has pursued a career as a freelance musician. This work has taken him as far afield as Moscow and Tokyo, and he has worked on every sort of keyboard ever made, even including the Chromelodeon. He is widely known for his expertise on the harpsichord, and is one of the leading interpreters of twentieth-century works for that instrument.

As a soloist he has appeared with the MET Chamber Players, the San Francisco Symphony, and Ensemble Modern in Frankfurt, Germany. His recording of Elliott Carter’s violin-piano Duo with Robert Mann was nominated for two Grammy Awards in 1990. He has collaborated with the conductor Robert Craft, and can be heard on several of his recordings.

Linda Larson

2008-03-30T10:48:00.000-07:00

Soprano Linda Larson has been praised for her engaging stage presence and audience connection, as well as her thoughtful music interpretation. Her operatic experiences bring a dramatic element to all of her performances: she has sung leading operatic roles throughout the United States with companies including New York City Opera National Company, Opera Illinois, Syracuse Opera, Tri-Cities Opera, Indianapolis Opera, and Opera Memphis. Favorite roles are Musetta in La Boheme and the title role in Floyd’s Susannah; she has enjoyed tragic death onstage as Gilda, Violetta, and Hoffmann’s Antonia; her characters on the lighter side include Susanna, Fiordiligi, Gretel, Mabel in Pirates of Penzance, both Rosalinda and Adele in Fledermaus, and others.

Recognized for her commitment to new American music, Linda has performed several pieces of composer John Eaton, including the world premiere of his opera Pumped Fiction at the 2007 American Composers Alliance Festival. She has sung with Washington Square Contemporary Music Society, Ensemble X, Brooklyn New Music Collective, Encompass New Opera Theatre, and Voices of Change, and has performed new music at the Bowdoin International and Chintimini Chamber Music Festivals. Composer David Glaser, American Academy of Arts and Letters award-winner, wrote Moonset No. 1 for her; and in February Linda premiered chamber music of Cynthia Lee Wong at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall with harpist Irantzu Agirre and others. She has recently sung music of Tom Cipullo, Norbert Palej, Robert X. Rodriguez, David Heuser, Philip Lasser, John Harbison, and Dan Welcher, among others.

In January 2008 Linda sang a recital as part of the Three Seasons Chamber Music series’ inaugural season, performing music of Schumann, Debussy, and Berg. She has also been featured in concert and recital at the Chautauqua Institute, with the Syracuse Symphony, New Texas Festival, Umpqua Symphony, Erie Philharmonic, Finger Lakes Chamber Ensemble, and Cayuga Chamber Orchestra. She sang Cantata at Symphony Space's Wall-to-Wall Stravinsky Festival; other recent concert engagements include Messiah, Dvorak Stabat Mater, Schubert Mass in A-flat, Mendelssohn Elijah. and Beethoven Missa Solemnis.

A native of Corvallis, Oregon, Linda holds degrees from the University of Michigan and the University of Texas at Austin. Honored as regional finalist in the Metropolitan Opera Auditions, she is a graduate of the Tri-Cities Opera Resident Artist Training Program, and participated in the Twentieth Century Opera and Song program at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Formerly coordinator of Vocal Coaching Program at Cornell University, she is now on the faculty at New York University.

Gabrielle Athayde, cello

2008-03-27T13:31:00.000-07:00

Cellist Gabrielle Athayde was raised by a musical family in the green hills of Berkeley, California. Her open-minded embrace of music has led her to perform all over the world, from mountain-town bars to European concert halls. She graduated from Oberlin Conservatory in 2008 and will pursue graduate work at the University of California at San Diego in the Fall.

Meredith Clark, harp

2008-03-27T13:30:00.000-07:00

Meredith Clark is a native of Fort Worth, Texas. She received her Bachelor of Music in harp performance, studying with Yolanda Kondonassis, from Oberlin Conservatory in May, 2008. She plans to pursue a Master of Music degree from Cleveland Institute of Music this fall, continuing her studies with Ms. Kondonassis.

John Langford, percussion

2008-03-27T13:29:00.000-07:00

John Langford will begin his third year of study at Oberlin Conservatory next Fall. A specialist in the performance of contemporary music, he is a student of Michael Rosen.

Nicole Pantos

2008-03-25T07:27:00.000-07:00

An avid performer of new music, soprano Nicole Pantos collaborates regularly with composers to perform chamber and recital programs. Formally trained as a concert pianist, harpist, and flutist, Ms. Pantos brings instrumental sensibility to chamber performance. She has appeared in concert in Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and in all time zones of the continental US. Her voice has been heard in a variety of venues: by millions at the Christmas Tree Lighting in Rockefeller Center, the Korean Embassy in Washington, DC, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Carnegie Hall, on WQXR, to the grand Nikolaikirche in Wismar, Germany. She recently performed a recital of new music, premiering Joyce Hope Suskind’s "Meditations on War and Peace," in the 2008 Women’s Work series presented by Greenwich House.

Other recent solo engagements include Mendelssohn’s Elijah with the Flemington Chancel Choir, a new music recital at the Nicholas Roerich Museum featuring the world premiere of the song cycle "Reflections on Motherhood" by Sarah Dawson, and the world premiere of the new opera Veil of Forgetfulness by Susan Stoderl. Ms. Pantos has performed the operatic roles of Zerlina, Musetta, Mimi, Gretel, Pamina, and Manon (Massenet). She holds degrees from Princeton University and Manhattan School of Music.

Photo credit: Eberhard Vilkner

Kevin Bylsma

2008-03-25T07:04:00.000-07:00

Kevin Bylsma, pianist and vocal coach, has appeared throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe as an organist, pianist, and accompanist, and is a frequent recital partner to Irina Mishura and Michelle DeYoung. His credits as a music director, chorus master, and répétiteur include Toledo Opera, Michigan Opera Theatre, OPERA!Lenawee, Lyric Chamber Ensemble of Detroit, Papagena Opera Company of Ann Arbor, and the Marquis Theatre of Northville, Michigan. Mr. Bylsma has served as principal keyboardist for several orchestras in the Great Lakes region, and has been the winner of a number of competitive awards, including the Robert Glasgow Organ Scholarship from the University of Michigan, and the Lucille Mehaffie Young Artist Award. Currently he is the opera/vocal coach at Bowling Green State University, in addition to his positions as Artistic Director of The Ann Arbor Festival of Song, and Assistant Organist at the historic Mariners' Church of Detroit.

Jane Schoonmaker Rodgers and Kevin Bylsma have been musical partners since 1990. Their credits as a performing duo include the Kerrytown Concert House in Ann Arbor, the Society for New Music, the Cleveland Art Song Festival, Pro Musica of Detroit, Camphill Village of Copake, NY, and the venerable Civic Morning Musicals series at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY. In 1994 they founded the Art Fair Song Fest, which eventually gave birth to its own parent organization, The Ann Arbor Festival of Song, featuring year-round offerings of art song and vocal chamber music.

Michael Fennelly, piano

2008-03-24T08:36:00.000-07:00

Following his sold-out recital debut in Carnegie’s Weill Hall, pianist Michael Fennelly has toured the world with an array of dynamic programs. This year, he released his debut recording, The Legend of Faust, on One Soul Records.

The native Californian made his first concerto appearance at age ten, and subsequently performed with the orchestras of Orange County, Palo Alto, Livermore, Santa Clara, Berkeley, Mission Viejo, and Aliso Viejo. While still in high school, he was flown to New York as a last-minute replacement for a soloist with the New York Virtuosi Orchestra, and later performed Brahms’ First Piano Concerto in Germany. More recently, he recorded new concerti with the Manhattan Symphony, and performed the Bach conerti with the Barge Festival

Michael Fennelly was taught from age five by his mother, a successful piano teacher, and his father, an avid amateur musician; he continued his studies with Trula Whelan and Earl Voorhies in California. He was a pupil of Dr. Nelita True at the Eastman School of Music, where he was awarded the prestigious Performer’s Certificate. He was then accepted into the studio of Byron Janis at the Manhattan School of Music, where he received the school’s special prize for chamber music and completed his Doctor of Musical Arts degree with a dissertation on Metric Structure.

His recitals have been broadcast on WQXR (New York City), NDR Radio (Germany), and KSTA (Palo Alto). On film, he appeared as the young Harry Truman (who initially trained to become a concert pianist!) for PBS’ American Experience.

In New York City, Mr. Fennelly’s position as staff pianist for Columbia Artist Management and the Julliard School has led to innumerable recitals with every instrument and voice type. He is also Distinguished Guest Artist for Olympia Cruises, a member of the German ensemble Hudson Shad, and a performed for the Aristotle Onassis Foundation.

Mr. Fennelly was the United States winner of the Horowitz Competition, and is a prizewinner in the Young Artist Peninsula Music Festival, the Young Keyboard Artist Association, and the Artist International Competition. He has performed in Moscow Conservatory’s International Chopin Symposium, New York’s Schoenberg Music Festival, and Italy’s Wilhelm Kempff Beethoven Seminar, and in mast classes under John O’Connor, Richard Goode, and Abby Simon.

Naomi Drucker

2008-03-24T07:40:00.000-07:00

Naomi Drucker, clarinetist, co-director of the American Chamber Ensemble, has performed, recorded and toured with the New York Philharmonic. She has performed in Japan, Great Britain, Russia, Sweden, France, Canada and Argentina, and has appeared as soloist with the Nassau Symphony Orchestra, New York Virtuosi, Philharmonia Virtuosi, Massapequa Symphony, Long Island Baroque Ensemble. Long Island Symphony and West Islip Orchestra.

She has given performances at the International Clarinet Convention in Paris, Toronto, Pittsburgh and Washington , DC. With her husband Stanley Drucker, principal clarinetist of the New York Philharmonic, she has performed on a tour of eleven cities in Japan, at the East Meets West Music Festival in Sweden, in 1996 at the International Clarinet Congress in Paris, in Singapore, at the Music Conservatorium in Sydney, Australia and at the Mykonos International Chamber Music Festival. Principal clarinetist of the New York Virtuosi, she began her career at age 21 as principal clarinetist of the North Carolina Symphony. A graduate of Hofstra University and an Adjunct Professor of Music at her alma mater, she received the 1994 George M. Estabrook Distinguished Alumni Award for career achievement.

With the American Chamber Ensemble, Drucker has recorded music of Zaimont, Hindemith and Weigl and has performed on New York Legends - Stanley Drucker for Cala Records and Naomi Drucker and Stanley Drucker Play Meyer Kupferman for Soundspells Records. A 1998 release, Music for Doubles, on Elysium Records, features Naomi and Stanley Drucker performing the Krommer Concerto, Op. 35, for Two Clarinets and Orchestra, Peter Tiboris conducting. Ms. Drucker enjoys a busy teaching schedule and is a strong supporter of her many friends who are Long Island composers.

Kim Paterson

2008-03-24T07:38:00.000-07:00

Kim Paterson is on the faculty of Hartwick College and SUNY Oneonta and freelances as a pianist, composer, and arranger. He has composed incidental music for Shakespeare’s “Cymbelline” and Euripedes’ “The Baechae”, the latter a winner of the meritorious acheivement award from the Kennedy Center College Theater Festival in Washington, D.C. He has also adapted numerous scores for theatrical productions, the most recent being Kurt Weill’s “Three Penny Opera”. Mr. Paterson is a graduate of SUNY Purchase and an alumnus of the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood.

Robin Seletsky

2008-03-24T07:36:00.000-07:00

Robin Seletsky, clarinet, graduated from New England Conservatory and later attended the Julliard School. A former member of the San Antonio Symphony she is currently the principal clarinetist with the Glimmerglass Opera. Robin lives in upstate New York where she teaches clarinet at SUNY Oneonta and Hartwick College and is a member of several regional orchestras. Additionally, she is the founder and clarinetist of the Catskill Klezmorim and is the music director at Temple Beth El in Oneonta.

Keith Spencer

2008-03-24T07:32:00.000-07:00

Keith Spencer was born in West Palm Beach, Florida, one of thirteen children in a musical family. His pursuit of a professional singing career began with formal training at the University of Miami, from where he received his Bachelor of Music degree in 1987. Two years later, he completed a Master of Music degree in voice at the Manhattan School of Music and in 1991 Keith gained his second Master's degree in opera performance from the Curtis Institute of Music.

Keith Spencer made his professional operatic debut in 1992 with the Virginia Opera Company. Since then, he has appeared with numerous ensembles, including the Opera Company of Philadelphia, The Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, Glimmerglass Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Chautauqua Opera, Lake George Opera, Ashlawn-Highland Opera, Skylight Opera Theater, Greensboro Opera, Opera Roanoke and Diamond Opera Theater.

Among his varied operatic roles are Papageno in Die Zauberflöte, Dandini in La Cenerentola,
Dr. Malatesta in Don Pasquale, Count Almaviva in Le Nozze di Figaro, Guglielmo in
Così fan tutte, Figaro in Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Schaunard in La Boheme, and the title role in Monteverdi's Orfeo. An accomplished concert singer, he has performed such orchestral works as Songs of Travel and Dona Nobis Pacem by Ralph Vaughan Williams, the Requiems of Fauré and Duruflé, Mozart's Mass in C, Bach's Mass in B minor, Handel's Messiah and Saint Saens' Christmas Oratorio. He made his New York recital debut in 1995 with the Hugo Wolf Society at Merkin Concert Hall.

Keith is known for his work in the contemporary music field. In June 2002, he performed a solo recital of new music at The Americas Society in New York City singing songs by Laura Kaminsky, Alba Potes and Chris DeBlasio. He has recorded the preliminary sketches of Burning Bright at the RCA recording studios. This modern opera, composed by Frank Lewin, is based on the Steinbeck novel of the same name. At American Opera Projects in New York City, Keith Spencer has premiered Three Reminiscences - songs written for him by composer Ed Windells with texts by W.S. Merwin. He has premiered works by composers Robert Alpert, Peter Susser, and Albert Ahlstrom as well. In June 2008, Keith will also premiere the cantata “A Measure of Love and Silence” by Richard Cameron-Wolfe at New York City’s Symphony Space.

Keith Spencer's competition honors include: 1st place, Bel Canto Singers of York Competition; winner of the Music Guild of Boca Raton Competition; winner of the Five Towns Music and Art Foundation Award; regional finalist in the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. He has also received the Theodore Newman Voice Scholarship, the Kiwanis Club of Palm Beach Scholarship and the Greater Miami Young Patronesses of the Opera Award.

