THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY College of Music presents
Guest Artist Recital of Duo Cortona
Rachel Calloway, Mezzo-soprano
Ari Streisfeld, Violin with Geoffrey Deibel, Saxophone
Tuesday, March 25, 2025
7:30 p.m. | Longmire Recital Hall
Deux Chansons (2012)
PROGRAM
Andrew Waggoner
I. Mi-route (b. 1960)
II. J’ai tant rêvé de too
Seit mich mein Engel nicht mehr bewacht (2025)* Ingrid Laubrock (b. 1970)
Duetti per due Violini (1979-1983)
Luciano Berio
Bruno (Maderna) (1925-2003)
Fiamma (Nicolodi)
Béla (Bartok)
Peppino (Di Giugno)
Tatjana (Globokar)
Leonardo (Pinzauti)
Annie (Neuburger)
It is what it is
Annika Socolofsky Sticks and Stones (b. 1990) Who am I to say?
In Empty (2025)*
Amadeus Julian Regucera (b. 1984)
* World Premiere
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To Ensure An Enjoyable Concert Experience For All…
Please refrain from talking, entering, or exiting during performances. Food and drink are prohibited in all concert halls. Recording or broadcasting of the concert by any means, including the use of digital cameras, cell phones, or other devices is expressly forbidden. Please deactivate all portable electronic devices including watches, cell phones, pagers, hand-held gaming devices or other electronic equipment that may distract the audience or performers.
Recording Notice: This performance may be recorded. Please note that members of the audience may at times be included in this process. By attending this performance you consent to have your image or likeness appear in any live or recorded video or other transmission or reproduction made in conjunction to the performance.
Florida State University provides accommodations for persons with disabilities. Please notify the College of Music at (850) 644-3424 at least five working days prior to a musical event to request accommodation for disability or alternative program format.
Andrew Waggoner was born in 1960 in New Orleans. He grew up there and in Minneapolis and Atlanta, and studied at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, the Eastman School of Music and Cornell University. Called “the gifted practitioner of a complex but dramatic and vividly colored style” by the New Yorker, his music has been commissioned and performed by the the Academy of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields; the Los Angeles Philharmonic; the Saint Louis, Denver, Syracuse, and Winnipeg Symphonies, and the Bohuslav Martinů Philharmonic of Zlin, Czech Republic; the Corigliano, Miro, Villiers, Lark, JACK, Ciompi, and Lydian Quartets; the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble; the California EAR Unit; pianists Gloria Cheng and Molly Morkoski; violist Melia Watras; Sequitur; the Empyrean Ensemble; Dinosaur Annex; Flexible Music; Peggy Pearson and Winsor Music; Duo Cortona; Seattle Modern Orchestra; Tanglewood; Ekmeles; Ensemble Nordlys, and the Rudersdal Kammersolister, of Denmark; and Ensemble Accroche Note, of France.
In 2009 he received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also received grants and prizes from ASCAP, Yaddo, The New York State Council on the Arts, Meet the Composer, and New Music Delaware. Other awards include the Lee Ettelson prize from Composers Inc.; a Guggenheim Fellowship; the Roger Sessions Prize from the Liguria Study Center in Bogliasco, Italy; second-prize in the Lydian String Quartet/Brandeis University Composition Competition; and a Fromm Foundation commission for his 5th Quartet, composed for the Lydian.
His latest solo disc, Quantum Memoir, concertos for guitar, piano, and violin, was released on Bridge Records in August of 2019, about which MusicWeb International wrote “Waggoner is indubitably his own man, and in these compact pieces conjures music of astonishing and unexpected depth, precision and sophistication”. His CD of chamber music and improvisations from Albany Records, Terror and Memory, was released in 2011 to broad critical acclaim. His work is also available on CRI/New World; Vienna Modern Masters; Centaur; and Fleur de Son. In addition to his concert works, Waggoner has also composed extensively for theatre and for film, and is an active violinist. He was a founding Director of the Seal Bay Festival of American Music in Vinalhaven, Maine, and is currently Co-Artistic Director, with his wife, cellist Caroline Stinson, of the Catskills-based Weekend of Chamber Music. He currently teaches composition and improvisation at Duke University. His music is available through Subito Music.
