Tag Archives: Robert Beaser

EarShot Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra New Music Readings

February 22-24, 2012
Feb. 23 at 7pm: Free & Open to the Public.
Kleinhans Music Hall, Buffalo, NY

February 22 – 24, 2012, EarShot (the National Orchestral Composition Discovery Network) and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra (BPO), JoAnn Falletta, Music Director, presented the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra New Music Readings at Kleinhans Music Hall (3 Symphony Circle, Buffalo). On Thursday, February 23 at 7pm at Kleinhans Hall, the public witnessed a behind-the-scenes look at the process of bringing brand new orchestral works to life, as music by the four selected composers was read by the BPO under the baton of associate conductor, Matthew Kraemer. The composers – Stephen Gorbos, Elizabeth Lim, David Marenberg, and Daniel Schlosberg – were selected through a national call for scores, and during the Readings received feedback from mentor composers Margaret Brouwer, Sebastian Currier, and Derek Bermel, the conductor and BPO principal musicians.

Over the decades, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra has matured in stature under the leadership of William Steinberg, Josef Krips, Lukas Foss, Michael Tilson Thomas, Julius Rudel, Semyon Bychkov, Maximiano Valdes, and now Music Director, Maestro Falletta. Since 1940, the Orchestra’s permanent home has been Kleinhans Music Hall, a National Historic Site with an international reputation as one of the finest concert halls in the United States. The BPO presents more than 120 Classics, Pops and Youth Concerts during a 37-week season and its award-winning education programs reach over 35,000 students per year. During the tenure of Maestro Falletta, the orchestra has rekindled a distinguished history of broadcasts and recordings, including the release of 15 CDs of a highly diverse repertoire on the NAXOS and Beau Fleuve labels. The BPO’s recording of composer John Corigliano’s Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan, featuring soprano Hila Plitmann, on the NAXOS label, won Grammys in two categories. Its concerts are heard regularly in over 200 cities across the U.S. on American Public Radio’s Performance Today. As Buffalo’s cultural ambassador, the BPO has toured widely across the United
States and Canada including a recent tour to Florida, the first multi-city tour since the 1988 European tour and the first outside of the region since Maestro Falletta led the ensemble at Carnegie Hall in 2004, its 22nd appearance there.

The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra’s New Music Readings are a part of EarShot, the nationwide network of new music readings and related composer-development programs. The goals of the program are to create the nation’s first ongoing systematic program for identifying emerging orchestral composers, to provide professional-level working experience with orchestras from every region of the country, and to increase awareness of these composers and access to their music throughout the industry. EarShot is a partnership among American Composers Orchestra, American Composers Forum, American Music Center, the League of American Orchestras, and Meet The Composer. Through EarShot, 24 composers so far have been selected for programs with the New York Youth Symphony, the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, and the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, and the Pioneer Valley Symphony (MA).

Stephen Gorbos: Bounce

Stephen Gorbos composes music that navigates a wide palette of genres and influences as diverse as American rhythm & blues, western classical music, and Javanese gamelan. He has been called “one of the bright stars of his generation of post modernists… an original, compelling and witty voice.” Gorbos’ music has been performed by Minnesota Orchestra, the New England Philharmonic, and the Cuarteto Latinamericano, and commissioned by the Strathmore Music Center in Bethesda, MD. He is cofounder of Collide-O-Scope Music, an ensemble dedicated to mixed media performance, and has received awards ASCAP, Meet The Composer, the American Music Center, and Amercian Composers Forum. He has been composer-in-residence at Copland House, and a fellow at Tanglewood the Aspen Music Festival. Gorbos is assistant professor of composition and theory at the Catholic University of America. He holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, Yale School of Music, and Cornell University. His teachers include Steven Stucky, Roberto Sierra and Martin Bresnick.

According to the composer, “Bounce owes its name to the literal ‘bouncing’ of the first notes in the piece: the instruments that open the piece play an energetic tune that jumps between high and low notes. Much of what happens in the piece from that point forward is built from canonic techniques, where a copy of a melody that was just played is echoed back at a slightly later interval of time. Aside from a slow middle section, the music is overtly danceable, with an audible beat that should keep toes tapping for most of the piece. The lively and exuberant nature of the music was inspired by my nephew James, a firecracker of a little boy who, with glittering eyes, bounces around my sister’s house.”