Keith and his brother Mark Spencer, harpist, have recently released a compact disc entitled “The Spencer Brothers - With Harp and Voice”, a CD which was inspired by the attacks on America on September 11, 2001. Keith composed two of the pieces on this CD, including the title work, “With Harp and Voice” which he wrote for his brother Mark, and “Joseph’s Promise” which Keith composed to honor the memory of the Brothers’ parents. www.thespencerbrothers.com

Keith can also be heard on other compact discs as baritone soloist of Brahms' Ein Deutsches Requiem with Marvis Martin, soprano, and the University of Miami Symphony Orchestra and Chorus (Cane Records). Keith has also recorded the role of the Mad Hatter in Dreams for Alice a musical by Gilbert Heatherwick based on Alice in Wonderland, The New Moon with City Center’s Encore! Series, and the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra’s Yuletide Christmas CD.

Jane Schoonmaker Rodgers

2008-03-24T07:01:00.000-07:00

Soprano Jane Schoonmaker Rodgers’ concert, recital, choral, and stage engagements have taken her in recent years to New York, London, Vienna, and Prague, as well as to Chicago, Detroit, Toledo, Syracuse, and other towns in the Great Lakes region. Recent activities have included performances and recordings with the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, Toledo Symphony, National Polish Radio Symphony, Moravian Philharmonic, American Composers’ Alliance, Mid-American Center for Contemporary Music, and the Society for New Music. She appears frequently at Ann Arbor's Kerrytown Concert House, and is General Director of The Ann Arbor Festival of Song. Opera credits include Ohio Light Opera, Michigan Opera Theatre, Toledo Opera, Michigan Lyric Opera, and others. She is currently an associate professor of voice at Bowling Green State University, and a long-time member of the professional ensemble at Mariners’ Church of Detroit.

Second Instrumental Unit

2008-03-24T05:07:00.000-07:00

Artist Roster

Violin
David Fulmer Co-Director, Keats Dieffenbach, Nathan Schmidt

Viola
Kyle Armbrust, Nadia Sirota

Cello
Claire Bryant, Christopher Gross

Bass
Brendan Kane, Kris Saebo

Flute
Erin Lesser

Oboe
Arthur Sato

Clarinet
Benjamin Lulich

Bassoon
Adrian Morejon

Saxophones
Eliot Gattegno Co-Director

Trumpet
Nathan Botts

Trombone
Steven Parker

Piano
Christopher Guzman
Eric Wubbels-accordion/keyboards

Organ
Daniel Sullivan

Percussion
Alex Lipowski, Samuel Solomon

Conductor
Marc Williams Co-Director

The artistic vision of the Second Instrumental Unit is steadfast and resolute. We have built and continue to build a strong rapport with many of the great living composers of today and tomorrow: performing some of their most important works while working together with them to create new ones.

Our mission is simple: we strive, through the highest artistic standards possible, to foster and present what is new, what is compelling, what is diverse, and what will set the trends for the future musical landscape. We look for music that is pushing the boundaries of the possible, with a particular interest in emerging and underrepresented composers and works. We are unapologetic in our aim to make as much of this new repertoire accessible to the largest possible audience, presenting it not as a concert for a distant audience, but as an experience that elucidates the relevance of both the performance and the art in our lives and times.

"Members of the Second Instrumental Unit were utterly superb, putting the music across with accuracy and flair."
-David Cleary New Music Connoisseur

Harold Rosenbaum

2008-03-24T05:04:00.000-07:00

Harold Rosenbaum is one of the most accomplished and critically acclaimed choral conductors of our time. In recognition of his leadership in the interpretation and performance of contemporary music, G. Schirmer, Inc., the world's largest music publisher, has established its Harold Rosenbaum Choral Series, for which he composes, edits, and gives performance suggestions for conductors. A tireless proponent and advocate for contemporary composers and American composers in particular, he has created an annual choral composition competition, has commissioned twenty works, has conducted over 200 world premieres (including works by Ravel [in Paris], Schnittke, Henze, Berio, Perle, and Harbison), and has recorded contemporary choral music for SONY Classical, Albany, CRI, Bridge, Koch International, Capstone, and DRG. He is also a three-time recipient of the ASCAP/Chorus America Award for Adventuresome Programming of Contemporary Music , and a recipient of Chorus America 's American Choral Works Performance Award.

To fulfill his dream of conducting the most complex and masterful choral compositions of the 20th century, Mr. Rosenbaum established The New York Virtuoso Singers, an all-professional choir now in its 20th season.

"In that domain of the performance of contemporary music which has been most neglected and least supported in this country, there is no choral group which has been more able and willing to perform responsibly the most demanding and knowing of contemporary works than The New York Virtuoso Singers, under the guidance of a sophisticated and understanding conductor. Not only do they deserve and require support, but the fate of contemporary choral music is largely contingent on such support."

-Milton Babbitt

The New York Virtuoso Singers

2008-03-24T05:01:00.000-07:00

Founded in 1988 by conductor Harold Rosenbaum, The New York Virtuoso Singers ( www.nyvirtuoso.org ) has become this country's leading exponent of contemporary choral music. Although the chorus performs music of all periods, its emphasis is on commissioning, performing and recording the music of American composers.

From its early days in 1988, as an offshoot of a chorus-in-residence created expressly for the Brooklyn Philharmonic, until the present day, with self-produced concerts, recordings, commissions and tours, NYVS has carved a unique niche for itself in the musical world. NYVS is a twelve to sixteen-member professional choral ensemble (sometimes expanded to 24 or more) dedicated to presenting both seldom-heard works by past and contemporary masters, as well as premieres by today's composers. Harold Rosenbaum has placed a special emphasis on supporting American composers. NYVS has been featured many times on radio and TV. In August 1993, the group appeared as the first-ever guest chorus at Tanglewood Music Center 's annual Festival of Contemporary Music (returning in 2003), and in January 1995, NYVS made its second appearance at the Juilliard School .

NYVS has won the prestigious ASCAP-Chorus America "Award for Adventuresome Programming of Contemporary Music" three times, and has been given Chorus America 's "American Choral Works Performance Award." It appears on 14 commercial CDs: SONY Classical, Albany , CRI, Bridge, Koch International, Capstone, and DRG.

With grants from The Mary Flagler Charitable Trust, The Koussevitzky Foundation of the Library of Congress and other sources, The New York Virtuoso Singers has commissioned 18 works by composers including Michael Gordon, David Felder, David Winkler, George Tsontakis, and Tristan Keuris. The New York Virtuoso Singers has premiered over 150 works by composers such as Luciano Berio, John Harbison, Hans Werner Henze, Louis Andriessen, Shulamit Ran, George Perle, Harrison Birtwistle, Ernst Krenek, Thea Musgrave, Jonathan Harvey, Arvo Pärt and Andrew Imbrie.

The New York Virtuoso Singers collaborates regularly with New York 's leading orchestras and ensembles, including The Brooklyn Philharmonic, The Juilliard Orchestra, The Orchestra of St. Luke's, The American Symphony, The Bard Festival Orchestra, The Mark Morris Dance Group, The Bang on a Can Festival, Parnassus , and The Riverside Symphony. Collaborations include The American Composers Orchestra, The American Symphony, The Brooklyn Philharmonic, and The Glynbourne Opera Company. The New York Virtuoso Singers is Chorus-in-Residence at St. Ignatius of Antioch Episcopal Church in New York City.

Beth Wiemann

2008-03-23T12:52:00.000-07:00

Beth Wiemann was raised in Burlington, VT and studied composition and clarinet at Oberlin College and Princeton University. Her works have been performed by the New York New Music Ensemble, Continuum, Ensemble 21, Earplay, the Motion Ensemble, Opera Vista, saxophonist John Sampen, singers Paul Hillier, Susan Narucki, D'Anna Fortunato, and others. Her compositions have won awards from Copland House, the Orvis Foundation, Colorado New Music Festival, American Women Composers, and Marimolin as well as various arts councils, and have been featured on the Capstone, Americus, innova and Albany record labels. She teaches composition and clarinet at the University of Maine.

"Erie, on the periphery" (2005) was composed while in residence at the Ragdale Foundation, and after a harrowing winter drive to that artists' colony around Lake Erie. The piece alternates between relatively calm progressions supporting the main melodic line and sections of irregular and unpredictable rhythms. I want to thank Ben and Marilyn for preparing this premiere outing of the work.

Joel Gressel

2008-03-23T12:12:00.000-07:00

Joel Gressel (b. Cleveland, 1943) received a B.A. from Brandeis University and a Ph.D. in music composition from Princeton University. He studied composition with Martin Boykan and Milton Babbitt, and computer music with Godfrey Winham and J.K. Randall. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State CAPS program. His computer music has been recorded on the Odyssey and CRI labels. He currently lives in New York, working as a computer programmer, maintaining and extending software that models tax-exempt housing-bond cash flows.

Program Note

An Orderly Transition (1985, revised 2007)

I had begun a piece for unaccompanied computer which, though viable, had no goal in sight, when Rachel Hadas presented a poem to my wife and me describing an evening spent together. It touched on major life changes afoot: my mother was to die of cancer a month before our first daughter was born. I could not resist the challenge posed at the end, “What music will you make for her, I ask.”

The music already written was recast as all that happened before the opening word “After.” Since the music was composed more than 20 years ago, I have only fragmentary recollections about what I was thinking at the time – that the equation between birth and death should be expounded by wrapping pairs of related row forms together to form the voice lines; that the crawling cockroach, purring cat, and bearded father formed a progression from lower to higher life forms, reflecting the baby developing in the womb; that in the overall musical program this development was followed by the labor and elation of childbirth.

The title is both an ironic comparison of becoming and losing a parent with the nation changing presidents, and a description of pitch procedures used in the piece – row forms are only partial transpositions of one another. This is a revised version of the piece, using a more modern computer “orchestra” than I had in the 1980’s and conforming to strict metrical notation. All sounds are created by small computer algorithms; there are no prerecorded or sampled sounds. The original version proceeded more slowly and essentially demanded that the soprano memorize the playback and then fit her part to it.

The portrait of me (above) for the festival program was drawn by my daughter, Katherine, “the child in the amnio x-ray.”

TEXT:

Amniocentesis
Rachel Hadas

After the apples brought down from the country,
after the Chinese food and beer and kisses of reunion,
sleepily with what syllables are left us
we talk of death and birth,
of terror and of comfort, their equation:
grandmother dying of cancer,
baby astir in the womb.
The cockroach crawls in the beer mug.
The cat with the ulcered ear
purring reaches up a paw to knead
the beard of the father-to-be
who from his fragile tower
is soon to be pulled down into the gene pool
to paddle down the generations' river
as far as an unfathomed fertile sea.
Parked for a while above the common lot,
each of us, gazing at it, either thinks
of our own mother and father or does not.
The child in the amnio x-ray shakes her fist
and in the baby shop you tell me of
a teddy bear, wound up, makes white womb noises,
amnio growls to soothe the savage breast
of a new creature thrust cold and wild
into such a strangely naked world.
What music will you make for her, I ask.

Used by permission of the poet

Performed by Linda Larson

Anthony Joseph Lanman

2008-03-23T12:10:00.000-07:00

Anthony Joseph Lanman, a native of Houston, Texas, received his BM in composition at the University of Texas, and an MM and DMA in composition from Indiana University. Mr. Lanman was lucky enough to be taught and inspired by Adam Holzman (classical guitar), Dan Welcher (composition), Nigel North (renaissance lute) and Sven-David Sandström (composition). Mr. Lanman is also an active performer on both the classical guitar and 8-string electric guitar.

Mr. Lanman has been commissioned by such diverse ensembles as Duo46, the Noné Trio, the Strung Out Trio, the California EAR Unit, the Oregon Bach Festival for the group Fireworks,and the British new music group, Ensemble Eleven. Mr. Lanman’s music has been performed all over the United States as well as in Turkey,Cyprus, Italy, Greece, England, Austria and the Czech Republic. His music has been featured on radio stations throughout the United States,Europe and Asia. Mr. Lanman has participated as composer-in-residence at the Music02 festival held in Cincinnati, OH and at the 'EssentiallyChoral' reading sessions held by Vocal Essence in Minneapolis, MN. He has received an ASCAP/Morton Gould Young Composer Award as well as several ASCAP Standard Awards.

Critics have praised his work as 'intense' (Gramophone Magazine) and'wild, edgy and raw to contemplative, sonorous and seductive' (TheStrad). Since the advent of compressed digital music, Mr. Lanman has been active in the promotion of music on the internet. His music has been downloaded from MP3.com, Ampcast and Download.com over 150 thousand times.

Il dolce stile nuovo (2001) for violin, cello, piano

This piece, for me, is just about the joy or writing and playing music. It brings together all of my major musical influences – rock, jazz, heavy metal, renaissance and baroque music, classical Japanese music, and modern concert music. Sure, the genesis of the piece came when a friend told me that, because I was a guitarist, I would never really be able to write for piano – I don’t like it when people tell me I can’t do something – but the piece became so much more than that for me. It embodies my style and my approach to composition and was written for and dedicated to Mandy Morris.

Harold Seletsky

2008-03-23T12:06:00.000-07:00

Harold Seletsky is the clarinetist, composer and bandleader of The West End Klezmorim. He has composed music for films, commercials, opera, ballet, and has written jazz and Yiddish songs. Born in Brooklyn in 1927, he attended the High School of Performing Arts. At the age of 17 he apprenticed for 5 years with composer Josef Schmidt--a German emigree who had been a prize pupil of Alban Berg. Harold’s eclectic musical career includes a position as Eb clarinetist with the Houston Symphony under Leopold Stokowsky, klezmer clarinetist in the Catskill hotels during the 1950’s and award winning composer of concert and commercial music.

He has composed for films, television commercials, opera, ballet and has written jazz and Yiddish songs. His commercials for Eastern Airlines, Air France, Chevrolet and U.S. Steel won numerous awards as did his theme music for the long-running news program Issues and Answers.
Harold has performed with his clarinet onstage in the Broadway
production of Rags and in the Off-Broadway production of Hot
Klezmer, the latter winning him notice in the New York Times as [the show’s] “sine qua non clarinetist”. Most recently, his Klezmer Fantasy, a work for klezmer clarinet and string quartet, won first prize in a competition sponsored by the American Society for Jewish Music.

Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, opus 3
Allegro
Adagio
Rondo

Jan Gilbert

2008-03-22T15:44:00.000-07:00

Jan Gilbert has been a member of American Composers Alliance since 1980. Her choral works have been commissioned by Chanticleer, the Dale Warland Singers, Ars Nova Singers, and LISTEN, and her work has received support from the NEA, McKnight Foundation, Jerome Foundation and Northwest Area Foundation. She has completed several residencies at the MacDowell Colony. Originally from New York City, Gilbert is a faculty member at Macalester College, St. Paul. Recent performances by the St. Paul Civic Symphony include In the Beginning: A Native American Legend from the Tlingit Tribe of the Northwest Coast (for Narrator and Orchestra) and Suite for Veena and Orchestra, featuring the internationally acclaimed veena artist, Nirmala Rajasekar, one of several collaborations with Rajasekar which will be presented in Zurich, Switzerland, in 2008. Gilbert’s experimental chant settings, NightChants, are recorded on Chanticleer’s Sound in Spirit (Warner Classics).

