|
Here are a few notes about each of the composers we have commissioned:Julie DolphinJulie Dolphin has been teaching, performing, and composing in various idioms for many years. She holds a degree in Theory and Composition from Hunter College and an advanced degree in musicology from Columbia University. Her unique style makes use of her knowledge of classical Western forms and world musics, as well as the rhythms of both jazz and Bartók. Ms. Dolphin’s choral settings of texts by Federico García Lorca, Teresa de Avila, e.e. cummings, Dorothy Parker, Robert Frost, M.S. Merwin, Walt Whitman, and others have been performed in public venues all around the tri-state area. Her commissioned works have received world premieres at Carnegie Hall and Saint Patrick’s cathedral in New York City and are featured on From Sorrow Free and Hoping it Might Be So, recordings by Charis Chamber Voices, directed by Susanne Peck. Ms. Dolphin has been commissioned by the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus, Angelica Women’s Voices, The Church of Saint Teresa de Avila, and for The South Windsor Chorus, as well as for private wedding ceremonies. Her “Millenium” for piano and clarinet was used by the Westchester County Department of Parks in its Year 2000 celebration. She contributed a commission in 2003 commemorating the events of September 11th and featuring tenor John Humphrey. A recent commission for the Foundation for Universal Sacred Music, featuring chorus, strings, oboe, and vibraphone, was premiered in October of2006 at Merkin Concert Hall. Final Dove, a work for choir, tenor soloist, and chamber orchestra, was a semi-finalist in 2007 in the Sorel Organization’s first annual composition competition. A soprano, Ms. Dolphin has performed with a wide variety of ensembles including the Waverly Consort, Voices of Ascension, Musica Sacra, The New York Virtuoso Singers, Pro Arte Singers, Music in a Sacred Space, Vox Vocal Ensemble, Early Music New York, and the San Francisco Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas. She has performed with the Mark Morris Dance Group at BAM and the New York City Ballet at Lincoln Center. She sang the solo soprano role in Roger Davidson’s Missa Universalis, as well as in the 2004 Merkin Hall premiere of Joshua Penman’s “Becoming.” She has performed at the Verbier Summer Festival in Switzerland under James Levine, at the Bard Summerscape series under Leon Bottstein, and throughout Europe with Musica Viva under Walter Klauss. Robert DennisRobert Dennis's commissions and performances include pieces composed for the Denver Project, the New York City Opera, I Cantori, Cerddorion, the Jubal Trio, the American Brass Quintet, Calliope, the New York Women's Chorus and the Lincoln Center Institute. His music for orchestra has been performed by the Cleveland, Chicago and Louisville Orchestras. Mr. Dennis has also composed extensively for theater and film, including scores for productions at (among others) the Arena Stage, the Guthrie Theater and Circle in the Square. Three of his eight scores composed for Pilobolus were performed on the PBS series "Dance in America." "Man in the Moon," a CD of Mr. Dennis's works composed for the Western Wind Vocal Ensemble has recently been recorded and released by the group. (http://www.westernwind.org/default.asp?pageid=11&recordid=66 ) David NoonDavid Noon was born of Pennsylvania Dutch, Welsh, and American Indian heritage in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on July 23, 1946. As a youth, he studied woodwinds and piano, performing frequently in choirs, bands, orchestras, and chamber groups. His formal com-position studies began at Pomona College and have been guided by Karl Kohn, Darius Milhaud, Charles Jones, Yehudi Wyner, Mario Davidovsky, and Wlodzimierz Kotonski. With a master’s in musicology from New York University, where he studied Medieval music with Gustave Reese, he earned Yale’s M.M.A. and D.M.A. in composition. In 1972–1973, he was a Fulbright Fellow in composition at the Music Conservatory in Warsaw, Poland, subse-quently teaching music theory and composition and supervising the advanced ear-training program at the Northwestern University School of Music. He has held the positions of composer-in-residence at the Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico, and Composer Artist-in-Residence at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine. His 214 chamber, orchestral, and choral works include 10 string quartets, two piano concertos, the opera R.S.V.P., and many works featuring percussion. He has also written two books of poetry—Postcards from Rethymno and Bitter Rain—and three novels—The Tin Box, Googie’s, and My Name Was Saul. Since 1981, he has been on the faculty of Manhattan School of Music, where he was Chair of the Music History Department (1981–2007), Chair of the Composition Department (1989–1998) and Dean of Academics (1998–2006). He has just this season returned from a year’s visiting professorship in musicology and composition at the Central Conservatory in Beijing, China. Eddie RubeizEddie Rubiez grew up in Geneva, Swizerland, where he studied piano and music theory and sang in a series of choirs. Aside from composing and singing in Cerddorion, he is a member of C4, a collective of choral conductors and composers, and has also started a one-person choir, the Set of All Eddies, with the help of his computer. By day, he helps write software at the Center for New Media Teaching and Learning at Columbia University. Yumiko MatsuokaYumiko Matsuoka, originally from Tokyo, Japan, is an associate professor at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she teaches ear training. She is founder of the Boston-based a cappella quintet Vox One, whose albums Vox One (1993), Out There (1995), Chameleon (1997), and Pure Imagination (2005) have won multiple awards from the Contemporary A Cappella Society of America (CASA). Her arrangements and compositions have garnered wide acclaim, and various ensembles have commissioned her, including m-pact, the 20th