Elizabeth Lim: Disharmony of the Spheres

Elizabeth Lim is a doctoral candidate at the Juilliard School, where she studies with Robert Beaser. According to her teacher, she possesses “…imagination which communes with the past and engages with the present.” Born in San Francisco, Lim began composing at age five. Her music has received honors from ASCAP, BMI, the Society of Composers, Inc., the National Association of Composers, USA (NACUSA), and the Society for New Music. Lim completed her undergraduate studies at Harvard University, where she was awarded the Hugh F. MacColl Prize in composition, the John Green Fellowship in composition, and named one of her class’s “Most Outstanding Seniors in the Arts.” She was a participant in the Berkeley Symphony Emerging Composers Program, the Albany Symphony’s Composer-to-Center-Stage program, Palo Alto Youth-to-Youth Commissioning Project, Bellevue Youth Symphony Orchestra Composers Competition, and the University of Nebraska’s Iron Composer Competition. Lim was named winner of the Juilliard Orchestra Composition Competition in 2009.

Since the time Lim first began composing, she has had an interest in dance music. One of her earliest compositions paid homage to Viennese waltzes, attempting to deconstruct the waltz into something of her own. Disharmony of the Spheres is a more mature take on a similar idea. Written during the fall of 2011, it borrows the traditional Scherzo and Trio form but quickly devolves into something entirely different. The “scherzo” section resembles a danse macabre, and the “trio” is ethereal and light; however the delineation between the two sections disintegrates as themes collide. This collision sets a course for chaos, redirecting the classical “harmony of the spheres” to disharmony.

David Marenberg: The Abyssal Zone

David Marenberg is a Los Angeles-born concert and multimedia composer living in New York. He studied at Amherst College, where he won the Eric Sundquist Prize for his first symphony. He recently completed his Masters Degree in Scoring for Film and Multimedia at New York University. Marenberg participated in the film scoring workshop at the Aspen Music Festival in 2010, and was recognized by the Songwriters Hall of Fame as one of the Best New Songwriters of 2011. His orchestral style infuses turn-of-the-century impressionist aesthetics with modern tropes of sound design and electroacoustic effect. His teachers include Eric Sawyer, Marc Antonio Consoli, and David Spear, who says Marenberg’s music shows, “…a mastery of many musical styles, while vibrating with infectious energy and originality.”

The composer says, “Deep down in the Abyssal Zone, 13,000 feet below the surface, a strange menagerie of marine life manages to survive the crushing ocean pressures and freezing temperatures. Shrouded in total darkness, bioluminescent creatures thrive on geothermal vents, while large-jawed anglerfish and giant squid sift through the sediment for food. On the 23rd of January, 1960, the Swiss research bathyscaphe Trieste became the first (and only) manned vessel to reach an area of the zone known as the Challenger Deep. The Abyssal Zone is a monument to explorers of the unknown, a slow descent into a region filled with beauty that defies its inhospitable landscape. Safe within the bathyscaphe, the listener EarShot & Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra New Music Readings, February 22-24, 2012 is witness to the marvelous and dangerous deep. At the same time, it pays homage to other musical explorers who took the plunge into uncharted depths. Harmonically and formally, the piece mirrors the voyage of the Trieste, descending from the familiar to the bizarre and back again. The primary theme is a scalar descent of two perfect fourths, and its contour generates most of the harmonic material of the piece. While writing The Abyssal Zone, Marenberg held to his belief that a composer’s responsibility is not simply to explore uncharted waters but to “report back” in such a way that the listener can best imagine the journey for his or herself.