PROGRAM NOTE

Chant-Prologue
I. Heloise: Prime
II. Heloise: Hymns
III. Heloise: Vespers
IV. Mother House
Chant-Epilogue

Of Heloise is a setting of four poems of Judith Infante from Love: A Suspect Form, Heloise and Abelard, a collection of fifty-four poems which will be released this fall by Shearsman Books Ltd. This setting for soprano and string quartet is the first part of a much larger work with collaborative partners Nancy Ogle and Judith Infante.

The chamber opera will be premiered at the University of Maine in Orono in 2009, and will include settings of the poetry for soloists, chorus, and instrumental ensemble. Judith Infante's poetry is published in the literary journals American Poetry Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, High Plains Literary Review, Marlboro Review, Puerto del Sol, The Texas Observer, The Blue Mesa Review; her work appears in poetry anthologies published by Papier-Mache Press.

Nancy Ogle, Soprano, and String Quartet

I. Heloise: Prime
I wake, morning, wound in my one dream.
Dreaming I wake in my lover's bed.

What to sing, dawn, as I rise in old clothes and take up my stone?
Stone, morning, heavy as an infant lost.

Love buried his arrows beneath this parchment wrap of bones
and keeps me bound in his bloody rags.

Hear how I sing, dawn, sing with a clotted heart.
With a clotted heart, dawn, singing my wound!

II. Heloise: Hymns
Our daughters praise you.
All winter icy splinters of song
rose towards the chapel's rough
planed rafters and scrolled
your lambent phrases upon them.

Your Christ-filled logic ignited
the space around the Paraclete,
our burden, your praise.
We had hours yet to toil and hard
prayers under our knees.

We had no money, and for barter
nothing. Sister knelt
before sister wrapping
her feet in rags. No fire to counter
the altar's bulk. But desire
grew silently. Squatter in every corner,
it pried open locks to chambers
beneath our veils.

As I slept, winter's insatiable
form moved over me. I woke
pinioned by the rough habit
you've dressed me in.

Spring brought melt and a low priest
to confess us. The daughters in Christ
sang, and the priest remarked
our fortune. After prayers,
your hymns stayed in the chapel,
fading with smoke and sputter of candle fat.
Here poetry is an alien.
The sisters thank you.

III. Heloise: Vespers
Our mouths spill the litany, tolling
to the forest's rim. She approaches our walls.

We don't hear what summons her.
We wear veils and are married to God.

The setting sun burnishes her flanks. My sisters
turn their backs. The doe is my sister.

Her bed is soft pine needles, her scent autumn
and tree bark and oestrus. I would go with her.

Beyond the convent's measured garden and seamed fields
stand the woods. Hours yet to compline.

Is she my sister?

My habit loosens, prayer book and key fall.
The ground is warm. Twigs avoid my bare feet.

Near the forest gate others wait. I hear their barks.
They are home in the moonlight. Hoofs glint.

The stag!

Then, between me and glade stands the cherubim. Sword
burns my lips and the babble begins.

Small words for sister, for words,
for doe vanished in the dark.

IV. Mother House
(Abbey of Ste. Marie de Argenteuil)
Heloise - derived from Eloim - therefore, dedicated to God, therefore, an offering

In the shaft of the afternoon, Heloise,
a child upon her pallet, curves
into a bell. As insects drone,
light glides along the wall and lures

her with arms warm and entwining.
Dust motes spiral and rise along
a ladder lit to heaven. And they sing.
She thinks she remembers this song

which calls to another. Under her tongue
the response quivers. She wants to touch
the phantom voice. Sing with it. But not one
thing can she hold. To clutch

afternoon light leaves you cold. Night will come
and time beats a loud, empty drum.

© 2008 Judith Infante. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.

Francis Kayali

2008-03-22T15:14:00.000-07:00

Francis Kayali was born in Poitiers, France in 1979. In the Fall of 1997, he moved to the US and enrolled at Bowdoin College, where he studied composition with professors Elliott Schwartz and Robert Greenlee.
From 2001 to 2003, he studied composition at SUNY Stony Brook, under Perry Goldstein and Peter Winkler. He received an MA in composition in May of 2003.

Kayali is now attending the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music in the DMA in composition program. His composition teachers at USC include Frank Ticheli and Tamar Diesendruck. Kayali has received commissions from the Chamber Opera of USC and Bowdoin College. His music has been performed by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), the Chamber Opera of USC, the Bowdoin Concert Band, and the Bowdoin Chamber Choir.

Please visit franciskayali.com to hear sound clips and obtain information about upcoming performances.

Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano (2001-2)

Program note:

I wrote the Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano while studying with Perry Goldstein at Stony Brook (2001-2002). It is the first piece in which I attempted to consistently adhere to an atonal idiom. At various points throughout the piece, tonality does make short appearances, bringing with it an added range of expressiveness. The transition between the two “languages” is never very abrupt; the music simply slips in and out of tonality.

The first movement is based on a short melodic and rhythmic motif present in Debussy’s piano prelude “…des pas sur la neige” (“Footsteps in the Snow,” Book I, VI). Here, it has been recast as something closer to “…du sang dans la neige” (“Blood in the Snow”). In the days leading up to my composing this movement, I had sat helplessly by in an analysis class while Debussy’s prelude was being mercilessly dissected. Relentlessly, hour upon hour, we feasted on the defenseless prey. Until we eventually became numb to the music, and we were able to go about our forensic measurements undistracted. But then, for days, for weeks, fragments of the music we had contributed to kill vengefully haunted our minds. I wrote this first movement as a means of inviting the torn spirits to rest.

The second movement oscillates between contemplative and playful moods. This ambivalence is present from the start, when the searching violin solo of the opening is punctuated by playful bird-like comments from the piano. Once the clarinet is reintroduced, a faster middle section takes place, giving the sense that there is a dialogue between the three instruments, during which the “bird” idea and the violin’s rising gesture are developed.

Low chords from the piano introduce the movement’s final section: a sparse and somewhat thorny landscape, with the clarinet playing a mournful melody with bluesy tendencies. There is at that point a certain sense of physical distance between the three instruments, as they appear to be listening to each other, trying to imitate one another, to find each other, and to start a dialogue.

While the music in the second movement tends to be polyphonic, with the three instruments off on their own, simultaneously exhibiting different intentions, the last movement of the Trio finds them united. In this movement, I wove in sections of music from the preceding two movements, and introduced a few stretches of not-so-atonal music, for contrast and, perhaps also, for the sake of resolution.

Joyce Hope Suskind

2008-03-22T15:04:00.000-07:00

Joyce Hope Suskind has enjoyed a varied career as composer, concert singer, oboist, pianist, and teacher. After completing her studies at Juilliard as a scholarship student in oboe and voice, Suskind discovered her talent for composing while playing improvisational piano at the Martha Graham School. She received a commission from Lehman College to compose a score for a Balinese dance which was written for gamelons, flute, and percussion. She went on to specialize in vocal music, composing a score for a musical comedy, a revue, a feminist anthem, which was her first published song, cabaret songs, and numerous art songs, most of them set to the poems of WB Yeats. She is currently interested in composing vocal chamber music. She resides in Manhattan, her hometown.

Meditations on War and Peace (2006)

Composed for voice, clarinet, and piano, the music is set to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Butler Yeats, and Morgan Alexander (with the composer's collaboration on the lyric of the song Chalk of Time).

Composers note:

When I came upon an untitled poem in the collected poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins that began, “The times are nightfall”, I gasped and said to myself, “Oh my God! We are living in those times”. A profound feeling of desolation, of despair, came over me. I sat down at the piano and started to play what became the song “War”. The line “Or what is else?” revealed a shift in consciousness in the poet that required a corresponding shift in the music. I accomplished that by going from minor to major (pentatonic), which let the light come in. This is the only section in the entire suite that is in a major key.

That shift of consciousness in the poem came from the spiritual depths of Hopkins, who was a Jesuit priest. Seeking and possibly finding “the world within” resides in the great mystic traditions. It is difficult to find a secular parallel to this. A notable exception was the response of Viktor Frankl, the great psychiatrist who survived the tortures of incarceration in a concentration camp. He said, “It is not what happens to a person that affects them, but how they choose to look at what happens to them. The last of the human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude”. He was able to save his sanity because of that choice.

Yeats doesn’t deal with the personal, but with a civilization out of control. The Irish and Russian Revolutions, and the First World War have devastated Europe. The Christian god cannot hold it together. An era is coming to an end. The old god will be replaced by another, unknown and terrifying.

Meditations on War and Peace

1. Chalk of Time
2. We Start in the Sun
3. War
4. Peace
5. The Second Coming

Chalk of Time
text by Morgan Alexander and Joyce Suskind

The bomb shatters the dream
The cry curdles the lullaby
The wail ferments the sunbeams
And you stand alone
In the chalk of time.

The knife pierces the flesh
The scream voices the agony
The troops tumble the dust
And you stand alone
In the chalk of time.

When the mist turns winter cold,
quiet;
Cover me with a blanket of dawn;
Out of the silence is woven a warmth
As the threads of the days wear on.

The truce announces the birth
The earth heralds the future
The sun beckons the journey
And you stand alone
In the chalk of time.

We Start in the Sun
text by Morgan Alexander

In the quiet morning
Bring me sleep in a wooden bowl;
In the eagle dawning
Cover me with strawberry vines.
We start in the sun
With kisses and sand;
We end when the raindrops fall
One by one.

In the naked sunlight
Gather wood for a blazing fire;
On the jagged skyline
Hawks with bloody claws.
We start in the sun
With banners and emblems;
We end when the monarchs fall
One by one.

In the smoky twilight
Set the wild dogs free in the wood;
Hear the sky’s warning;
Hide in caves from charcoal death.
We start in the sun
With kisses and sand.
We end when the bombs fall
One by one.

War

Gerard Manley Hopkins

The times are nightfall, look their light grows less;
The times are winter, watch, a world undone;
They waste, they wither worse; they as they run
Or bring more or blazon man’s distress.
And I not help. Nor word now of success;
All is from wreck, here, there, to rescue one –
Work which to see scarce so much as begun
Makes welcome death, does fear forgetfulness.

Or what is else? There is your world within.
There rid the dragons, root out there the sin.
Your will is law in that small commonweal

Peace.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace?—I’ll not play hypocrite

To my own heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?

O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
He comes to brood and sit.

The Second Coming

William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are these words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

Hubert S. Howe, Jr.

2008-03-22T14:59:00.000-07:00

Hubert Howe is Professor of Music at Queens College of the City University of New York. He is currently President of the American Composers Alliance, a position he has served in since 2001.

Program Note:

Each of my symphonies is based on a set of related materials for which I can see numerous possibilities for working things out, thus leading to several different movements. Symphony No. 3 is based on a series of trichords, tetrachords and pentachords that all relate to the diminished seventh chord. The instrumentation, consisting of four woodwinds, four brasses, piano and strings, allows different materials to be presented in distinct instrumental groups, and when combined, to keep the threads clear. The piano, which has several solos in the quieter moments, combines with all the other groups.

[In the first movement, there are two principal ideas, the first based on pentachords and presented in a faster tempo, and the second on tetrachords and trichords. After a slow introduction, these materials are presented in a series of evolving sections, followed by an extensive development that combines different parts of each and then the two together, reaching an intense climax. This is followed by a transformed recapitulation and conclusion.]

II and III to be presented at this year's festival:

The second movement presents two overlapping strands of music, identified by orchestration. The first strand begins in the winds and brass, and the second in the strings. Each strand proceeds by adding new elements to the preceding passage, or by extracting elements from it. Thus, there are many lines that are repeated, each time in a different context. The movement builds to a climax and then recedes.

The third movement is based entirely on tetrachords. The first two sections run through the basic forms used, and the middle section runs through basically all different combinations and permutations of these materials. After a transformed recapitulation, the work ends with a brief coda.

Steven Kemper

2008-03-22T14:53:00.000-07:00

Originally from Baltimore, Steven studied composition with Elliott Schwartz and Vin Shende during his time at Bowdoin. Upon graduation he moved to Chicago where he worked as a sound engineer for the Chicago Shakespeare Theater and the Apple Tree Theatre. Steven completed a master of music degree in composition at Bowling Green State University where he studied composition with Marilyn Shride and worked as a teaching assistant for music technology. Currently, Steven is a second year doctoral student at the University of Virginia in the composition and computer technologies program, studying with Matthew Burtner.

He has composed several pieces incorporating computer processing and acoustic instruments. Other research interests include video, interactivity in electronic music and musical robotics. In 2005, Steven’s saxophone quartet Gliding Through a Misty Phosphorescence was premiered in Madrid, and his video Neoga has been shown at numerous electroacoustic festivals and concerts around the world.

Run From Fear (2007)
The title of this piece refers to a Bruce Nauman neon sculpture which contains the text “Run from Fear” above the text “Fun from Rear.” This piece is based on the minor third E-G which comes from the first song I learned to play on guitar: “About a Girl” from the Nirvana Unplugged album.

As in Nauman’s sculpture, this piece strives to be both serious and light-hearted at the same time. This piece was commissioned by Bowdoin College in celebration of the opening of the Studzinski Recital Hall.

Nathan Bowen

2008-03-22T14:50:00.000-07:00

Nathan Bowen is currently pursuing a doctorate in music composition at the CUNY Graduate Center, studying primarily with Amnon Wolman and Tania León. Having composed for chamber ensembles, short films, orchestra, choir, theater, commercial projects, and computer music, Nathan has diverse interests. As a member of the Handcart Ensemble, he created sound scores tightly integrated with kinetic dance movement and spatialization for New York premieres of Pulitzer Prize winner Seamus Heany's Burial at Thebes as well as Ted Hughes's Alcestis. His music for Handcart Ensemble's Two Yeats Plays garnered a nomination for a New York Innovative Theater Award for best original music. He was recently commissioned by MELD Danceworks to provide an original score for Sydney Ann's Apple, which was premiered at the Merce Cunningham Studio. His most recent projects involve networked performance and are geared toward audiences helping to make compositional decisions in real-time. As a co-founding member of the Intermedia Arts Group, Nathan has performed computer laptop improvisations using signal-processing and 3D graphics. His work in this area has been funded by a position at the Graduate Center's New Media Lab. Nathan currently teaches computer music and music history at Hunter College (CUNY), as well as solfége and music theory at Purchase College (SUNY).

Program Note:

Cassia (2004) is an aromatic spice that, among other uses, is an ingredient for anointing oil. Having an interest in the rich history of anointing, I love how it is a tradition mainly associated with vitality and potential. This piece is meant to be a celebration of things that are ennobling, constructive, and beneficial to growth and enrichment. As such, I wanted to write something that not only comes alive aurally, but also requires a bit of physical nimbleness for performance. I am increasingly drawn to durational issues and how rhythm can be used to create a sense of motion or stasis. In this piece I am conscientious of the interplay between sparse and rich textures, brittle and lush timbres, and abrupt dynamic and rhythmic contrasts.