Century Consort, and Women Singing. In 2002, Yumiko was asked by the city of Matsuyama, Japan, to compose a song to commemorate the centennial of the death of Japan’s premier poet, Masaoka Shiki. She has also composed the alma mater for a junior high school in Takayama, Japan, and her music can be heard in TV commercials in her native country. Yumiko is an active clinician, adjudicator, and choral director, working locally, nationally, and worldwide. The women of the Cerddorion Vocal Ensemble can be heard performing Matsuoka’s arrangement of the Scottish Traditional Skye Boat Song on her 2008 album: To Every Thing There Is A Season. David Lang"There is no name yet for this kind of music," writes music critic Mark Swed, but audiences around the globe are hearing more and more of David Lang’s work in performances by such organizations as the Santa Fe Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, The Cleveland Orchestra and the Kronos Quartet; at Tanglewood, the BBC Proms, the Munich Biennale, and the Sydney 2000 Olympic Arts Festival; as well as in the choreography of Twyla Tharp, La La La Human Steps, The Nederlands Dance Theater, and the Royal Ballet. Recent projects include monumental musical environments such as the amplified orchestra piece The Passing Measures; an opera for the Kronos Quartet, The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, with libretto by Mac Wellman and direction by Carey Perloff; the critically-acclaimed opera Modern Painters, about the curious and tragic life of art critic John Ruskin; the evening-length piano solo Psalms without Words; the bittersweet comic book opera The Carbon Copy Building; and World to Come, a Carnegie Hall commission for cellist Maya Beiser, which Ms. Beiser is performing on an international tour. He is currently working on the opera Anatomy Theater with visual artist Mark Dion. Lang is co-founder and co-artistic director of New York’s legendary music festival, Bang on a Can, and Composer-in-Residence at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. Born in Los Angeles in 1957, Lang holds degrees from Stanford University and the University of Iowa, receiving his doctorate from the Yale School of Music in 1989. He has studied with Jacob Druckman, Hans Werner Henze and Martin Bresnick. His work is recorded on the Sony Classical, BMG, Point, Chandos, Argo/Decca, CRI and Cantaloupe labels. Elliot Z. LevineElliot Z. Levine has been awarded five Meet-the-Composer grants. His most recent large commission from Cerddorion, Un Prodigio Les Canto, has just been performed by the Yale Camerata under the direction of Marguerite Brooks. His Cantata of the Animals, commissioned by The Harmonium Choral Society, has been performed by Westminster Choir College Choir, the Yale Camerata and the Studio Arsis Chorus of Tokyo. He has been composer-in-residence at New York City’s Church of St. Thomas More and for the schools of Delmar, New York. Since its inception in 1969, Mr. Levine has been baritone for the Western Wind Vocal Ensemble. He has appeared as a featured soloist with such groups as Musica Sacra, the Rome Opera, La Fenice, the Mannes Camerata, the Ensemble for Early Music, and the Folger Consort and the Kalamazoo Bach Festival. Mr. Levine is also the cantorial-soloist at Temple Emanuel in Great Neck, N.Y. He received his Master’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music and his B.A. from Queens College, pursuing further studies in music education at the Orff School in Salzburg, in conducting with Robert Hickok, and in composition with Robert Starer at Brooklyn College. For 25 years, he has been a conductor and coach at Western Wind Workshops at such institutions as Dartmouth and Smith Colleges and the University of Massachusetts, as well as at American Choral Directors Association conferences around the country. Lisa BielawaComposer-vocalist Lisa Bielawa often takes inspiration for her work from literary sources and from close artistic collaborations. A 1990 graduate of Yale University with a B.A. summa cum laude in Literature, she explores the ritual and phenomenological nature of music-making and listening, employing instrumental forces in ways that are both dramatic and intimate in their use of time and space. Ms. Bielawa’s Hurry, for soprano and chamber ensemble, was commissioned by Carnegie Hall and premiered in October 2004 as part of Dawn Upshaw’s Perspectives series. The inaugural season of Zankel Hall included the premiere of her work The Right Weather by American Composers Orchestra and Van Cliburn prize-winning pianist Andrew Armstrong. Upcoming projects include a piano quintet for pianist Jon Nakamatsu and the Miami String Quartet. In 2006, Ms. Bielawa will begin a three-year residency with Boston Modern Orchestra Project under the auspices of Music Alive, a national program jointly designed and managed by Meet the Composer and ASOL. A recipient of the 2001 Aaron Copland award for emerging composers, she is one of the founders and co-artistic directors of the MATA Festival in New York, which was named #1 Classical Pick of the Year by Allan Kozinn of The New York Times. Her symphonic work Roam has been performed by the Minnesota Orchestra (2002), ACO (2002), and the New England Conservatory Philharmonia (2003). Ms. Bielawa has appeared as a vocalist of her own work at the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan (2000); at the INFANT Festival in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia (2000); and at the 1999 Bang on A Can Festival, among others. She has received grants, fellowships and awards from groups including the Alpert-Ucross Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, The Fund for U.S. Artists at International Festivals, and The New York State Council for the Arts. An enthusiastic advocate for her field, Ms. Bielawa serves on the board of the American Music Center and teaches composition through the New York Youth Symphony Making Score Program. As a vocalist, she has premiered and recorded countless works by her composer colleagues. |
 |