Daniel Schlosberg: Grosse Concerto

Originally from Philadelphia, composer and pianist Daniel Schlosberg has had works premiered by the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, Encompass New Opera Theater, counter)induction, the Lorelei Ensemble, and New Triad for Collaborative Arts, and his first work for large orchestra was premiered by the Yale Symphony Orchestra in October 2010. Schlosberg has won awards from Yale, NFAA, and ASCAP. His choral piece Poor Richard’s Almanack Excerpts was performed by Singing City at the national celebration of Ben Franklin’s 300th birthday and he has appeared on From the Top, the Today Show, and in two PBS documentaries. Schlosberg is currently in his first year of a Masters degree in composition at the Yale School of Music, studying with Christopher Theofanidis, who says, “Daniel has a great talent for working with his musical material in a way that is both developmentally satisfying and still very playful.”

The composer says, “Grosse Concerto began as my personal struggle with the symphonic genre, and specifically the overwhelming body of work that is the German symphonic tradition. Given this genre’s de facto—and seemingly never-ending—status as the ‘pinnacle’ of Classical music, I felt it was important to confront it head-on. The title alludes to the Baroque form of concerto grosso and serves as a metaphor for the entire piece, which is a kind of ‘big concerto’” or concerto for orchestra. The work features a broad array of styles that waft in and out, as if having a conversation through time. I wished to explore the ways in which these seemingly disparate styles interact and form a cohesive musical narrative. A main theme in the full orchestra alternates with musical episodes played by subsections, which are embedded solos for various instruments. Each of the episodes features music echoing a past time period, such as Baroque, jazz, and modernist pointillism. This adds up to what are often very sharp contrasts—rapid shifts without any transition, like an abrupt cut between scenes in a film or a sudden change of lighting in a play.”

Matthew Kraemer, associate conductor
Recognized for his “musical sensitivity” and “energized sense of interpretation”, conductor Matthew Kraemer enters his second season as associate conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra in September 2010. In this role he appears regularly on each of the orchestra’s major series, including subscription weeks, Pops, Family, and summer concerts. He plays a vital role in the BPO’s award-winning education and community engagement programs, in addition to assisting Music Director JoAnn Falletta during recording sessions and on tour. Upcoming season highlights include performances of Miguel del Aguila’s The Fall of Cuzco, a fully-staged production of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, and tour performances with Idina Menzel in Atlanta, Indianapolis, Long Island, Miami, Orange County, St. Louis, and West Palm Beach. Kraemer additionally appears this season as guest conductor with the Atlanta, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, and Virginia symphony orchestras.

Recipient of the distinguished Herbert von Karajan Conducting Fellowship and the Bruno Walter Career Development Grant, Mr. Kraemer served a residency with the Vienna Philharmonic at the Salzburg Music Festival during the summer of 2006. His conducting engagements include appearances with the symphony orchestras of Akron, Asheville, Baltimore, Canton, Jacksonville, and Richmond (IN), the Reno Chamber Orchestra, and in Europe with the Vidin Philharmonic and the Orquesta de Cadaqués. Equally at home in the ballet pit, he has led fully-staged productions with Virginia Ballet Theatre, Ohio Ballet, Neglia Ballet Artists, and Todd Rosenlieb Dance. Mr. Kraemer has collaborated with many leading artists, including Awadagin Pratt, the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet, Philippe Quint, Jennifer Koh, Ben Folds, Chris Botti, Idina Menzel, and Richard Stolzman, among others.

Prior to his appointment in Buffalo, Mr. Kraemer completed a highly successful, three-year tenure as associate conductor of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra. He has held positions with the Akron Symphony and the Akron Youth Symphony orchestras, leading the AYS into its 50^th anniversary season with a performance in Carnegie Hall. Increasingly recognized for his passionate advocacy for music education and his devotion to audience development, he has created numerous arts education programs and continues his work with young musicians as conductor, clinician and lecturer at many music festivals and in public schools.