Ingrid Laubrock is an experimental saxophonist and composer, interested in exploring the borders between musical realms and creating multi-layered, dense and often evocative sound worlds. A prolific composer, Laubrock was named a “true visionary” by pianist and The Kennedy Center’s artistic director Jason Moran, and a “fully committed saxophonist and visionary” by the New Yorker. Her composition Vogelfrei was nominated ‘one of the best 25 Classical tracks of 2018’ by The New York Times. She worked with: Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richards Abrams, Dave Douglas, Kenny Wheeler, Jason Moran, Tim Berne, William Parker, Tom Rainey, Mary Halvorson, Kris Davis, Tyshawn Sorey, Craig Taborn, Andy Milne, Luc Ex, Django Bates’ Human Chain, The Continuum Ensemble, Wet Ink and many others.
Awards include the BBC Jazz Award for Innovation in 2004, a Fellowship in Jazz Composition by the Arts Foundation in 2006, the 2009 SWR German Radio Jazz Prize, the 2014 German Record Critics Quarterly Award, Downbeat Annual Critics Poll Rising Star Soprano Saxophone (2015), Rising Star Tenor Saxophone (2018) and Herb Alpert/Ragdale Prize in Composition 2019. Ingrid Laubrock has received composing commissions by The Fromm Music Foundation, BBC Glasgow Symphony orchestra, Bang on The Can, Grossman Ensemble, The Shifting
Foundation, The Robert D. Bielecki Foundation, The Jerwood Foundation, American Composers Orchestra, Tricentric Foundation, SWR New Jazz Meeting, The Jazz Gallery Commissioning Series, NYSCA, Wet Ink, John Zorn’s Stone Commissioning Series and the EOS Orchestra. She is a recipient of the 2019 Herb Alpert Ragdale Prize in Music Composition and the 2021 Berklee Institute of Gender Justice Women Composers Collection Grant.
Ingrid Laubrock is part time faculty at The New School and Columbia University. Other teaching experiences include improvisation workshops at Towson University, CalArts, UC San Diego, UC Irvine, Baruch College, University of Michigan, University of Newcastle and many others. Laubrock was Improviser in Residence 2012 in the German city Moers. The post is created to introduce creative music into the city throughout the year. As part of this she led a regular improvisation ensemble and taught sound workshops in elementary schools.
Luciano Berio was born in Oneglia, in Northwest Italy, on 24 October 1925. His family, with whom he lived until the age of 18, was the first source of his musical education, particularly his grandfather Adolfo and his father Ernesto, who were both organists and composers. With them, he learned the piano and played chamber music extensively. An injury to his right hand forced him to give up on a career as a pianist, and he turned to composition. At the end of the Second World War, he entered the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi in Milan, where he studied first with Paribeni (counterpoint and fugue), then with Ghedini (composition) and with Votto and Giulini (conducting). In 1952, Berio traveled to Tanglewood to study with Luigi Dallapiccola, a composer whose work he admired greatly. Chamber Music (1953) was composed as a tribute to his teacher. During his stay, he attended the first concert in America to include live electronics, in New York. In 1953, he began writing soundtracks and scores for television. In Basel, he attended a lecture on electroacoustics where he met Stockhausen for the first time. He began experimenting with magnetic tape at that time, with (Mimusique n°1), and traveled to Darmstadt, where he met Boulez, Pousseur, and Kagel, immersing himself in serial music, of which Nones (1954) was his personal reflection. He returned to Darmstadt between 1956 and 1959, and taught there in 1960, but kept his distance from the sometimes dogmatic atmosphere there.