André Brégégère

2008-03-22T14:43:00.000-07:00

Born in Paris, France, in 1975, André Brégégère came to the United States in 2003. He spent two years in Boston, where he studied Jazz composition with Ken Pullig, Greg Hopkins, earning his BM at the Berklee College of Music in 2005. In 2006, he moved to New York and has been since studying privately with Bruce Saylor at the Aaron Copland School of Music, where he is currently working towards his MA in composition. In 2008, Mr. Brégégère has been awarded the prestigious Chancelor’s Fellowship from the City University of New York, and will start his doctoral studies in composition at CUNY beginning next Fall.

During the past two years, Mr. Brégégère has been involved in the organization of new music concerts in New York City, as the vice president and president of the QC New Music Group (www.qcnmg.net). He recently started—in collaboration with fellow composer Inés Thiebaut—the Dr. Faustus Chamber Concert Series, which held its first concert on May 8th 2008 at the St. Peter’s church in Chelsea (for more information about Dr Faustus, email at: contact.drfaustus@gmail.com). Mr. Brégégère is a member of ASCAP.

Program notes:

Vol de nuit was written during the Spring of 2007 and received its first performance in May of the same year. It is based on the interplay of two contrasting ideas: the first idea, stated in the opening gesture the opening gesture, is submitted throughout the piece to a process of orchestral and rhythmic re-interpretations; the second, contrasting idea is first stated as a simple accompanied melody. It later returns, unfolding in a slow, contrapuntal passage, leading to the primary climax of the piece.

The pre-compositional material from which Vol de nuit is derived uses symmetry as its main structuring force, and is based on my—rather naïve—interpretation of the theoretical writings of George Perle, to whom this piece is dedicated. I am also indebted to my teacher, Bruce Saylor, for his attentive guidance and support; to the Second Instrumental Unit, David Fulmer and Marc Williams for their inspired first performances of many of my works during the past two years—including the present piece.

Lewis Nielson

2008-03-22T14:40:00.000-07:00

Lewis Nielson (b. 1950) studied music at the Royal Academy of Music in London, England, Clark University in Massachusetts and the University of Iowa. His works have been performed throughout the North and South America, and in Europe. He served as Professor of Music Theory and Composition at the University of Georgia, and, in 2000, joined the composition faculty of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he is currently Professor of Composition and chair of the Composition Department.

How you go… (2007)

How you go was written at the request of Meredith Clark and is dedicated to her. The work is a fantastical line drawing in sound, with the joy of writing it being the only focus.

Meredith Clark, harp
Gabrielle Athayde, cello

John Melby

2008-03-22T14:32:00.000-07:00

Born in 1941 in Whitehall, Wisconsin, John Melby attended the Curtis Institute of Music, the University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton University. His composition teachers include Henry Weinberg, George Crumb, Peter Westergaard, J. K. Randall, and Milton Babbitt. In 1973 he was appointed to the Composition/Theory faculty in the School of Music of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was Professor of Music until his retirement in August of 1997 and where he now holds the title of Professor Emeritus.

John Melby is best known for his music written for computer-synthesized sounds, including a series of concerti for various instruments with computer; other compositions include two piano sonatas, three string quartets (the most recent of which includes computer), songs for voice and piano, pieces for larger ensembles, numerous compositions for computer alone, an opera, and two symphonies. His compositions have won numerous awards and have been widely performed both in the United States and abroad. He has been the recipient of an NEA Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, an associateship in the University of Illinois Center for Advanced Study, and numerous other grants and awards, including First Prize in 1979, at the International Electroacoustic Music Awards (Bourges, France). His music is published by Associated Music Publishers, ACA, Shawnee Press, and Merion Music, Inc. (Theodore Presser Co.), and recorded on the CRI, Advance, New World, Centaur, and Zuma labels, and on a CD issued by the Institute International de Musique Electroacoustique in Bourges, France.

John Melby is a member of BMI, American Music Center, SEAMUS, International Computer Music Association, SCI, American Composers Forum, and American Composers Alliance. His biography is included in the current edition of Who's Who in America.

In Darkness for soprano and computer (2007)

Amy Lawrence Lowell, an American poet of the “imagist” school, was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, on February 9, 1874, and died there unexpectedly of a cerebral hemorrhage at 51 on May 12, 1925. In the year following her death, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry posthumously. Lowell was one of several illustrious members of a prominent Boston family: one of her brothers, Percival Lowell, was a famous astronomer who predicted the existence of the now-demoted planet Pluto, and another brother, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, became President of Harvard University. (Other members of this distinguished family have included the poet and critic James Russell Lowell and the poet Robert Lowell.)

Though Amy Lowell herself did not attend college because of the prevailing attitude at the time regarding the education of women, she began educating herself by voracious reading in her family’s collection of over 7,000 books. Lowell was known as an eccentric and formidable figure whose lesbianism was only one manifestation of her unconventionality and her rebellion against her distinguished Boston lineage; her unusual appearance (she was greatly overweight because of a glandular problem) was heightened by her habit of smoking cigars almost constantly, claiming that because they lasted longer than cigarettes, they took less time away from her work. She began to write poetry in 1902 and her first published work appeared in 1910 in the Atlantic Monthly. She subsequently became one of the most famous and widely-read American poets of her time.

Following her death, her work became quite unfashionable and was largely forgotten. However, recent years have seen a marked resurgence of interest in her poetry. In Darkness is a setting in one uninterrupted movement for soprano and computer-synthesized sounds of three of Lowell’s poems: “At Night,” “New York at Night,” and “In Darkness,” all three of which are found in the first published volume of her poetry, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, which appeared in 1912, and all three of which deal with very different images of night. The British spellings in the texts represent those of the poet. The work was composed in 2007 for soprano Patricia Sonego.

At Night

The wind is singing through the trees to-night,
A deep-voiced song of rushing cadences
And crashing intervals. No summer breeze
Is this, though hot July is at its height,
Gone is her gentler music; with delight
She listens to this booming like the seas,
These elemental, loud necessities
Which call to her to answer their swift might.
Above the tossing trees shines down a star,
Quietly bright; this wild, tumultuous joy
Quickens nor dims its splendour. And my mind,
O Star! is filled with your white light, from far,
So suffer me this one night to enjoy
The freedom of the onward sweeping wind.

New York at Night

A near horizon whose sharp jags
Cut brutally into a sky
Of leaden heaviness, and crags
Of houses lift their masonry
Ugly and foul, and chimneys lie
And snort, outlined against the gray
Of lowhung cloud. I hear the sigh
The goaded city gives, not day
Nor night can ease her heart, her anguished labours stay.

Below, straight streets, monotonous,
From north and south, from east and west,
Stretch glittering; and luminous
Above, one tower tops the rest
And holds aloft man’s constant quest:
Time! Joyless emblem of the greed
Of millions, robber of the best
Which earth can give, the vulgar creed
Has seared upon the night its flaming ruthless screed.

O Night! Whose soothing presence brings
The quiet shining of the stars.
O Night! Whose cloak of darkness clings
So intimately close that scars
Are hid from our own eyes. Beggars
By day, our wealth is having night
To burn our souls before altars
Dim and tree-shadowed, where the light
Is shed from a young moon, mysteriously bright.

Where art thou hiding, where thy peace?
This is the hour, but thou art not.
Will waking tumult never cease?
Hast thou thy votary forgot?
Nature forsakes this man-begot
And festering wilderness, and now
The long still hours are here, no jot
Of dear communing do I know;
Instead the glaring, man-filled city groans below!

In Darkness

Must all of worth be travailled for, and those
Life's brightest stars rise from a troubled sea?
Must years go by in sad uncertainty
Leaving us doubting whose the conquering blows,
Are we or Fate the victors? Time which shows
All inner meanings will reveal, but we
Shall never know the upshot. Ours to be
Wasted with longing, shattered in the throes,
The agonies of splendid dreams, which day
Dims from our vision, but each night brings back;
We strive to hold their grandeur, and essay
To be the thing we dream. Sudden we lack
The flash of insight, life grows drear and gray,
And hour follows hour, nerveless, slack.

Steven R. Gerber

2008-03-22T13:51:00.000-07:00

Steven Gerber's most recent composition, a 16-minute orchestral work entitled "Music in Dark Times," was written at the request of Vladimir Ashkenazy, who will conduct the four world premiere performances with the San Francisco Symphony in March, 2009. Other recent works of Gerber's include String Quartets # 4 and 5 for, respectively, the Fine Arts and Amernet String Quartets; a Viola Concerto for Yuri Bashmet, a Cello Concerto for Carter Brey, a Violin Concerto for Kurt Nikkanen, and a Clarinet Concerto for Jon Manasse; and two symphonies, the second for Daniel Boico, which have received numerous performances in the United States, Russia, Ukraine, and Romania. His works have been performed by the Louisville Orchestra, Omaha Philharmonic, Long Island Philharmonic, Philharmonia Virtuosi, National Philharmonic, National Chamber Orchestra, Knoxville Chamber Orchestra, Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, Wheeling (West Virginia) Symphony, Russian National Orchestra, St. Petersburg State Academic Symphony, and Chamber Orchestra Kremlin, among others. Three CDs of his orchestral works are available on the Chandos, KOCH International, and Arabesque labels, and a CD of his solo and chamber music, all featuring violinist Kurt Nikkanen, will be released towards the end of the year.

Gerber was born in 1948 in Washington, D.C. and received a B.A. from Haverford College and an M.F.A. from Princeton University. His composition teachers included Robert Parris, Milton Babbitt, Earl Kim, and J.K. Randall. For more information, please see www.stevengerber.com

Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought (2003-4)
(5 Sonnets of William Shakespeare)

Sonnet 30
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye (unused to flow)
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancelled woe,
And moan th' expense of many a vanished sight.
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee (dear friend)
All losses are restored, and sorrows end.

Sonnet 129

Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action, and till action, lust
Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad.
Mad in pursuit and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest, to have extreme,
A bliss in proof and proved, a very woe,
Before a joy proposed behind a dream.
All this the world well knows yet none knows well,
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

Sonnet 71

No longer mourn for me when I am dead,
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay if you read this line, remember not,
The hand that writ it, for I love you so,
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O if (I say) you look upon this verse,
When I (perhaps) compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse;
But let your love even with my life decay.
Lest the wise world should look into your moan,
And mock you with me after I am gone.

Sonnet 9

Is it for fear to wet a widow's eye,
That thou consum'st thy self in single life?
Ah, if thou issueless shalt hap to die,
The world will wail thee like a makeless wife,
The world will be thy widow and still weep,
That thou no form of thee hast left behind,
When every private widow well may keep,
By children's eyes, her husband's shape in mind:
Look what an unthrift in the world doth spend
Shifts but his place, for still the world enjoys it;
But beauty's waste hath in the world an end,
And kept unused the user so destroys it:
No love toward others in that bosom sits
That on himself such murd'rous shame commits.

Sonnet 130

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun,
Coral is far more red, than her lips red,
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun:
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head:
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks,
And in some perfumes is there more delight,
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know,
That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet by heaven I think my love as rare,
As any she belied with false compare.

Robert Carl

2008-03-22T13:25:00.000-07:00

Robert Carl (b.1954) studied composition with Jonathan Kramer, George Rochberg, Ralph Shapey, and Iannis Xenakis. His music is performed throughout the US and Europe, and is published by American Composers' Alliance, Boosey&Hawkes, Roncorp, and Apoll-Edition. His grants, prizes and residencies have come from such sources as the National Endowment for the Arts, Tanglewood, Connecticut Commission on the Arts, Camargo Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Ucross, Millay Colony, Bogliasco Foundation, Djerassi Foundation, the Aaron Copland House, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He has been awarded a 2005 Chamber Music America commission for a string quintet written for the Miami String Quartet and Robert Black. An excerpt from his opera-in-progress Harmony (with novelist Russell Banks) was presented in May 2005 in the New York City Opera’s VOX Showcase series. He is also the recipient of the 1998 Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. New World Records released a CD of three large string chamber works in March 2006.

In 2007, Carl received a fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council for travel to Japan to research contemporary Japanese composers, and he has been commissioned by Oxford University Press to write a book on the premiere of Terry Riley’s In C. Other CD releases of his work are found on Neuma, Koch International, Lotus, Centaur, Vienna Modern Masters, E.R.M., and The Aerial. For fifteen years he was a co-director of the Extension Works new music ensemble in Boston; he is chair of the composition department at the Hartt School of Music, University of Hartford, and writes extensively on new music for Fanfare Magazine. He studies shakuhachi with Ralph Samuelson.

Program note(s):

A Clean Sweep (2005) is a work for shakuhachi flute and electroacoustic accompaniment, generated by the MAX/MSP program. It is 13’ long.

The title comes from the iconic gesture of the electroacoustic part, long continuous glissandi that move incrementally from one pitch to another, often over small intervals. The result is a polyphonic web of modal harmonies that are constantly changing in their construction, and their resultant tonal implications. The work’s layers are all centered around key structural tones of the shakuhachi, in particular D and A (Ro and Chi). The sliding motive is a glacial expansion and projection of the sort of bending tones possible on the shakuhachi. The original generative sound is that of a sine tone, frequency modulated by a single cycle from a sample of the low D on the shakuhachi. For me, the resultant sound is rather like a sort of “meta-sho”, i.e. the polyphonic mouth organ used in gagaku orchestral music.

The shakuhachi part is closely related to this accompaniment, but it was conceived much more intuitively. It is very much a plaintive, “human” voice that keens within a far more impersonal, “inevitable” sonic environment. Because the work, while fully notated, allows for performer discretion in matters of timing, ornamentation, and repetition of motives, it may be performed as either a solo work, or a duo, the latter of which will be heard in this concert. —Robert Carl

Richard Brooks

2008-03-22T13:18:00.000-07:00

RICHARD BROOKS holds a BS degree in Music Education from the Crane School of Music, Potsdam College, an MA in Composition from Binghamton University and a PhD in Composition from New York University. In December 2004 he retired from Nassau Community College where he taught for 30 years; for the last 22 years he served as department chairperson. From 1977 to 1982 he was Chairman of the Executive Committee of the American Society of University Composers (now the Society of Composers, Inc.). From 1993-2002 he served as President of the American Composers Alliance. He is an active composer with over eighty works to his credit, including two full length operas. His children’s opera, Rapunzel, was most recently produced by the Cincinnati Opera giving 65 performances. He was selected as New Music Connoisseur’s New Music Champion for 2006-2007 in recognition of his work with Capstone Records on behalf of new music. He was recently appointed Composer-in-Residence with The Lark Ascending (NYC).