An Indiana native, Mr. Kraemer studied conducting in Vienna, Austria with Salvador Mas Conde and was twice a fellowship conductor at the American Academy of Conducting at Aspen. He has additionally participated in the National Arts Center Conductor’s Program in Ottawa, Canada. His conducting teachers include David Zinman, Robert Spano, Stanley DeRusha, and Jorma Panula. Mr. Kraemer is a graduate of Butler University and the University of Nevada, Reno, where he assisted former Cincinnati Symphony concertmaster Phillip Ruder. An accomplished violinist in his own right, he was a member of the Nightingale String Quartet. Fluent in German and French, his principal violin teachers include Phillip Ruder, Herbert Greenberg, and Larry Shapiro. When he is not performing, Mr. Kraemer enjoys cooking, running, and reading. He and his wife Megan reside in Buffalo, NY.

EarShot is made possible with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music and with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts.

EarShot: Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra New MusicReadings

Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra New Music Readings
February 8 – 10, 2011

EarShot, the National Orchestral Composition Discovery Network, and Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra (BPO) will present the Buffalo Philharmonic New Music Readings. Four composers, selected from a national call for scores, will hear their works read by the BPO under the baton of associate conductor Matthew Kraemer, and will receive feedback from mentor composers David Felder, Steven Stucky, and Robert Beaser, and the conductor and BPO principal musicians. The four composers selected are Michael-Thomas Foumai, Austin Jaquith, Nathan Kelly, and Carl Schimmel. The public is invited to a free reading session on Wednesday, February 9, 2011, no ticket is necessary.

Over the decades, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra has matured in stature under the leadership of William Steinberg, Josef Krips, Lukas Foss, Michael Tilson Thomas, Julius Rudel, Semyon Bychkov, Maximiano Valdes, and now Music Director, Maestro Falletta. Since 1940, the Orchestra’s permanent home has been Kleinhans Music Hall, a National Historic Site with an international reputation as one of the finest concert halls in the United States. The BPO presents more than 120 Classics, Pops and Youth Concerts during a 37-week season and its award-winning education programs reach over 35,000 students per year. During the tenure of Maestro Falletta, the orchestra has rekindled a distinguished history of broadcasts and recordings, including the release of 15 CDs of a highly diverse repertoire on the NAXOS and Beau Fleuve labels. The BPO’s recording of composer John Corigliano’s Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan, featuring soprano Hila Plitmann, on the NAXOS label, won Grammys in two categories. Its concerts are heard regularly in over 200 cities across the U.S. on American Public Radio’s Performance Today. As Buffalo’s cultural ambassador, the BPO has toured widely across the United States and Canada including a recent tour to Florida, the first multi-city tour since the 1988 European tour and the first outside of the region since Maestro Falletta led the ensemble at Carnegie Hall in 2004, its 22nd appearance there.

Michael-Thomas Foumai: The Light Bringer

Michael-Thomas FoumaiMichael-Thomas Foumai (b. 1987, Honolulu, HI) earned a bachelor in music composition from the University of Hawaii and currently studies at the University Michigan. His music has been performed in the US, China, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and Thailand. His mentors include Robert Beaser, Tristan Murail, Michael Gordon, Xu Shuya, Jia Daqun, Neil McKay and Jon Magnussen. He has studied with Bright Sheng, Michael Daugherty, Peter Askim, Byron Yasui, Donald Reid Womack, Takeo Kudo and Thomas Osborne. Recent performances of his music have been presented at the Osaka College of Music, Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Yogyakarta Contemporary Music Festival, Thailand International Composition Festival, MidWest Composers Symposium, Fresno New Music Festival and the Calarts Theatre at Disney Hall. This performance of The Light-Bringer marks the first time Mr. Foumai’s work has been performed by a professional orchestra.

The Light-Bringer symphony is inspired by the biblical fall of Lucifer and the title ofthe work is taken from the translation of Lucifer’s Latin name meaning, bringer of light or bearer of light. The work is based on manipulations of the infamous “number of the beast,” six hundred and sixty six and so the number six is embedded within the structure of the work. This can be heard on a small level with musical motives and sonorities being repeated six times, melodic and harmonic intervals of 6ths, a melody or harmony of six pitches and a progression of six chords. On a larger level, the work is built on six major sections with the main climax occurring roughly 666 seconds (11 min and 6 seconds) into the work. On a visual and performance level, tempo markings are all multiples of six.