Berio’s love for literature (Joyce, Cummings, Calvino, Levi-Strauss) and linguistics nourished his musical reflections. In 1955, with his friend Bruno Maderna, he founded the Studio di fonologia musicale di Radio Milano, Italy’s first studio for electro-acoustics research. Products of his research there include Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) (1958). In 1956, he and Maderna launched the Incontri musicali, a concert series dedicated to the performance of contemporary music, and an experimental music journal of the same name, published between 1956 and 1960. He returned to the United States in 1960, teaching music composition at Dartington Summer School, Mill’s College in Oakland, and at Harvard and Columbia Universities. He also taught music at the Juilliard School in New York between 1965 and 1971, where he founded the Juilliard Ensemble (1967), specialized in contemporary music. Berio returned to Europe to live in 1972. At the invitation of Pierre Boulez, he took over as director of the IRCAM’s electroacoustics department from 1974-1980, where he supervised the installation of the 4X system, a real-time digital sound processing system designed by Giuseppe di Giugno. In 1987, building on his experience at the IRCAM, he founded Tempo Reale, an institute for electronic and experimental musical research in Florence. His interest in folklore and folk music inspired Coro (1975), one of his major works. In the 1980s, Berio created two major lyric works, La Vera Storia (1982) and Un re in ascolto (1984), both with libretti by Italo Calvino. While continuing to write his own compositions, Berio also revisited the past with transcriptions and arrangements, as well as a reconstruction of Schubert’s Tenth Symphony in (Rendering, 1989).
Annika Socolofsky is a composer and avant folk vocalist who explores corners and colors of the voice frequently deemed to be “untrained” and not “classical.” Described as “unbearably moving” (Gramophone) and “just the right balance between edgy precision and freewheeling exuberance” (The Guardian), her music erupts from the embodied power of the human voice and is communicated through mediums ranging from orchestral and operatic works to unaccompanied folk ballads and unapologetically joyous Dolly Parton covers. Annika writes extensively for her own voice, including composing a growing repertoire of “feminist rager-lullabies” titled Don’t say a word, which serves to confront centuries of damaging lessons taught to young children by retelling old lullaby texts for a new, queer era. Annika has taken Don’t say a word on the road, performing with ensembles including Eighth Blackbird, New European Ensemble, Albany Symphony, Knoxville Symphony, Latitude 49, and Contemporaneous. Her follow-up feminist rager-lullaby song cycle in collaboration with ~Nois, titled I Tell You Me, was recognized by the Chicago Tribune as “grotesquely gorgeous… among the most captivating compositions heard the whole festival [Ear Taxi 2021]” and was included in their “Chicago’s Top 10 for classical music, opera and jazz that defined 2021.”
As a composer, Annika has collaborated with artists such as the Rochester Philharmonic, Albany Symphony, Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, Eighth Blackbird, Third Coast Percussion, So Percussion, HIIIT (Slagwerk Den Haag), Asko|Schönberg, Möbius Percussion, Contemporaneous, Latitude 49, Music from Copland House, Akropolis Reed Quintet, marimbist Ji Hye Jung, Bang on a Can All-Stars cellist Arlen Hlusko, and sean-nós singer Iarla Ó Lionáird, among others. Recent and upcoming projects include a climate activist work for TorQ Percussion and the Elora Singers, an EP for her own voice and Friction Quartet, a Dolly Parton-meets-queer Love Actually subversive Country mini-opera for Quince, and a micro-documentary on small business owners with XUAN and Akropolis Reed Quintet. Annika is a recipient of the 2021 Gaudeamus Award, the 2019 Cortona Prize, an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Award, a BMI Student Composer award, and grants from Harvard University’s Fromm Foundation and the Barlow Endowment.