STRING QUARTET no. 3 (2007)

In my Second String Quartet I incorporated fragments of “America the Beautiful” as a response to the tragic events of September 11, 2001. The interval of the minor third plays an important role in the song and I developed a lot of musical figures using descending and ascending minor thirds in various patterns. One pattern in particular appealed to me: a minor third up, a half step up followed by another minor third up. Of course this pattern results in a triad with both a minor and major third.

I had used this construct in several earlier works as it has proven to be a very flexible compositional tool. I recently realized that extending the patter one more half-step-minor third results in the 3-1-3-1-3 all-combinatorial source hexachord discovered by Milton Babbitt. An all-combinatorial hexachord is one in which a pattern of six pitches can be transposed and inverted symmetrically to produce another set of six pitches, thus it can combine with itself and yield all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale without duplication.

The fact that this pattern can produce major and minor triads as well as less tonal patterns appealed to me very much and became the basis for this work The quartet is a single movement with several internal sections of contrasting moods.

Duration: c. 12 minutes

Performance materials are available from the American Composers Alliance.

Elizabeth Bell

2008-03-22T13:11:00.000-07:00

ELIZABETH BELL was born in 1928; graduated from Wellesley College (Music) in 1950, and from Juilliard (Composition) in 1953. She was music critic of the Ithaca Journal, 1971-1975; one of the founders, a former officer, and currently a director of New York Women Composers; and a member of Board of Governors of American Composers Alliance, 2000-2004. She has had commissions from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Bradshaw/Buono duo, the Inoue Chamber Ensemble, North/South Consonance, the Putnam Valley Orchestra, and Vienna Modern Masters. Awards have been: the Delius Prize (Keyboard), 1994; first prize (1986), and grand prize (1996) in the Utah Composers Competition; many Meet-the-Composer grants. There are three all-Bell CD’s: “The Music of Elizabeth Bell”, MMC 2082; “Snows of Yesteryear”, N/S R 1029; and “A Collection of Reflections”, N/S R 1042. Other recordings are on CRS, Classic Masters, VMM, and North/South Records. There have been six all-Bell concerts, including two to celebrate her 75th birthday: NYC 10/12/03, and Yerevan, Armenia, 4/28/04. Performed world-wide, she is a member of BMI, ACA, SCI, AMC, NACUSA, and other professional organizations.

NIGHT MUSIC (1990)

“The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.” (Henry James Sr.) . . . “Night Music” does not contain literal wolf howls or bird chatterings; but it attempts to describe the emotional landscape James refers to-- the dark inner feelings of guilt and terror, sorrow and fury which we all try to hide in our day-to-day lives, but which music can bring to the surface and, at times, help to resolve. . . . The 15-minute piece is in two movements played without pause. The longer slow first movement is marked “molto doloroso”. The fast movement, which also contains a few reminiscent slow passages, is labeled “angrily”. . . . The piece is preoccupied with major and minor 2nds, 7ths, and 9ths, and with the dichotomy of triple against duple rhythms. It is dedicated to Max Lifchitz.

Margaret Fairlie-Kennedy

2008-03-22T13:07:00.000-07:00

Margaret Fairlie-Kennedy writes for chamber groups, voice, orchestra, contemporary dance and mixed media. She was Composer in Residence for Dance and Theater Arts at Bennington College and Cornell University.

Awards and Grants include the NEA and NEH Endowments, the Georgia Commission on the Arts, Meet the Composer grants ,and the Cornell Council for Creative and Performing Arts. She was a winner in the Philadelphia Classical Symphony/Maxfield Parrish and Women Composers' Showcase, New Jersey City University, competitions.

Commissions include the Walker Art Center, Cornell Theater Arts Dept., several choreographers and commissions for 20th and 21st century works.

Performances include the Alabama Symphony. Atlanta String Quartet and Relache Ensemble; venues at Eastman School of music, Carnegie Weill Recital Hall, the Bowling Green College of Musical Arts Festival,''05, and abroad in Paris, Upsala and Beijing.

She is published by ACA, in the SCI Journal of Music Scores, American Composers Alliance, and EC Schirmer Publishing. CDs are on Capstone, ACA Digital and Euterpe labels.

Fairlie-Kennedy is a member of ACA, SCI, AMC, IAWM, NYCC and BMI.
Some reviewers comments: "Expressive use of a 12 tone row...eloquence and energy... atmospheric and dreamy" N.Y. Times. "extended the usual sonorities of the instruments... its emotional focus was strong and the expressive range of the instruments spoke well for the composer's gift." Philadelphia Inquirer; "Mr. Ueyama's opening dance was set to urgent and atmospheric music by Margaret Fairlie-Kennedy" N.Y. Times Dance Review. '05.

Summer Solstice (2007) world premiere

The Summer Solstice begins in the pre-dawn, a mystic time of pagan rites, lovers' trysts and poignant moments, wild dances and lighthearted frolic.

Jody Rockmaker

2008-03-22T13:00:00.000-07:00

Jody Rockmaker (born 1961, New York City) received his Ph.D. in Composition from Princeton University. He has studied at the Manhattan School of Music, New England Conservatory and the Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna. His principal teachers have been Erich Urbanner, Edward T. Cone, Milton Babbitt, Claudio Spies, Malcolm Peyton and Miriam Gideon.

Dr. Rockmaker is also the recipient of numerous awards including a Barlow Endowment Commission, Fulbright Grant, two BMI Awards for Young Composers, an ASCAP Grant, the George Whitefield Chadwick Medal from New England Conservatory, and a National Orchestral Association Orchestral Reading Fellowship. He has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program and Villa Montalvo, and has been a Composition Fellowship at the Tanglewood Music Center. He taught at Stanford University and is currently an Associate Professor at Arizona State University School of Music.

Program note

Yiddish Choruses (2006)

I. Bulba
II. Shlof Meyn Kind
III. Ma noymar uma nedaber
IV. Zackele
V. Volt Ikh

A chance discovery in the ASU Music Library spurred the creation of Yiddish Choruses. There, sitting on the recent acquisitions shelf, the title boldly emblazoned in Hebrew on the spine was an anthology of Yiddish folksongs published in Glasnost-era Russia. I recognized many of the tunes, songs I had heard from family or friends or simply in passing. I wanted to set my favorites for chorus.

Each movement is dedicated to a family member. Bulba is a song my mother remembers from her childhood. Shlof Meyn Kind is a lullaby for my daughter. My brother-in-law loves to sing Ma noymar uma nedaber during Passover. I had used the melody of Zackele as the theme to a set of piano variations my freshman-year of college. This setting is dedicated to the memory of my Bubby. Volt Ikh is a gift to my wife. The movements may be sung singly or in any combination.

Text for Yiddish Choruses by Jody Rockmaker

1. Bulbe

Zuntik bulbe, montik bulbe,
dinstik un mitvokh bulbe,
donershtik un fraytik bulbe.
Shabes in a novine a bulbekigele!
Zuntik vayter bulbe!

Broyt mit bulbe, fleysh mit bulbe,
Varimes un vekhere bulbe,
Ober un vider bulbe.
Eynmol in a novine a bulbekigele!
Zuntik vayter bulbe!

Ober bulbe, vider bulbe,
Nokh amol un ober amol bulbe!
Haynt un morgn bulbe!
Ober Shabes nokhn khlont a bulbekigele!
Zuntik vayter bulbe!

1. Potatoes
Sunday potatoes, Monday potatoes
Tuesday and Wednesday potatoes,
Thursday and Friday potatoes.
On Sabbath day a novelty, potato pie!
Sunday again potatoes!

Bread with potatoes,
meat with potatoes,
Lunch and dinner potatoes,
Over and over potatoes.
One time a novelty, potato pie!
Sunday again potatoes!

Again potatoes, more potatoes,
More and more potatoes,
Evening and morning potatoes,
But on the Sabbath, a treat,
potatoe pie! Sunday again potatoes!

2. Shlof meyn kind

Shlof meyn kind,
meyn treyst, meyn shayner,
shlof ze, lu lu lu.
Shlof meyn laybn,
meyn kadish ayner,
shlof ze, shlof tokhter.

2. Sleep, my child
Sleep my child
my hope, my pretty one,
go to sleep, hush, hush.
Sleep, the apple of my eye,
my only one,
Sleep, sleep my daughter.

3. Ma noymar uma nedaber

Ma noymar uma nedaber,
oy vay ma nedaber
ver ken zagen ver ken rayden
vos ayns badayt?
Zibn zaynen di Vukhenteg
Zeks zaynen di mishnahyes,
Finf zaynen di Humash,
Fir zaynen di muters,
Dray zaynen di foters,
Svay zaynen di lukhes,
Un ayner iz dokh Got,
Got iz ayner un vayter kayner.

3. What shall we say?
What shall we say?
Oh my! what shall we say?
who can say, who can tell,
what (one) means?
Seven are the days of the week,
Six are the orders of the Mishna,
Five are the books of the Torah,
Four are the mothers,
Three are the fathers,
Two are the tables of the covenent,
And one is God,
God alone and no one else.

4. Zackele

Zackele Zackele, shpil mir a kazackele,
zokh an oreme, abi a zvakhke.

Refrain:
Orem iz nit gut, orem iz nit gut.
Lomir zikh nit shemen mit eygenem blut!

Zackele Zackele, shpil mir a dume,
zoch an oreme, abi a frume.

Zackele, Zackele, shpil mir a zemele,
Far a drayerl oyf Zackes kremele.

4. Zackele

Zackele, Zackele, play me a Russian dance.
Although poor, yet with a spirit.

Refrain:
Poverty is not good, poverty is not good.
Let us not be ashamed of our own blood.

Zackele, Zackele, play me a ballad. Although poor yet with piety.

Zackele, Zackele, play a merry song
for all my friends.

5. Volt Ikh

Volt ikh hobn gilderne fliglen,
Volt ikh cu dir flien.
Volt ikh hobn gilderne reder,
Volt ikh cu dir forn.

Volt ikh hobn ferd un tsotel,
Volt ikh cu dir geritn.
Volt ikh hobn tint un feder,
Volt ikh cu dir geshriben.

Volt ikh hobn a goldenem fingerl,
Volt ikh cu dir gegeben.

5. If I had golden wings
If I wish I had golden wings,
I would fly over to you.
If I had golden wheels,
I would drive over to you.

If I had horse and saddle,
I would ride over to you.
If I had ink and quill,
I would write to you.

If I had a golden ring,
I would give it to you.

Brian Fennelly

2008-03-22T12:58:00.000-07:00

Brian Fennelly (born 1937) studied at Yale with Mel Powell, Donald Martino, Allen Forte, Gunther Schuller, and George Perle (M.Mus ‘65, Ph.D. ‘68). From 1968 to 1997 he was Professor of Music in the Faculty of Arts and Science at New York University, where he is now Professor Emeritus. In addition to a Guggenheim fellowship, his awards include three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, two Koussevitsky Foundation commissions, and an award for lifetime achievement from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His catalogue includes fifteen works for orchestra, eleven of which have been recorded; choral music; and chamber music including Skyscapes I-IV, Evanescences for instruments and tape, two piano sonatas, three string quartets and three brass quintets. His music has been awarded prizes in such prestigious competitions as the Louisville Orchestra New Music Competition and the Goffredo Petrassi International Competition for orchestral music. He is co-director of the Washington Square Contemporary Music Society, which he founded in 1976. In November 2007 Albany records released a new CD of his chamber music featuring the Da Capo Chamber Players, Pro Arte String Quartet, the ensemble counter)induction, and pianist Blair McMillen.

SOON SHALL THE WINTER’S FOIL (1994)

This is the single setting completed of a planned set of nature poems by Walt Whitman for Harold Rosenbaum and the New York Virtuoso Singers. It was written for a now-abandoned recording project of some years ago involving all my choral music.

Soon shall the winter’s foil be here;
Soon shall these icy ligatures unbind and melt -- A little while,
And air, soil, wave, suffused shall be in softness, bloom and
growth -- a thousand forms shall rise
From these dead clods and chills and low burial graves.
Thine eyes, ears -- all thy best attributes -- all that takes cognizance
of natural beauty,
Shall wake and fill. Thou shalt perceive the simple shows, the
delicate miracles of earth,
Dandelions, clover, the emerald grass, the early scents and flowers,
The arbutus under foot, the willow’s yellow-green, the blossoming
plum and cherry;
With these the robin, lark and thrush, singing their songs -- the
flitting bluebird;
For such the scenes the annual play brings on.

Margarita Zelenaia

2008-03-22T12:55:00.000-07:00

Versatility is the hallmark of composer Margarita Zelenaia whose work ranges from operatic and chamber compositions to Music Theater, scores of musicals and art songs.

Zelenaia began playing the piano in Russia at the age of four and composing at age six. At twelve, she had her own TV program broadcast in 12 European countries. Her vocal cycles, art songs and piano compositions for children have subsequently been performed at the Moscow Autumn Festival, the Young Peoples’ Arts Festival and the Moscow Spring Festival, The Tutti New Music Festival in Ohio, and New Music North (Canada).

She studied composition at the Music College of the Moscow Conservatory with Alexander Batashov and at the Gnessin State Music Pedagogical Institute with Genrich Litinsky who also mentored such remarkable Russian composers as Aram Khachaturyan, Tikhon Khrennikov and Arno Babadjanyan. As a student-composer, Zelenaia was awarded the prestigious Lenin Scholarship. After graduating with honors from the Gnessin State Music Pedagogical Institute, she became one of the youngest composers ever to be inducted into the prestigious Russian Union of Composers.

Her two act opera for children Winnie the Pooh Once Again was commissioned by the Moscow State Academic Children’s Musical Theatre in 1983, where it was part of the standard repertoire for fifteen years, and has been performed in over 400 major venues in Russia, Japan, South Korea, Israel and Czechoslovakia. Excerpts from her musical Alice in Wonderland have sold more than 450,000 copies to date and over 40 performances of her miscellaneous works and incidental work for TV movies have been broadcast in Russia, Israel and the United States. Zelenaia’s chamber music compositions, musicals and a solo-opera have been commissioned by the Ministry of Culture of the former USSR, the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, the Moscow Concert Philharmonic Society and the Russian Chamber Orchestra – ‘The Seasons’.

Recent works are in the repertoires of the New York Philharmonic artists: Violinist Anna Rabinova and Cellist Evangeline Benedetti; Metropolitan opera flutist Stefan Hoskuldsson, New York City Opera soloist, soprano Irina Rindzuner, Concert Violinist Nina Beilina and chamber orchestra ‘Bachanalia’; Concert Pianist Ana Maria Bottazzi, President of both the Pinault International Musical Society and the International Audio-Video Tape Piano Competition; Concert Pianist Paolo Vergari (Italy), Cellist Christophor Miroshnikov (Greece), Baritone Kreshnik Zhabjaku, mezzo-soprano Leslie Middlebrook; and One World Symphony Singers & Ensemble (David Hong, Music Director & Conductor).