Austin Jaquith: Blaze of Autumn

Austin Jaquith, a native Californian, began studying composition in High School with Jack Perla in Oakland, CA. In 1999 he enrolled at the Cleveland Institute of Music, studying with Margaret Brouwer and graduated in 2003 with a Bachelor of Music in composition. From 2003 to 2005 he attended the Moores School of Music at the University of Houston, where he studied with Robert Smith and graduated with a Master of Music in composition. While at the Moores School he received the Seraphim composition prize, for his String Quartet No. 2, and participated in SCI’s region VI conference in San Antonio. In the fall of 2005, he began doctoral studies at Indiana University where he studied with David Dzubay, Chinary Ung, Richard Wernick, Claude Baker, and P.Q. Phan. Upon graduation, Dr. Jaquith was hired as an Assistant Professor of Theory and Composition at Cedarville University in Ohio, where he continues to teach and compose. Blaze of Autumn is the first of Mr. Jaquith’s works to be performed by a professional orchestra. Recent performances include Shades of Red, performed at the ITG 2010 Conference in Sydney, Australia, Kinesis by the El Paso Youth Symphony Youth Orchestra, Andy Moran Conductor, and Quintet for Brass by the Mirari Brass Quintet on their southwest tour.

Blaze of Autumn (Five Images from Fall) was inspired by fall in the Midwest. After spending my formative years as a native Californian, I was very impressed with the beautiful fall colors found in Ohio, where I moved for college. This work seeks to capture the magnificence found in autumn as green explodes into radiant reds, oranges, and yellows. There are five brief movements, each an image of a fall scene. I. Dawn’s Revelation, II. Breath of Frost, III. Indian Summer, IV. Frost’s Bite, V. Blaze of Autumn.

Nathan Kelly: Legend of Pecos Bill

Nathan Kelly is a film and concert composer and professional orchestrator. Working in Broadway, television and film, some of his orchestrating credits include The Tony Awards, Curtains, Dionne Warwick, Sir André Previn, Nickelodeon Television, Sarah Brightman, The Kennedy Center, Walt Disney Music Studios, Radio City Music Hall, Lea Salonga, Stephen Schwartz’s Opera and Andrea Bocelli. He studied at The University of Texas, North Texas, The Juilliard School, The University of Southern California and privately with the orchestrators of Stephen Sondheim and Alan Menken. He has composed two symphonies, a violin concerto, a harp concerto, a mass, and works for vocalists. He has received several commissions from orchestras around the world. The Legend of Pecos Bill is Mr. Kelly’s first work to be performed by a professional orchestra.

While a composer-in-residence in Wyoming, I wanted to capture the landscape of the open prairies and quiet nights that seemed to inspire memories of my favorite American tall-tales that I heard when I was a kid growing up in Texas, the Legend of Pecos Bill was one of them. After abandoning the idea of using a narrator, I decided to approach this idealized, highly energetic, and larger-than-life hero by depicting some of his tall-tales through the suggestive use of orchestrating and harmonizing a singular short theme which could be continually altered throughout the set of 5 attaca movements which feature the main characters and dramatic elements of the stories: I. Pecos Bill Shows Off, II, The Appearance of Slue-Foot Sue, III. Lightning, The Horse, IV. The West, and V. Finale (which is a coda that is reminiscent of the beginning, and serves to bookend the piece).

Carl Schimmel: rite. apotheosis.

Carl Schimmel Winner of Columbia University’s Joseph Bearns Prize and the 2010 Lee Ettelson Award, Carl Schimmel has received honors and awards from many organizations, including the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Copland House, the Seoul International Composition Competition, the National Federation of Music Clubs, the New York Youth Symphony First Music Awards, NACWPI, SCI, and ASCAP. His works have been performed in Carnegie Hall’s Weill Hall, Merkin Hall in New York, Severance Hall in Cleveland, the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London, Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis, and at other venues throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. He has received performances and commissions from the California EAR Unit, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, the Minnesota Orchestra, North/South Consonance, saxophonist Taimur Sullivan, bass clarinetist Henri Bok, Line C3 Percussion Ensemble, Cross Sound Music Festival, the Da Capo Chamber Players, Lucy Shelton, the Mexico City Woodwind Quintet, Flexible Music, counter)induction, and many others. A graduate of Duke University (Ph.D. Music Composition) and the Yale School of Music (M.M. Music Composition), he is currently Assistant Professor of Music Theory and Composition at Illinois State University in Normal, IL. Please visit http://www.carlschimmel.com.