Recordings of her music are available on New Amsterdam, Bright Shiny Things, Naxos, and Innova record labels. Her research focuses on contemporary vocal music, using the music of Dolly Parton to create a pedagogical approach to composition that is inclusive of a wide range of vocal qualities, genres, and colors. She is Associate Professor of Composition at the University of Colorado Boulder. She holds her PhD in Composition from Princeton University. Her primary musical mentors have been Reza Vali, Kristin Kuster, Dan Trueman, Juri Seo, and Evan Chambers. She plays a hardanger d’amore 5x5 fiddle made by Salve Håkedal. www.aksocolofsky.com
The work of Amadeus Julian Regucera (b. 1984, He/They) engages with the embodied and acoustical energy of sound and the erotics of its production through concert music, installation, performance art, and video. He has had the opportunity to present works around the world: notably, at ManiFeste (Paris, FR), the Festival Musica (Strasbourg, FR), Voix Nouvelles (Asnières-sur-Oise, FR), the Resonant Bodies Festival and the SONiC Festival (New York City), the Havana Festival of Contemporary Music as part of the American Composers Forum artist delegation to Cuba, the Mizzou International Composers Festival, and the Hong Kong Modern Academy, among others. His music has been performed by musicians and ensembles such as Ensemble Linea, Alarm Will Sound, Ensemble Intercontemporain, EXAUDI vocal ensemble, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, violinist Jennifer Koh, Splinter Reeds, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Duo Cortona, Third Sound, and the University of California, Berkeley Symphony Orchestra. In addition to concert music, his practice intersects with visual and performance art, most notably in RIGOR, a collaboration with visual artist Nicolás Rupcich and commissioned by violinist Jessica Ling (2021); Absence in relief (April 2021) an audio-visual installation commissioned by InterMusicSF and Indexical for the Radius Art Gallery, Santa Cruz, California; IMY/ILY – a monodrama for
solo percussionist, commissioned by Andy Meyerson (The Living Earth Show); The trauma you keep safe is the pain your pass along (2018) for flutist, performer, and video; and the installation Communication (2013), for the Kulturzentrum bei den Minoriten in Graz, Austria. Upcoming projects include UNFEELING (She sketches out her dreams on his skin.) for the Wavefield Ensemble (NYC) commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation (spring 2024). Amadeus holds degrees in Music from the University of California, San Diego (B.A. 2006) and the University of California, Berkeley (PhD, 2016). Beginning in September 2022, Amadeus is Curator of Music at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
In recent work, Amadeus explores what he calls the “erotics” of sound production, or how a body, as a physical form and as a container for personal experience, is a nexus for a multiplicity of possible meanings. His current practice stems from the belief that each body is physically unique and comes with its own manifold history which can and should be expressed in the music. Amadeus sees the work of music as finding and cultivating lyricism while foregrounding the [physical] struggle that creates it. Inspired and educated by the musical modernism of the 20th century, Amadeus wishes to expand the genre’s potential as an expressive tool for composers beyond its origins. His work is often developed in close collaborations with performers which provoke conversations about consent and trust, complicity and gaze, and power dynamics in performance.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Duo Cortona is a contemporary music ensemble dedicated to the creation of works for its unique instrumentation: mezzo-soprano and violin. This ensemble explores new sounds and possibilities for its intimate, expressive, and vital combination. Duo Cortona works to establish a new and thus far unexplored repertoire, pursuing the endless possibilities of this union. We create opportunities for both established and emerging composers through commissions, competitions, educational workshops, university residencies, and major concert performances. Duo Cortona was founded at the Cortona Sessions for New Music by husband and wife team Ari Streisfeld and Rachel Calloway. Recent and upcoming performances include the Southern Exposure Series for New Music, East Carolina New Music Initiative, University of Wisconsin, College of Charleston, New Music New College, the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, Resonant Bodies Festival, The Stone, the SONiC Festival, New Music on the Point, and Contemporary Undercurrent of Song Project (Princeton).