Margarita Zelenaia’s music premiered at Lincoln Center in 1997 and at Carnegie Hall in 2001. In 2007 she was a recipient of the ‘Encore’ program of the American Composers Forum and in 2008 her music was performed at the Kaplan Penthouse Chamber Series at Lincoln Center by New York Philharmonic musicians.

As a Professor of Composition, Piano and Theory at the Gnessin State Music College from 1980 to 1993, her compositions have been a continuous part of the college’s instrumental and vocal curriculum since 1986. She currently tutors private students in Piano, Composition and Theory in New York City.

Program Note:

“Homage” (2004), a cycle for Clarinet and Violin, dedicated to the great Russians and has three movements:
1) Vocalize (to S. Rachmaninov)
2) Don Juan (to M. Tsvetaeva, a poet, who wrote a poem “Don Juan”)
3) Ducks Are Flying, a reworked Russian folk song (to I. Stravinsky)

The most difficult thing is always to find the fascinating idea, what it will be about. One day I was very impressed listening to the famous Rachmaninov's Vocalize that was performed by Yo Yo Ma and Bobby McFerrin. No doubt, the Russian spirit and the spirit of Rachmaninov's beautifully melodic composition inspired me to write the Vocalize.
When I was a student composer I loved the Marina Tsvetaeva's poetry so passionately, that composed over 30 works, based on it. One of them was the vocal cycle for soprano and piano "Don Juan". Since Clarinet And Violin is totally different combination, it sounds very different and became the new composition.

The idea of the homage to Stravinsky came easily: the Russian folk song “Ducks are Flying” I had to rework.

When the cycle was written I realized that it is a meditation on the feelings that any woman has through her life: a dream of the pure beauty (#1. Vocalize), the breathless expectation of the life major event and the disappointed hopes (#2. Don Juan) and a mix of irony and despair through the humoristic sight to what has happened (#3. Ducks are Flying).

John Eaton

2008-03-22T12:49:00.000-07:00

Program Note DUO (1977)

Duo is more like a cantata movement than a choral piece – in any case it is operatic in intent. Two very divergent eschatological views are represented by, on the one hand, the smug, complacent chorus – a typical congregation - and, on the other, the suffering, questing soloists. These two views are dramatically juxtaposed. I’ve tried to further intensify the contrast by giving the two groups contrasting musical materials. Enough said; the piece will work out the drama. Let me only add that the concluding word of the piece, “Selah”, as used in the psalms can mean “Stop! And begin over (or anew)!”

Duo Texts

Soloists

By the waters of Babylon,
there we sat down; yea, we wept,
when we remember thee, O Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows,
in the midst thereof.
For there they who carried us away,
captive, required of me a song.
though the earth be removed,
How shall we sing the Lord’s song
in a new land?
O God, why hast thou cast us off forever?
Why doth Thine anger smoke
against the sheep of my pasture?

And God saw that the wickedness of man
was great in the earth.
And the Lord said: “I shall destroy man,
whom I have created,
from the face of the earth.”
Selah.

Chorus

God is our refuge,
God is our refuge and strength,

a very present help in trouble.

Therefore, will we not fear,
Be still and know that I am God.
I will be exalted among the heathen.
I will be exalted in the earth.
The Lord of Hosts is with us;
The God of Jacob is our refuge.
Selah.

String Quartet no. 2 (1987)
Program Notes

My second quartet was written in 1987 in Florence as a restorative divergence from my perhaps, most dramatic opera, The Reverend Jim Jones. The first movement originally had the subtitle “Homage to Bartok”. I later removed that because, although aspects of the music might suggest the music of the composer who was, in my early teens, my most significant influence, there are on closer examination, significant differences which cropped up during the ensuing forty years before I wrote this quartet. Perhaps, only the contrast of free, delicate and brutal, multi-metric sections will recall the great Hungarian master.

The second movement has the expressive tempo marking “Wandering”. It is a real challenge to any quartet. It’s music uses utterly divergent tempi in open notation throughout much of the movement, only interrupted on occasions when ‘a solution to the quest seems to be found’. The third movement is a playful divertissement, a minuet and trios. One of the latter is labeled “insect-like”, because I was attacked by miniature gnats one night while hearing the march-like music of a Berlusconi rally approaching in the distance then receding.

The frenetic finale is … well, pretty much … a frenetic finale. It uses quarter tones, like the rest of the quartet, as well as even smaller divisions of the semitones.

BIO

John Eaton was called "The most interesting opera composer writing in America today" by Andrew Porter in The London Financial Times. He has received international recognition as a composer and performer of electronic and microtonal music as well.

Eaton's work has been performed extensively throughout the world. International performances include those in Italy (at the Venice Festival, Maggio Musicale Fiorentina, RAI, etc.), Germany (Hamburg Opera, NDR, Sud-West Funk, etc.), France, England, Spain, Portugal, Czechoslovakia (Prague Festival), Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, Israel, Japan, Korea, China, Russia, Latvia and Estonia. In America, his work has been performed by the San Francisco Opera, Cincinnati Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Santa Fe Opera, New York City Opera and Brooklyn Academy of Music, among others, and has been featured at the Tanglewood, Aspen, and Pepsico Summerfare Festivals. In addition, several works have been broadcast on Public Radio and Television, and, his opera, Myshkin, was seen throughout the U.S.A. and foreign countries by an estimated 15,000,000 people.

Among his best known works are his opera, The Cry of Clytaemnestra, which has received great public and critical acclaim at its nearly twenty performances, including those under the auspices of the San Francisco Opera, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Bolshoi Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. The Lion and Androcles , written especially for children, was shown on national television and taken on tour by the Cincinnati Symphony. The Tempest was called a "formidible intellectual as well as musical achievement ... an opera of stark beauty" by Michael Walsh of Time Magazine following its premiere by the Santa Fe Opera. His most recent grand opera, The Reverend Jim Jones, was commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1993 he formed the Pocket Opera Players, which presented his operatic pieces Peer Gynt and Let's Get This Show on the Road to great public and critical acclaim; as was the case in 1996, when it premiered Don Quixote and Golk as well. On May 30th, 1997, Boston Musica Viva premiered his Travelling with Gulliver, commissioned by them and made possible by a grant from the Fromm Music Fndt. A new opera, Antigone, was added to it in very successful performances in Chicago by his opera company on Dec.9th, 10th, and 11th, 1999.

In 2000, his provocative opera Youth was premiered. After it’s first performances at Symphony Space, May 21st and 22nd, 2002, Anne Midgette of the New York Times called “inasmuch…” “creative, antic, quirky and enchanting”. Further New York Premieres of Travelling with Gulliver and Golk as well as the World Premiere of Salome’s Flea Circus were done on June 23rd and 24th of 2003. A festival of his music occurred at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center on May 18th and 19th of 2004, featuring the World Premiere of Pinocchio and the New York Premiere of Antigone, as well as panels on The Acting Instrumentalist: Eaton’s Pocket Operas and Eaton’s Contributions to Electronic Music. His full length comic opera Pumped Fiction, premiered at Symphony Space on June 20th, 2007, was repeated by popular demand on Sept. 6th. Allan Kozinn spoke of it as a “…considerable achievement” in the New York Times.

Eaton has been the recipient of many awards. In 1990, he received the "genius" award from the MacArthur Foundation. His music was chosen to represent the U.S.A. in 1970 at the International Rostrum of Composers (UNESCO). He has received a citation and award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, three Prix de Rome Grants, 2 Guggenheim Fellowships, and, among others, commissions from the Fromm and Koussevitsky Foundations and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He has lectured at the Salzburg Center of American Studies, and was Composer in Residence at the American Academy in Rome. In September, 2000 his career was celebrated in the American Music Center’s web site and excerpts of his operas can still be seen as well as an extended interview in the archives of www.newmusicbox.org for Sept., 2000. He has done a lecture tour for Phi Beta Kappa as well as lecturing on his operas at Oxford.

Eaton is Professor Emeritus of Music Composition at the University of Chicago. He taught there for 10 years and at Indiana University (Bloomington) for 20. His compositions are handled by Shawnee Press, G.Schirmer (A.M.P.), and the American Composers Alliance.

Robert Ceely

2008-03-22T12:46:00.000-07:00

"To me music is organized sound in time. Whether my music is instrumental, vocal, electronic or a combination, the impetus is the idea; the medium chosen is a result of the idea." - Robert Ceely, born in 1930, is a composer and an educator. His compositions include solo, chamber, and orchestral music as well as music for tape and tape with instruments. He attended the New England Conservatory where he studied with Francis Cooke and completed further studies with Darius Milhaud and Leon Kirchner at Mills College, with Roger Sessions, and with Edward Cone and Milton Babbitt at Princeton University.

From 1963-64, he composed music in the Electronic Music Studio in Milan as a guest of The Italian Government. His ballet “Beyond the Ghost Spectrum”, commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation with choreography by James Waring, was performed at Tanglewood with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting and the opera, “Automobile Graveyard”, after a play by Fernando Arrabal, was presented at the New England Conservatory in 1995. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ditson Fund, the Manon Jarrof dancers, the Massachusetts Arts Council, the Fromm Music Foundation and others. He has taught at the Naval School of Music, The Lawrenceville School, Robert College in Istanbul, and for thirty-eight years at the New England Conservatory where he established and directed the Electronic Music Studio and taught composition. In 1995, he was honored with an Outstanding Alumni Award. He retired from teaching in 2003 and presently devotes his time and energy to composition.

Two Pieces for String Quartet are receiving their world premiere. Each is separate, and self contained; they are not related to each other nor will they be a part of any future quartet.

The Five Contemplative Pieces for chorus is receiving its first New York performance. The poems express the meanings and character of each song as well as the mood of the composer while writing them.

FIVE CONTEMPLATIVE PIECES (2000)

1. On Solitude by Alexander Pope

Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breath his native air
In his own ground.

Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire;
Whose trees in summer yield him shade.
In winter fire.

Blest, who can unconcern’dly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day.

Sound sleep by night; study and ease
Together mix’d; sweet recreation,
And innocence, which most does please
With meditation

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.

2. Eternity by William Blake

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise.

3. My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold by Wordsworth

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So it is now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Mam;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

4. Fall, Leaves, Fall by Emily Bronte

Fall leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;
Lengthen night and shorten day;
Every leaf speaks bliss to me
Fluttering from the autumn tree,
I shall smile when wreaths of snow
Blossom where the rose should grow;
I shall sing when night’s decay
Ushers in a drearier day.

5. Age by Walter Savage Lander

Death, tho I see him not, is near
And grudges me my eightieth year.
Now I would give him all these last
For one that fifty have run past.
Ah! He strikes all things, all alike,
But bargains: those he will not strike

Edward Jacobs

2008-03-22T12:38:00.000-07:00

Edward Jacobs is an acclaimed composer and accomplished educator whose music the American Academy of Arts & Letters described as “immediately engaging, attractive, and intellectually demanding” upon presenting him with the Charles Ives Award in 2005. Jacobs (b. 1961, Brookline, MA) began playing violin at age eight, but was drawn to the saxophone at age eleven upon hearing a friend's jazz quartet. Work at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (B.A., 1984) in jazz performance and arranging (Jeff Holmes) and composition (Sal Macchia, Robert Stern) was followed by study in composition (Andrew Imbrie, Olly Wilson, Gerard Grisey) and conducting (Michael Senturia) at the University of California, Berkeley (M.A., 1986) and at Columbia University (composition with Chou Wen-Chung, Mario Davidovsky, Marty Boykan, George Edwards; conducting with George Rothman) where he completed his D.M.A. in 1993.

In 2001 Jacobs began to explore electronic media. He has since written works for computer-generated sound with clarinet (A Function of Memory, 2001, Beauty Shop, 2005), with cello (al momento, 2002), and for dancers (dis/Connect, 2004). His music is published by C. F. Peters Corp., NY, APNM and ACA.

Six years after he began teaching at East Carolina University, Jacobs was chosen for a Teacher-Scholar Award in 2004. He founded and directs the Annual NEWMUSIC@ECU FESTIVAL and works in the Pitt County Public Schools, collaborating with middle school general music teachers in his “Composers-in-Public Schools Project”, a program that strives to make the creation of music a fundamental part of childrens’ education.

WHEN TIME (2007)

DOUBLE CHOIR (& DOUBLE STRING QUARTET)

When Nick Glennon emailed me the poem upon which this music is based, I was shaken by its clarity and directness. In very short order I set the text to a single melodic line—that which appears in mm. 20-37. As I continued to develop the piece, the word “time” and the rising interval of a ninth became linked, and so emerged the beginning of When Time. The choice of a double choir seemed clear to me, as the notion of an echo—either in space or in time—was unspoken, yet implied, to me, in the poetry. —Edward Jacobs

The poetry used in this work was written by Nicholas J. Glennon (1957-2007) in May, 2006. It is used here by permission of his estate.

Time as a fly

Whisking

Over our heads

Heartless

We only notice

It is in our way

When

Lisa Hogan

2008-03-22T12:01:00.001-07:00

Lisa Hogan is a singer, composer, and songwriter. After graduating from Cornell University with an A.B. in English, Lisa came to New York to pursue a career in the music industry as a singer/songwriter. She has won numerous songwriting awards and performed extensively in the tri-state area. She has been selected to perform in concerts sponsored by the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences (NARAS), the Songwriters Guild, ASCAP, and New York Music Festival, among others. In 2000, she released an independent CD, The Other Way, and was selected for inclusion on a CD featuring top New York City songwriters, entitled The East Side of Fascination. In June 2006, she received an M.A. in composition at the Aaron Copland School of Music. She continues to study composition with Dr. Bruce Saylor, in addition to training with Robert Aldridge and Menachem Zur. She has written music for soprano and tenor voice, solo piano, chamber orchestra and Pierrot ensemble, and is happily exploring new harmonic terrain and larger forms in the vast world of modern music.

Music for Trumpet, Marimba and String Quartet was originally written in the fall of 2005 during my last year of graduate school. I was influenced to write for the marimba by the composer Robert Aldridge who has written extensively for the instrument. Initially, I was intrigued by a devastating event that altered the course of urban culture in Queens in the 1960’s, but the music went in an entirely different and more optimistic direction. The piece is written in binary form with the trumpet leading the ensemble through the entire A section. The strings take over the melodic emphasis in the B section. There is a short reprise to signal the end of the piece.

Eleanor Aversa

2008-03-22T12:01:00.000-07:00

Eleanor Aversa has recently completed her Master's degree in Music Composition at Queens College CUNY, where studied with Bruce Saylor. After obtaining a B.A. in Russian Language and Literature from Princeton University she spent two years in Russia prior to attending Queens College. In Moscow she accompanied harpist Simeon Kulkov at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory and sang as a soprano in the choir of the Immaculate Conception Cathedral, performing both Latin and Russian Orthodox sacred music.