rite. apotheosis. is an experiment in (melo-?) drama. The frenetic and exaggerated gestures in the work are typical of my recent music, and some have termed me an “expressionist.” I frequently dabble in humor, but this work seems to have little of it – although the sparse “cha-cha-cha” sections are light and tiptoed; maybe they will make some in the audience smile. The musical material is drawn from and moves across a special set of seven-note scales (major, harmonic minor, melodic minor, and quasi-octatonic). But my building materials are less relevant than the emotional import of the music. There is no plot to this music per se, but the title reflects the general narrative progression and shift of mood that takes place.

Matthew Kraemer, associate conductor

Matthew Kraemer Recognized for his “musical sensitivity” and “energized sense of interpretation”, conductor Matthew Kraemer enters his second season as associate conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra in September 2010. In this role he appears regularly on each of the orchestra’s major series, including subscription weeks, Pops, Family, and summer concerts. He plays a vital role in the BPO’s award-winning education and community engagement programs, in addition to assisting Music Director JoAnn Falletta during recording sessions and on tour. Upcoming season highlights include performances of Miguel del Aguila’s The Fall of Cuzco, a fully-staged production of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, and tour performances with Idina Menzel in Atlanta, Indianapolis, Long Island, Miami, Orange County, St. Louis, and West Palm Beach. Kraemer additionally appears this season as guest conductor with the Atlanta, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, and Virginia symphony orchestras.

Prior to his appointment in Buffalo, Mr. Kraemer completed a highly successful, three-year tenure as associate conductor of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra. He has held positions with the Akron Symphony and the Akron Youth Symphony orchestras, leading the AYS into its 50th anniversary season with a performance in Carnegie Hall. Increasingly recognized for his passionate advocacy for music education and his devotion to audience development, he has created numerous arts education programs and continues his work with young musicians as conductor, clinician and lecturer at many music festivals and in public schools.

American Composers Orchestra: Underwood New Music Readings

Underwood New Music Readings
Monday and Tuesday, April 8-9
The DiMenna Center for Classical Music

The 22nd Annual Underwood New Music Readings are under the direction of ACO’s Artistic Director, composer Robert Beaser, and will be conducted by ACO Music Director George Manahan, with Christopher Theofanidis and Joan Tower as mentor composers.

This year, six of the nation’s most promising composers in the early stages of their professional careers have been selected from over 150 submissions received from around the country. The selected composers – Jonathan Blumhofer, Louis Chiappetta, Joshua Groffman, Saad Haddad, A.J. McCaffrey, and Nina C. Young – represent a broad spectrum of musical backgrounds and sound worlds.

In addition, this year the Readings offer composers, students, or anyone interested in learning more about the business of being a composer a Professional Development Seminar on Tuesday, April 9 from 9:30am-3:00pm at the DiMenna Center. Workshop topics include Intellectual Property and Copyright Law, Engraving and Self-Publishing with Bill Holab, Owner, Bill Holab Music; Support and Fundraising for Composers with Ed Harsh, President and CEO of New Music USA; and Publicity and Promotion with Jessica Lustig, Founding Partner 21C Media Group. The cost for the Seminar is $25, which includes lunch.

The composer participants:

Jonathan Blumhofer:
Diversions for Orchestra

Jonathan Blumhofer (1979) has received numerous awards and honors and his compositions have been performed and recorded by a number of ensembles in the United States and Europe. Jonathan has taught at Clark University and Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in Worcester, MA, and at Gordon College in Wenham, MA. He earned his doctorate from Boston University. His principal teachers include Edwin Childs, Dalit Warshaw, Jan Swafford, Joshua Fineberg, Richard Cornell, and Samuel Headrick. Of his work, Samuel says, “Jonathan has a wonderful ear for orchestral color, and his unique sounds and interesting textures are creatively and effectively used to create well-structured, innovative new compositions that are musically interesting and innovative, highly expressive, and dramatically compelling.” Jonathan also studied with Allain Gaussin and Andre Bon at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, and with Ladislav Kubik at the Czech-American Summer Music Institute in Prague. The New Music Readings will be his first experience working with a professional orchestra.