Rachel Calloway brings versatility and compelling insight to stages worldwide. Her work has been praised by The New York Times for “penetrating clarity” and “considerable depth of expression” and by Opera News for her “adept musicianship and dramatic flair.” A dedicated interpreter of new music, Ms. Calloway has premiered hundreds of solo and chamber music works. Recent and upcoming premieres include music by Augusta Read Thomas, John Zorn, Robert Xavier Rodriguez, David Garner, Gabriela Lena Frank, Christopher Cerrone, and Annika Socolofsky. She collaborates with premiere ensembles including Third Coast Percussion, JACK Quartet, the Amernet Quartet, and Ensemble Signal. Ms. Calloway and her husband, violinist Ari Streisfeld, founded Duo Cortona, an ensemble dedicated to the creation and performance of new works for violin and voice.
She has appeared in concert with the Orlando Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Series, Charleston Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, Berkeley Symphony, Omaha Symphony, Ojai Festival, San Francisco Girls’ Chorus, BAM Next Wave Festival, Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival, Cal Performances, and Lincoln Center Festival. Ms. Calloway made her European operatic debut as Mrs. Grose in The Turn of the Screw at Opéra de Reims, Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jovet (Paris), and Opéra de Lille. She has performed with the late Lorin
Maazel at the Castleton Festival in Virginia, and at Opera Philadelphia, Tulsa Opera, Central City Opera, Gotham Chamber Opera, The PROTOTYPE Festival, and the Glimmerglass Festival. She is also a founding member of Shir Ami, an ensemble dedicated to the performance, discovery and preservation of Jewish music.
Ms. Calloway serves on the faculty of the University of South Carolina as Assistant Professor of Voice and Director of Spark: Music Leadership at Carolina. She joined the faculty of the Cortona Sessions for New Music (Italy) in 2014 and Summer Performing Arts with Juilliard in 2016. Ms. Calloway holds degrees from The Juilliard School (BM) and Manhattan School of Music (MM) and can be heard on Albany Records, Tzadik Records, BCMF Records, and Toccata Classics. www.rachelcalloway.com
Violinist Ari Streisfeld has garnered critical acclaim worldwide for his performances of diverse repertoire and has established himself as one of the foremost interpreters of contemporary classical music. Praised for his “dazzling performance” by The New York Times and “scintillating playing” by New York Classical Review, Dr. Streisfeld is a founding member of the world renowned JACK Quartet. Recent season highlights include performances at Wigmore Hall (London), La Salle Pleyel (Paris), Teatro Colon (Argentina), Suntory Hall (Tokyo), Bali Arts Festival (Indonesia), Carriage Works (Sydney, Australia), Venice Biennale (Italy), Carnegie Hall, The Library of Congress, The Morgan Library (New York), the Lucerne Festival (Switzerland), and the Salzburg Festival (Austria). He has collaborated with many of today’s most prominent composers including John Luther Adams, Caroline Shaw, Julia Wolfe, Helmut Lachenmann, Matthias Pintscher, Georg Friedrich Haas, Steve Reich, and Salvatore Sciarrino. He has recorded for Mode, Albany, Carrier, Innova, Canteloupe, New Focus, and New World Records.
Together with his wife, mezzo-soprano Rachel Calloway, Dr. Streisfeld formed Duo Cortona, a contemporary music ensemble dedicated to the creation of new works for the unique instrumentation of mezzo-soprano and violin. Recent and upcoming performances include the Resonant Bodies Festival, SONiC Festival, The Stone (NY), Contemporary Undercurrents of Song Project (Princeton, NJ), New Music on the Point (VT), and The Cortona Sessions for New Music (Italy). He is also a member of Shir Ami, an ensemble dedicated to the performance and preservation of Jewish art music. Dr. Streisfeld frequently collaborates with some of today’s leading ensembles, including Ensemble Signal, Worldless Music Orchestra, and Weekend of Chamber Music.
Hailed as “imaginative” by the Los Angeles Times, Dr. Streisfeld’s arrangements of madrigals and motets for string quartet by Machaut and Gesualdo have been performed to acclaim both at home and abroad. A recipient of the Morton Gould Young Composer Award, Dr. Streisfeld most recently premiered his Machaut arrangements for voice and violin at The Stone (New York).