In the past two years, Ms. Aversa has completed two commissions for choreographer Danuta Petrow-Sek, the second of which was supported by a grant from the Queens Council on the Arts. Excerpts from both scores have been played at new music festivals at California State Fullerton University (2007) and at Ball State University (2008). She was recently named a finalist for ASCAP's Morton Gould Young Composer Award. Ms. Aversa will begin her Ph.D. in Composition this fall at the University of Pennsylvania on full fellowship.

Program note:

Something Gleamed Like Electrum (2007) takes its title from Ezekiel's mystical and ecstatic vision of the four cherubim. The prophet sees "a huge cloud with flashing fire enveloped in brightness; from the midst of the fire something gleamed like electrum" (1:4). Electrum is an alloy of gold and silver.

Something Gleamed Like Electrum was premiered by Second Instrumental Unit at Queens College on April 25, 2007 and honored in the Brian M. Israel Prize Competition later that year.

Marilyn Shrude

2008-03-22T11:22:00.000-07:00

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.

Elliott Schwartz

2008-03-22T08:40:00.000-07:00

Two Watterson Poems (2004)
Program Note

These choral settings of poetry by my Bowdoin faculty colleague William Watterson were composed in 2004, and first performed in December of that year by the Bowdoin College Chamber Choir. Apart from that premiere, the music was designed for the choir's spring 2005 tour of California, which included venues that lacked a piano. Hence the absence of a piano part for the /Two Watterson Poems/. As a compromise, midway between /a cappella/ setting and full accompaniment, I decided to augment the choral texture with a number of percussion instruments (small enough to be taken around California in a rented car). The two poems may appear to be quite different, one serious and meditative, the other humorous -- but in fact they share one aspect which I found fascinating: a duality of "inside" and "outside," the observer and the observed. I tried to capture that quality in my settings.

Two Watterson Poems
Text by William Watterson

Cat Fall

Outside
the feral mother won’t let me near
though when I call she hears me;
she never quite finishes her food.
She covers the bowl with grass,
Then arranges sticks and stones
around it in patterns
I do not understand.

Only she knows what she means.

II.

Inside
the paws of the kitten who survived
explore the keyboard
of an old piano,
striking notes randomly
like a row by Schoenberg
never to be repeated.
Music at the edge,
at the edge music

which will not harden into form.
A gust rattles the windowpane.

On the roof the rain is playing
its small silver triangle.

III.

Yellow eyes stare up into my eyes,
their vacancy
unwordable as song…

Seminar

They watch me like a t.v. turned down low
and now I am watching them watch me,
their faces blank as endpapers
in books they will never read.

I am, apparently, a rerun,
just words but no music,
my “teacher knows best” voice a drag
no matter how much I modulate,
a one-man show less commercial interruptions,
my rating lower than I know.

When the hour ends I unplug myself,
my cord a prehensile tail that slithers like a whip.

When the screen goes dark
the Keats ode fails
like perfect flora frozen in the shale.

Suite for Viola and Piano (1962)
Program Note

The /Suite for Viola and Piano /is among my earliest pieces -- composed in the mid-1960s -- and certainly among the very few works of that decade I still enjoy hearing! It was written for violist Louise Rood, and first performed by her on a Smith College recital. Other violists (notably George Grossman, Jacob Glick and Julia Adams) have played it as well over the years. The work attempts to project a range of contrasting moods and textures, via a series of brief (and occasionally interconnected) movements. Although all the material derives from a 12-tone row, the overall language of the /Suite/ is highly triadic and even "tonal."

Elliott Schwartz was born 1936 in New York City and studied composition with Otto Luening and Jack Beeson at Columbia University. He has recently retired from the faculty at Bowdoin College, where he served for 43 years, twelve of them as department chair. His many extended residencies and/or visiting professorships include Ohio State University, the University of California (San Diego and Santa Barbara), Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge. Schwartz’s compositions have been performed by such groups as the Minnesota Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Chicago Chamber Orchestra, and the Youth Orchestra of the Netherlands and featured at numerous international music centers and festivals including Tanglewood, the Library of Congress, Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), DeIjsbreker (Amsterdam), Music of the Americas (London), and the European Youth Orchestra Festival (Copenhagen). Leading orchestras and chamber ensembles have recorded his music for New World, CRI, Albany, Innova, Capstone and other labels. Honors and awards for his compositions include the Gaudeamus Foundation (Netherlands), the Rockefeller Foundation (two Bellagio residencies), and the National Endowment for the Arts. Over the course of his career he has served as president of The College Music Society, president of the Society of Composers, Inc, vice-president of the American Music Center, and board member of the American Composers Alliance.

Schwartz has also written or edited a number of books on musical subjects. These include Music: Ways of Listening, Electronic Music: A Listener’s Guide, Music since 1945 (co-author with Daniel Godfrey) and the anthology Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music (co-editor with Barney Childs).

During 2006, Schwartz’s 70th birth-year was celebrated with concerts and guest lectures at Oxford, the Royal Academy of Music (London), Butler University, Concordia College, the University of Minnesota, the ACA Festival (NYC) and the Library of Congress. The last-named also celebrated the Library of Congress acquisition of his collected papers and archives.

Burton Beerman

2008-03-22T05:03:00.000-07:00

Dialogue for soprano voice and piano features a text by award-winning playwright Raymond Brent Beerman. The text outlines a reflective conversation between the writer and his teenage son in which the father expresses his sorrow, his devoted love for his son, and the inevitable hope for the future.

Composer, clarinetist, video artist Burton Beerman’s music spans many media, including interactive real-time electronics, chamber and orchestral music, interactive video art, theatre, dance, and musical score for documentary films. His works have been the subject of international, national and public television and radio broadcasts, including ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, NPR and PBS.

New York City’s The Village Voice states, “There is a remarkable clarity in the way Burton Beerman carries out the logic of his materials and he has an excellent ear for sound color…the composer displays an acute sensitivity to the differences between live sound and electronic sound and the music contains extraordinary moments when the sound seems to belong to both worlds.”

Amongst some of his prestigious awards and honors are the Barlow Endowment Commission for Music Composition, the 2008 Governor’s Award for the Arts in Ohio, selected as one who is recognized as a “distinguished artist sustaining extraordinary artistic talents and achievements throughout his career”, a 2008 CINE Special Jury Award, the 2007 CINE Golden Eagle Award as composer for the film documentary 203 Days produced by bbarash productions, LLC.,and the Martha K.Cooper Orchestra Prize (First Place) for Moments.

Beerman’s music has been presented at prominent venues and festivals worldwide, such as the Edinburgh International Art Festival in Scotland, The Chicago Sinai, Martin Luther King International Center in Atlanta, Rudolfinum Performing Center, Prague, the Haag, Amsterdam, OrfRadioFunkhaus, Vienna and Chopin Hall, Mexico City, as well as throughout Australia, Canada , Europe and Asia. His works have been featured on CNN and CNN International, FutureWatch, and The World Today, broadcasting Beerman’s Virtual Video Opera, Jesus’ Daughter to a viewing audience of 50 million plus. The opera addressed a critical social issue of Violence against Women~Children-at-Risk and was chosen as a Video Installation ArtWork exhibited in Switzerland and Italy, endorsed by UNESCO-CIRET, sponsored by the United Nations, at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art (MOMA), Lincoln Center Gallery, and Dance on Camera Festival. CNN maintains a webpage as a source of information on the story and the opera.

The Warsaw National Philharmonic performed and recorded Beerman’s Morning Calls for B-flat clarinet and orchestra featuring Richard Stoltzman as clarinetist under the baton of George Manahan, present music director of the New York City Opera. Morning Calls received a performance by the Memphis Symphony Orchestra with Beerman as soloist. Beerman has been hailed by audiences as one of the leading clarinetists of contemporary and avant-garde music whose virtuosity and technical control of the instrument establish him as a remarkable and compelling performer.

Dialogue (2008)
For voice and piano

Jane Schoonmaker Rodgers, soprano
Kevin Blysma, piano

Help me
Standing on the edge of a forgotten wall
Teetering on a life from a faceless dream
Drifting through bloodless streams
Leading to nowhere
Pointing to nothing
Through bloodless streams

Help me
Drifting through bloodless streams
Pointing to nothing
Sifting
Clawing
Digging
Peeling
Help me
Help me for lost years

Hope is beautiful
Hope is love
Dear little child
The sun is here
I kiss the brightness of the future
Hope is real
Hope is
Hope is hope
Hope is want
Dear, little child
The sun is here
Sliding from a womb
Into my Hands

Holding you close
Keeping you warm
Holding you once
Keeping you always
Dear little child
Dear little child
I breathe life into your smile

Help me
Holding you close
Keeping you warm
Holding you once
Keeping you always
Dear little child
Dear little child
I breathe life into your smile

Help me
Standing on the edge
Of a forgotten wall
Help me
Help me to understand
How to talk to you
Help me
Mend
Tie
Skip
A slithering cut
Toys
Birthdays
Cakes
Ice cream
Dinosaurs
Hope is beauty
Hope is love

Crawling through a maze
Of want and loss
Digging into a hole
That can never be filled
I want because I can’t
I need because I don’t
I want and need and feel nothing
While you stand there
With your arms reaching for me
But my back is turned

Help me
Help me
Help me
Dear little child
The sun is here

Hope is beauty
Hope is love
Dear, little child
The sun is here
I kiss the brightness
Of the future
Hope is real
Hope is hope
Manchild facing the shadow
Calling out what was
Was lost
Build the fire
Build the fire in the soul
Manchild facing the shadow snake
Call out what was lost
Build the fire
Soul
Build the fire
In the soul
Manchild facing the shadow snake
Call out what was lost
The smiles
The sun
The trees

Help me
Hope is beauty
Hope is love
Dear, little child
The sun is here
I kiss the brightness
Of the future
Hope is real
I kiss the brightness
Of the future
Hope is real
Hope is hope
Hope
Turn
To see my hand
Help me
Turn
See my hand
Help me
No answers for lost years
Standing on the edge
Of a forgotten wall
Turn
See my hand
Help me.

Mark Zuckerman

2008-03-21T09:30:00.000-07:00

Mark Zuckerman, a composer of “intriguing music of deceptive simplicity ... subtle, persuasive and ― quite simply ― beautiful" (Glyn Pursglove, MusicWeb), has written extensively for virtuoso soloists, chamber ensembles, a cappella choir (including an internationally-recognized collection of Yiddish choral arrangements), wind ensemble, and string orchestra. He attended Juilliard and continued at the University of Michigan, Bard College, and Princeton University studying under David Epstein, George B. Wilson, Elie Yarden, Milton Babbitt and J. K. Randall. His choral music has achieved an international reputation with choruses and at festivals and been performed and recorded by the Gregg Smith Singers, Chicago a cappella, The Goldene Keyt Singers, the New Yiddish Chorale, and The Workman’s Circle Chorus. Notable ensembles such as the Rutgers University Wind Ensemble, the Rutgers University Symphony Band, the Chicago Brass Ensemble, and the Seattle Sinfonia have recorded his instrumental music. Zuckerman earned a PhD from Princeton and is a member of the music faculties at Princeton, Columbia, and Rutgers Universities. He has taught a wide variety of subjects leading to a number of publications, including a book on listening to jazz drawn from his popular jazz survey course. He is a recipient of an artist fellowship from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts and recently had the first act of his opera, The Outlaw and the King, presented by the Opera Workshop at Rutgers University. Characterized as "Highly accessible ... listeners are carefully guided through some very enjoyable musical metaphors ... quite moving" (Steve Schwartz, Classical CD Review), Zuckerman continues to compose for both professional and amateur performers ― especially student groups ― and for all kinds of audiences, from modern music aficionados to children.

Two Browning Settings: Grow Old Along With Me (1998) and Because (1999)

These two choral settings of poetry by Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were written for my wife, Judith. Grow Old Along With Me was sung at our wedding. This piece is actually a joint effort with Judith, since we both selected the text. It was her idea to use Robert Browning, and she chose as our theme the famous first lines from Browning’s poem, Rabbi Ben Ezra. We then read through several volumes of Browning’s work until we discovered Any Wife to Any Husband, the second stanza of which we felt captured exactly how we felt about each other. In the resulting composite text the lines from the first poem frame the excerpt from the second, a relation reflected in the music.

Grow old along with me!

The best is yet to be!

I have but to be by thee, and thy hand

Will never let mine go, nor heart withstand

The beating of my heart to reach its place.

When shall I look for thee and feel thee gone?

When cry for the old comfort and find none?

Never, I know! Thy soul is in thy face.

Grow old along with me!

The best is yet to be!

Because was a first anniversary gift, presented with the help of the Gregg Smith Singers at their summer workshop in Saranac Lake, New York, close after the actual event. Because sets the Sonnet XXXIX of Elizabeth Barrett Browning from her collection of forty-four Sonnets from the Portuguese. She wrote these in secret, presenting them to her husband Robert in 1847. Although she never meant them to be published, she was, fortunately, persuaded to put them in print. According to Louis Untermeyer (the editor of The Love Poems of Elizabeth and Robert Browning, currently published by Barnes and Noble):

The title was something of a mystery; it was a modest, and misleading, attempt to conceal the unimpeded confessions of an impassioned heart. The poems were obviously not translations; the title was merely one more token of domestic intimacy. At first Mrs. Browning suggested “Sonnets translated from the Bosnian.” But the title finally chosen was another homage to Browning; it was an acknowledgment of her husband’s playful way of calling her his “own little Portuguese” because of her olive skin.

Because is heavily influenced by the music of Lili Boulanger – in particular her Psalm settings – which highlights nuances in the text with dramatic awareness and sensitivity.

The title, Because, comes from the first word which is repeated twice in key positions within the poem and distills the thrust of the text. Within the poem’s rigorous sonnet structure lies a wealth of dramatic and contrasting images and thumbnail sketches evocative of deep feeling and long experience. Consequently, Because shifts moods rapidly along with changes in the text and imagines the emotional foundation for each declaration.

Because thou hast the power and own'st the grace

To look through and behind this mask of me

(Against which years have beat thus blanchingly

With their rains), and behold my soul's true face,

The dim and weary witness of life's race,--

Because thou hast the faith and love to see,

Through that same soul's distracting lethargy,

The patient angel waiting for a place

In the new Heavens,-- because nor sin nor woe,

Nor God's infliction, nor death's neighbourhood,

Nor all which others viewing, turn to go,

Nor all which makes me tired of all, self-viewed,--

Nothing repels thee,… Dearest, teach me so

To pour out gratitude, as thou dost, good!