Of his piece for the Readings, Diversions, Jonathan says, “Diversions is my first purely orchestral work; as its title suggests, I aimed to write a piece that was entertaining and lighthearted in character. Diversions is dedicated to Andrew Johnston, the son of long-time family friends, Jim and Lisa Johnston. Between 2001 and 2003, I dedicated three short pieces to each of Andrew’s older sisters. When Andrew was born in 2004, his father requested that any piece I write for Andrew be suitably big and loud, ‘preferably with anvils.’ Alas, I couldn’t bring myself to include an anvil in the scoring for Diversions, though I trust a log drum and some tom-toms will suffice.”

photo: Beowulf Sheehan

Louis Chiappetta:
Chroma

Louis Chiappetta (b. 1989) began studying composition at Mannes College of Music’s Preparatory Division at the age of 13. He is a graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Music, receiving a bachelor’s degree studying with Keith Fitch. In 2011, Chiappetta was awarded a Fulbright Grant to study with Julian Anderson at the Guildhall School of Music in London. His works have been performed at London’s Wigmore Hall, New York’s Carnegie Hall, Aspen Music Festival and School, Dartington International Summer School (UK), and MusicX Festival (Switzerland). Chiappetta has won several prizes including an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award (2010), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Charles Ives Scholarship (2011), and the Cleveland Institute of Music Donald Erb Prize (2011). In 2012 Chiappetta participated in a professional training workshop at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute where he studied with Kaija Saariaho and Anssi Karttunen. As a participant, his trio Loops, Clocks, and Shadows was premiered at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall.

Of his piece Chroma, he says, “In Chroma I set out to write a piece that tries to fuse my own musical vocabulary with Morton Feldman’s painterly approach. I am trying to treat musical ideas as if they were strips of color, building a structure that creates tension through juxtaposing distinctive materials in ever changing ways. Chroma also draws inspiration from my interest in contemporary literature. I was reading David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King while working on it, and I was struck by the unique way Wallace employed nonlinear narratives to gradually reveal who characters are and how they’ve come to know each other.”

Joshua Groffman:
Music from elsewhere: orchestra

Joshua Groffman (b. 1984) of Millbrook, NY has written works for orchestral, vocal, and chamber ensembles, as well as for electronic media, theater, and film that have received numerous performances. The Readings will be Joshua’s first experience working with a professional orchestra. He graduated magna cum laude from Cornell University in 2007, where he completed double majors in music and history. While at Cornell, he studied composition with Roberto Sierra and Steven Stucky and piano with Xak Bjerken and Malcolm Bilson. Joshua holds Doctor of Music (2012) and Master of Music (2009) degrees from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where he studied composition with Sven-David Sandström, P.Q. Phan, Claude Baker, Aaron Travers, and Don Freund and computer music with Jeffrey Hass and John Gibson. He currently teaches composition and theory at the John J. Cali School of Music at Montclair State University.

The title of Joshua’s piece, music from elsewhere, comes from a passage in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Robber Bride. He explains, “The title evokes, for me, a sense of dichotomy between two types of music: One that is fully present, audible, and familiar to us, and another which is more mysterious, emerging into our perception only in fits and starts – the ‘music from elsewhere.’ The idea of this dichotomy seems to capture a facet of the experience of daily life, namely, that if prosaic and familiar concerns largely shape our existence, they are occasionally interrupted by a sense that something larger and more fundamental is at work behind the scenes. Music from elsewhere attempts to capture that sense of an ineffable, larger something.”