A passionate and committed music educator, Dr. Streisfeld is currently Assistant Professor of Violin and Violin Pedagogy at the University of South Carolina School of Music and serves on the faculty of the Cortona Sessions for New Music (Italy). He previously taught violin and chamber music at New York’s Special Music School, Face the Music, and New Music on the Point. Dr. Streisfeld holds degrees from the Eastman School of Music (Bachelor of Music), Northwestern University (Master of Music), and Boston University (Doctor of Musical Arts). His teachers include Zvi Zeitlin, Almita Vamos, and Peter Zazofsky.
A Washington, D.C. native, Geoffrey Deibel is a leading and innovative voice for the teaching and performance of the saxophone and contemporary music. He maintains a multi-faceted career as performer, teacher, and researcher. New projects for 2024-2025 include commissions from Tyshawn Sorey, Amadeus Regucera, and Ingrid Laubrock, performed by Trio Nebbia and a new ensemble with Duo Cortona. His most recent recordings include Iannis Xenakis’ Dmaathen with percussionist Ji Hye Jung, and his debut solo recording, Ex Uno Plures. He has performed with contemporary music ensembles such as the Wet Ink Ensemble (“Missing Scenes” recording now available) and the International Contemporary Ensemble at the Park Avenue Armory (NYC) in the full North American Premiere of Louis Andriessen’s De Materie. He has also given recitals throughout the U.S. and in Europe, and been an invited guest lecturer at several conservatories in Europe and many Universities in the US. He has appeared at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Darmstadt, the International Iannis Xenakis Festival in Athens, Greece, and World Saxophone Congresses in the UK, Europe, and Thailand.
Geoff has commissioned new works by a wide range of composers, including Drew Baker, Caleb Burhans, Viet Cuong, Nathan Davis, Claudio Gabriele, Martin Iddon, Ingrid Laubrock, Robert Lemay, Marc Mellits, Joseph Michaels, Forrest Pierce, David Rakowski, Amadeus Regucera, David Reminick, Jesse Ronneau, Tyshawn Sorey, and Eric Wubbels. He has also premiered the music of Louis Andriessen, Georges Aperghis, Jason Eckardt, Hiroyki Itoh, Pierre Jodlowski, Marc Mellits, Elliott Sharp, Jagoda Szmytka, Mari Takano, Hans Thomalla, and Amy Williams.
Geoff is a member of the critically acclaimed h2 quartet, first prize winners at the Fischoff Competition and NASA Quartet Competitions, finalists at the Concert Artists Guild Competition, and recipients of multiple Aaron Copland Fund Grants. The American Record Guide has hailed h2 as a group of “artistic commitment...boasting superb blend, solid technique, [and] tight rhythm.” h2 has seven recordings available, and maintains a non-profit organization to promote the creation of new works for the saxophone quartet. Geoff is also a seasoned orchestral performer, and serves as principal saxophonist with the Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra. He previously served in the same capacity with the Wichita Symphony, and has also performed with the New World Symphony and Grant Park Symphony.
Geoff holds degrees in history and music from Northwestern University, and a doctoral degree from Michigan State University. His principal teachers have included Joseph Lulloff, Frederick Hemke, Leo Saguiguit, and Reginald Jackson. Geoff has held teaching positions at the University of Florida and Wichita State University, where he was the recipient of the 2015 College of Fine Arts Award for Scholarly and Creative Activity, and the 2016 WSU Faculty Award for Excellence in Creative Activity. He currently serves as Associate Professor of Saxophone at Florida State University, where he was awarded a SEED Grant to fund projects from 2024-2027. He also serves on the faculty of the Cortona Sessions for New Music, and the Great Plains Saxophone Workshop. Geoff is a Yamaha, Vandoren, and LefreQue performing artist, and performs on Yamaha Saxophones, and Vandoren reeds, ligatures, and mouthpieces exclusively.