Fred Cohen

2008-03-20T15:07:00.000-07:00

Fred Cohen's music has been commissioned by such organizations as the Richmond Symphony, the Cleveland Chamber Orchestra, the Manhattan School of Music Orchestra, the Shanghai String Quartet, the 21st Century Ensemble, the Paul Hill Chorale, as well as numerous chamber ensembles and individual musicians. His works have been performed throughout the Americas, and in Northern and Eastern Europe. Recent performances include his String Quartet No. 1 during the Chamber Music America National Conference in New York; Great Scott!,a concerto for French horn and wind ensemble, commissioned by the Montclair State University Wind Ensemble and soloist Jeffrey Scott; Smiling Dennis, a concerto for bass clarinet and orchestra premiered by Dennis Smylie, bass clarinet, and the Colonial Symphony Orchestra; Dances and Meditations, commissioned for Susan Palma, flute, and the Borromeo String Quartet; and Fred's Fancies, a trio for oboe, bassoon and piano trio commissioned by the University of Amherst, Massachusetts.

Mr. Cohen is an active conductor, most recently having led the Montclair State University Orchestra and Concert Band. He received his compositional training at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he studied with David Cope and Gordon Mumma, and at Cornell University, where he worked with Karel Husa and Steven Stucky, receiving his DMA in 1986. His music is published by Magna-Music Baton, American Composers Edition, and Subito Music. Mr. Cohen has been a member of the music faculty at the University of Richmond (1986-2002), Montclair State University (2002-2007), and the Schwob School of Music at Columbus State University (2007-present). Mr. Cohen founded the Cornell Contemporary Ensemble in 1982, and CURRENTS, a professional new-music ensemble in residence at the University of Richmond, in 1986. www.fredcohenmusic.com

Four Episodes for Clarinet and Piano (2006)

1. Flash
2. Breath
3. Arioso
4. Pure

The titles for each movement originated as shorthand expressions intended to help the performers realize the underlying intentions of each episode. "Flash," for example, is a depiction in music of flickering, sparkling images. "Breath" celebrates the sheer beauty of long, melodic lines—an opportunity for the performers to display their artistry in weaving melodic contours from of simple musical materials. "Arioso" is a short, intense, lyric solo for clarinet, with the piano performing a largely accompaniment role. "Pure," the final episode, combines elements of the previous three within a mostly simple, unornamented texture, celebrating the pure beauty of the musical interaction of the two performers."Four Episodes for Clarinet and Piano" was commissioned by David Singer, Associate Principal Clarinet Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.

Gregory Hall

2008-03-20T11:55:00.000-07:00

Composer Gregory Hall (b. 1959) was passionate about harmony even before he began composing in the late 1970’s. As a result, much of his work has been concentrated on developing a contrapuntally-based musical language emphasizing neither harmony nor melody, but the successful blending of both.

Hall holds composition degrees from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and
the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied with Ned Rorem. In 1991, the Maine Music Teachers National Association commissioned his piece the Hardanger Trio. His orchestra work Arkadia, commissioned by the Arcady Chamber Orchestra, Bar Harbor, ME, premiered in 2001 and received several performances at various venues in Maine. Hall has composed nearly forty works for varied ensembles and participated in concerts by the ACA, SCI, Maine Arts, SEAMUS, Ought-One Festival and the Gamper Festival of Contemporary Music, Brunswick, ME, which selected him as the Maine Composer of the Year in 1997. His works have been reviewed in the New Music Connoisseur, among others

Recordings include Water: 2 Poems of W.S. Merwin for Soprano and Orchestra released in Vol. 15 of ERMMedia's Masterworks of the New Era CD series in March of 2008 and Quartet for Saxophones which will be featured in an upcoming Capstone Records recording of new quartets for saxophone, also featuring the premiere release of Lukas Foss' Saxophone Quartet. His MAX computer music algorithm 21st Century Baroque for computer and sampling device(s) appeared on the internationally distributed MAX list CD-ROM. Hall’s works are published by the ACA.

From 1993 to 2005 he served as Vice-President of the Maine Composer's Forum (MCF), and then from 2005-present as President. In 2000 he was elected to the membership of the American Composers Alliance (ACA). He is a reviewer for the Contemporary Record
Society (CRS) Society News Magazine and a Fellow of the Ucross Foundation. Currently, he is listed in Marquis' Who'sWho in America.

PROGRAM NOTES
“April” (2005) for SATB chorus and piano

April is based on a text by W.S. Merwin, from his collection “The Lice”. The composition of this work was a case in point for my relationship to the poetry of Merwin, for--having set much Merwin in the past-- I was deliberately going through the works of a number of other poets. However, this poem jumped out at me in a way that numerous other Merwin poems have and I had no other choice, as the music started as well. Specifically, the music was almost immediately inspired by the line “April April”, and I took the liberty of using it as a recurring refrain. Other musical devices inspired by the poem include lengthy solo melismas, and staggered entrances on the words “Sinks” and “You”.

APRIL

When we have gone the stone will stop singing

April April
Sinks through the sand of names

Days to come
With no stars hidden in them

You that can wait being there

You that lose nothing
Know nothing

PROGRAM NOTES
“The Waking” (2007) high voice and piano

The Waking is from a text by Theodore Roethke. Since the subject matter is somewhat farther-ranging than many other poems I have set, I have deliberately expanded my harmonic palette, and the work points not only to (what I hope are) some future developments in that vein, but also looks back to the language of some of my earlier music, and thus becomes a summation so far of what I have done in the art-song idiom.

The Waking
Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Raoul Pleskow

2008-03-19T12:34:00.000-07:00

Raoul Pleskow, composer, was born in Vienna, Austria and educated in New York City. His principal teachers in composition were Karol Rathaus, Otto Luening, and Stefan Wolpe. He has been recipient of many honors, the most recent of which include awards by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His works have been performed by the Cleveland Philharmonic, the Tanglewood Festival Orchestra, the Plainfield Symphony, the Orchestra de Camera, the South Dakota Symphony, the Pierrot Consort, the Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players, the Queens Symphony Orchestra and many others. Commissions include those by the Chamber Players of the Kennedy Center, the Aeolian Chamber Players, the New York Virtuosi, Camarata, the North/South Consonance and the Unitarian Church of All Souls. He was Chairman of the music department at C.W. Post University from the late 1960s until 1994. His work can be found on CRI, Serenus, Ars Nova-Ars Antiqua, Golden Crest, Centaur, CRS, Capstone, and North-South Records.

Program Notes

Piece for 8 Instruments (2007) - World premiere

“Piece for Eight Instruments” was written last year.
After a brief introduction the piece leads “attacca” to the main portion in which the trumpet plays a “concertante” role within a chamber setting.
The work is freely atonal and is characterized by rapidly changing tempi, textures, instrumental colors and by asymmetrical rhythm.
The intervals of major seconds and tritones appear dominantly and serve to unify the octet.

Richard Cameron-Wolfe

2008-03-19T12:19:00.000-07:00

Composer-pianist Richard Cameron-Wolfe was born in Cleveland, Ohio, USA and received his music training at Oberlin College and Indiana University. His principal piano teachers were Joseph Battista and Menahem Pressler; his composition mentors included Bernard Heiden, Iannis Xenakis, and John Eaton.

After brief teaching engagements at Indiana University, Radford College (Virginia), and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Cameron-Wolfe moved to New York City, where he performed and composed for several major ballet and modern dance companies. In 1978 he began a 23-year Professorship at Purchase College, State University of New York, resigning in 2002 in order to devote his life primarily to the piano and composing.

Devoted to the promotion of modern classical music (which he prefers to call “sound art”), Cameron-Wolfe has served as an administrator for several musical organizations: Friends of American Music (1974 to the present), the New Mexico Music Festival (1978-82), Music from Angel Fire (1984), The Charles Ives Center (1990-91), and as Executive Director of the American branch of CESAME: the Center for Soviet/American Musical Exchange (1989-93).

He now lives and teaches piano and composition in the mountains of northern New Mexico, writes music articles for Horse Fly, a monthly journal of politics and culture, and hosts a monthly three-hour “Sunday Morning [Un]Classics” radio show (dominated by 20th-century music).

His current projects include the recording and editing of two CDs – one of his own compositions, the other showcasing his unique piano repertoire of music by lesser-known 20th-century composers. Additionally, he has recently been engaged as Co-Editor of FULCRUM: an annual of poetry and aesthetics, and is currently preparing for an autumn 2008 concert tour, with dates already set in Oldenburg, Germany and Tampere, Finland.

A Measure of Love and Silence (2006)

– Tatyana Apraksina
(trans. by James Wesley Mantooth)

The measure of
My
Love’s weight
Is insatiable hunger
For silence

Without closeness
Without meeting

At the stern
As the steamer departs
The soul will withdraw and nod
Change into water

It is not mine not yours
It is no one’s

(-----)

As a yellow flake of rosin
Fallen to the stage
Told
In a violin’s voice

What it wanted
Why it lived

How it came
To be absolutely itself
No one nothing
For no one

A measure of love
And silence

Maria Sampen, violin

2008-03-19T11:53:00.000-07:00

Violinist, Maria Sampen is in demand as a performer of new and experimental works and has premiered dozens of compositions both as a soloist and with Brave New Works. Ms. Sampen has appeared as a concerto soloist with orchestras throughout the United States and is particularly known for her performances of William Bolcom’s virtuosic violin concerto. She is an active chamber musician and has performed on music festivals and recitals in Europe, Asia and North America. Her major teachers include Paul Kantor, Kenneth Goldsmith and Paul Makara. In addition to a busy performing schedule, Ms. Sampen is a dedicated teacher. She is associate professor of violin and chair of the string department at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington.

Memorie di luoghi… (2001) for Violin and Piano – Marilyn Shrude
Maria Sampen, violin
Marilyn Shrude, piano

Nancy Ogle

2008-03-18T12:02:00.000-07:00

Nancy Ellen Ogle holds a Master of Music Degree in Vocal Performance from Indiana University, where she studied voice with Martha Lipton. Her postgraduate studies have included important work with Birgit Nilsson, Edward Zambara and Elizabeth Cole.

Her concert career has included television appearances in Canada and Germany as well as the United States, and performances in England, Austria, Russia, Georgia (Republic), and Japan. With help from accompanying musicians and scholars, Ogle has evaluated hundreds of scores of unpublished works by American composers. Drawing from published and unpublished sources, she has created new music programs, which she has performed in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Mexico.

She has performed premieres of many concert works, including pieces by John Eaton, Don Stratton, Jan Gilbert, Joyce Suskind and Donald Hagar. Her recordings may be found on several labels, including Cormorant, New Media and Capstone.

Ms. Ogle is currently Professor of Music at the University of Maine, where she
teaches voice and directs the Opera Workshop.

Jan Gilbert, Of Heloise: Four Song Settings of the Poetry of Judith Infante

Scott Winship

2008-03-02T13:14:00.000-08:00

Scott Winship was recently appointed Program Manager for New York based Meet The Composer, whose mission is to increase opportunities for composers by fostering the creation, performance, dissemination, and appreciation of their music. Prior to Meet The Composer, Mr. Winship served as the Associate Director and Youth Jam Coordinator for Chicago’s Rock For Kids, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping Chicago’s homeless children through holiday relief programs and Youth Jam, a free music education program. He has also served as the Development Assistant for the American Music Center in New York. Mr. Winship remains an active composer and holds degrees in composition and music education from Bowling Green State University (MM) and Central Michigan University (BME). His primary teachers have included Marilyn Shrude, Jeffrey Mumford, Phillip Grange, Mikel Kuehn, and David Gillingham.

The concept behind Habitual Patterns revolves around the idea that when faced with loss we often recoil into very individually established emotional patterns to deal with that loss. It may start out with anger and end in despair or vice versa with a host of emotions in between. Whichever manner these arrive in, it is the body’s emotional way of dealing with losing something/someone close. Habitual Patterns reflects one such pattern starting with disbelief and anger, moving into despair and solitude with occasional resurgences of frustration and anger ultimately settling on a hollow acceptance. Habitual Patterns is for five octave marimba and alto saxophone and lasts approximately 11 minutes.

Photo credit: Kathryn Gritt

Louis Karchin

2008-03-02T12:09:00.000-08:00

A composer of "fearless eloquence" (Andrew Porter, The New Yorker), Louis Karchin has a highly acclaimed compositional portfolio of over sixty works. He was born in Philadelphia in 1951 and studied at the Eastman School of Music and Harvard University. Recent music includes
vocal-instrumental song cycles Songs of John Keats, Songs of Distance and Light, Orpheus, American Visions, and his latest work, The Gods of Winter. Recently, the Guggenheim Museum presented his 70-minute one-act comic opera Romulus, in a fully-staged production, and his Chesapeake Festival Overture was premiered this past summer by the Orchestra di Stato della Romania at the Alba Music Festival (Italy) and performed shortly after by the Chesapeake Orchestra at the River Concert Series of St. Mary's College, MD.

Karchin's music has been commissioned and performed by some of the world's most acclaimed ensembles for new music, including the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Group for Contemporary Music, the Da Capo Chamber Players, the New York New Music Ensemble, the Louisville Orchestra, the Delta Ensemble of Amsterdam (Netherlands), and Spectrum Sonori (South Korea). New World, Albany and CRI labels have recorded his works and C. F. Peters Corporation and ACA have published his compositions. He is the recipient of Koussevitzky and Barlow Foundation Commissions, and two awards each from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University. Mr. Karchin is Professor of Music at New York University, teaching in an advanced graduate program in composition which he organized for the Department of Music in 1989.

To the Stars (2003)

“In 2002-03, I was totally immersed in the Orpheus myth, writing a masque for baritone, instruments, and dance, based on a modern recasting of the legend by poet Stanley Kunitz. While researching various versions of the story, I came across a book of Orphic hymns, most likely written in the third or fourth century A.D. by followers of a religious sect that had grown up around the legend of Orpheus. The hymns were beautifully translated by classics scholar and UC Santa Barbara Professor Apostolas Athanassakis. At first, I thought of incorporating them into my masque, but in the end, two of the hymns became separate short works—To the Sun and To the Stars. To the Sun is for soprano and piano, and To the Stars, for chorus. The two pieces may be performed separately or as a set. To the Sun has been released on an Albany CD, recorded by Elizabeth Farnum and Stephen Gosling; this concert marks the premiere of To the Stars.

To the Stars (text)

I call forth the sacred light of the heavenly stars
and with devotional prayers I summon the holy demons.
Heavenly stars, dear children of dark Night,
On circles you march and whirl about,
O brilliant and fiery begetters of all.
Fate, everyone’s fate you reveal,
and you determine the divine path for mortals
as, wandering in midair, you gaze upon the seven luminous orbits.
In heaven and on earth, ever indestructible on your blazing trail,
you shine upon night’s cloak of darkness.
Coruscating, gleaming, kingly and nocturnal,
visit the learned contests of this sacred rite,
finishing a noble race of works of glory.

Anonymous, circa 3rd century A. D.
Translated by Apostolas Athanassakis

Copyright 2002 Apostolas N. Athanassakis. Used with permission