Joshua Groffman: Music from elsewhere: ensemble

Saad Haddad:
Maelstrom

Saad Haddad (1992) is an Arab-American composer based in Los Angeles whose music showcases his Middle-Eastern heritage. A junior at the University of Southern California, he is majoring in Music Composition with a minor in Cinematic Arts. In addition to his concert work, Saad has composed the soundtracks to eighteen short films, eight which were recorded live by the Thornton School of Music at the John Williams Scoring Stage. He is currently scoring “Core Overload,” a video game thesis being developed at USC. In the summer of 2011, he was selected as the youngest of fourteen students across the United States to study with Professor Samuel Adler of the Juilliard School in Berlin as part of the Freie Universitat

in Berlin International Summer Program. Saad has been a finalist in the 2012 ASCAP Morton Gould Award contest and was a member of the first group of high school composers to participate in the Los Angles Philharmonic’s Composer Fellowship Program under the direction of Steven Stucky. His composition professors include Frank Ticheli, Mark Weiser, Stephen Hartke, Samuel Adler, Donald Crockett, and Steven Stucky.

Maelstrom was selected as an alternate for the 2012 Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute. Of the piece, Saad says, “Maelstrom will keep people right on the edge of their seats, holding on for dear life, as their ship, the concert hall, catches a devastating current that puts them at the heart of an unrelenting storm.”

A.J. McCaffrey
Thank You For Waiting

A.J. McCaffrey (1973) has received commissions from the Tanglewood Music Center and the Radius Ensemble, and his music has been performed by the New Fromm Players and members of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Alarm Will Sound, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and the Chiara Quartet. A native of the Boston area, A.J. has been an active singer, guitarist, and songwriter since high school. He studied composition at Rice University, as well as at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama with composer James MacMillan. He has just completed his doctorate in music composition with composers Donald Crockett and Stephen Hartke at the University of Southern California. A.J. currently lives in southern California, where he teaches music theory and aural skills at USC, composition through the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Composer Fellowship Program, and composition and musical analysis at the Longy School of Music of Bard College’s Los Angeles-based Masters of Arts in Teaching program. A.J. is currently at work on his own composition/musician documentary series This Is What Really Happened for solo and pre-recorded instruments, and is also member of the Portland (OR)-based band Planes Intersect.

A.J. says, “The title of this piece, Thank You for Waiting, could easily serve as a note to any audience of my music, but here specifically it expresses my hope that the unsettled and unresolved nature of the musical material will be heard as a texture in and of itself, and that the ‘waiting’ on the part of the listener will become its own reward. Additionally, as this piece was my doctoral dissertation in composition at the University of Southern California, the title is a very direct message to my wife, family and professors, all of whom did lots of waiting of their own while I finished this piece.”

Nina C. Young:
Remnants

Nina C. Young (1984) is a New York-based composer who writes instrumental and electronic music incorporating her research of blending amplification and live electronics into instrumental ensembles, always with a view toward creating a natural and cohesive sound world. Nina’s music has been performed by ensembles such as the Orkest de Ereprijs, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, JACK Quartet, Yarn/Wire and Sixtrum. Her music has received honors from BMI, the International Alliance for Women in Music, and the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States. She is currently a doctoral fellow at Columbia University, studying with Fred Lerdahl, Brad Garton, and George Lewis, where she also teaches electroacoustic composition at the Computer Music Center. Nina earned a master’s degree in music composition from McGill University, studying with Sean Ferguson and completed her undergraduate studies at MIT, receiving degrees in ocean engineering and music. This is her first experience working with a professional orchestra.

Nina says of Remants, “When a resonant body is activated, the loudness and spectral content of the resulting sound change over time in complex interactions; this process can be described using the Attack Decay Sustain Release model (ADSR). Remnants explores this interaction of sound over time. The traditional orchestra is treated as a complex but integrated resonant body that can be excited in a variety of ways. This instigating sound then ripples through the ensemble in a causal chain, with each instrument reacting according to its inherent characteristics.”

Tickets & Info
The readings are free and open to the public. No ticket is required but reservations are recommended.

Support for the Underwood New Music Readings comes from Paul Underwood, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Fromm Music Foundation and the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University. The project also receives public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts.