PHILADELPHIA MUSIC PROJECT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM
New Frontiers in Music: Composer Symposium Thursday, April 27, 2006 Settlement Music School Presser Auditorium 416 Queen Street, Philadelphia
To RSVP for this event, please complete the accompanying form and return it by fax to 267 350 4998 or 4997. For more information, please call 267 350 4960.
Featuring Jeffrey Mumford Charles Wuorinen Steven Mackey
PMP convenes a panel of three of America’s most distinctive and prominent composers whose work spans a remarkable spectrum of musical styles. Steven Mackey is noted for his highly individual idiom, a multi-layered play of rhythm and sonority that incorporates and transforms references to classical and popular music in a way that is “lithe, subtle, and more than a little playful” (Tim Page, Newsday). Charles Wuorinen has been described as a “maximalist,” writing music luxuriant with events, lyrical and expressive, and strikingly dramatic. His works are characterized by powerful harmonies and elegant craftsmanship. Jeffrey Mumford’s compositions, though thoroughly modern, are evocative and impressionistic, exploring the sensuous and tactile nature of sound in subtle and sophisticated ways, often involving a high degree of rhythmic complexity.
Moderated by Frank J. Oteri, composer and Editor, NewMusicBox 1:45 pm to 2:00 pm Registration 2:00 pm to 4:30 pm Composer Roundtable 4:30 pm to 5:00 pm Reception This event is produced by the Philadelphia Music Project, an Artistic Initiative funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, administered by The University of the Arts.
Photos (left to right): Al Fuchs photo courtesy of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Nina Roberts, Alice Arnold.
The panel will share audio and video recordings of their work, and discuss their influences and philosophical and theoretical approaches to composition, within both traditional settings and interdisciplinary contexts. They will also explore practical aspects of composition with topics including: commissioning development, traditional versus self-publishing, composer friendly recording labels, and more.
Steven Mackey is Professor of Music at Princeton University, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1985. His first musical passion was playing the electric guitar in rock bands based in northern California. He later discovered concert music and has composed for orchestras, chamber ensembles, dance and opera. He regularly performs his own work, including two electric guitar concertos as well as numerous solo and chamber works, and is also active as an improvising musician. He has been honored by numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, two awards from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Stoeger Prize for Chamber Music by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and in 2000 the Miami Performing Arts Center acknowledged his contributions to orchestral music with a special career achievement award. Mackey has been the composer in residence at numerous music festivals including Tanglewood and Aspen. Among his commissions are works for the Chicago and San Francisco Symphonies, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Kronos Quartet, the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress, the Fromm Foundation, the Brentano String Quartet, the Borromeo String Quartet, Fred Sherry, Dawn Upshaw, and The Dutch Radio Symphony, Prism Saxophone Quartet, the BBC Scottish Chamber Orchestra and many others. His monodrama—Ravenshead—for tenor/actor (Rinde Eckert) and electro-acoustic band/ensemble (The Paul Dresher Ensemble), has been performed nearly one hundred times and is available on a min/max CD. In a year-end wrap up of cultural events, USA Today crowned the work the “Best New Opera of 1998.” His work has been recorded on Bridge, BMG/RCA Red Seal, Albany Records, New World Records, Nonesuch, BMG/Catalyst, CRI, and Newport Classics. Charles Wuorinen’s many honors include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the Pulitzer Prize (the youngest composer to receive the award). His compositions encompass every form and medium, including works for orchestra, chamber ensemble, soloists, ballet, and stage. His newest works include his Fourth Piano Concerto for Peter Serkin and James Levine, commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and Ashberyana, chamber settings of poems by John Ashbery. His opera Haroun And The Sea Of Stories, based on the novel of Salman Rushdie, was premiered by the New York City Opera in Fall 2004. The 2005-2006 season will offer the premiere of Flying To Kahani, a concert piece for piano and orchestra commissioned by Carnegie Hall, and Theologoumenon, a tone poem commissioned for James Levine and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. Wuorinen has been described as a “maximalist,” writing music luxuriant with events, lyrical and expressive, and strikingly dramatic. His works are characterized by powerful harmonies and elegant craftsmanship, offering at once a link to the music of the past and a vision of a rich musical future. The most recent recordings of Wuorinen’s music include Lepton (on John Zorn’s Tzadik label), Fast Fantasy, and The Haroun Songbook. Forthcoming is a disc of piano works performed by Alan Feinberg (Col Legno), a live recording of Cyclops (2000) on the London Sinfonietta’s own label, and two orchestral discs for Albany: Genesis and Five. Wuorinen is Professor of Music at Rutgers University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Jeffrey Mumford is presently Composer In Residence at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. He has been the recipient of the “Academy Award in Music” from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, a Fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and commissioning grants from the American Music Center, the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, Meet the Composer, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music Inc., and the ASCAP Foundation. Mumford’s most recent commissions include those from violinist Ole Bohn, the Haydn Trio Eisenstadt, the Network for New Music, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, a consortium of presenters consisting of the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Chamber Music Columbus (OH) and Omus Hirshbein (New York) (for the Pacifica Quartet and pianist Amy Dissanayake), and the Nancy Ruyle Dodge Charitable Trust (for the Corigliano Quartet). Mumford’s works have been extensively performed both in the United States and abroad, including Miller Theatre and the Bang On A Can Festival (NYC), the Library of Congress (DC), the Aspen Music Festival, the Seattle Chamber Music Festival, San Migel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico, London’s Purcell Room, Finland’s prestigious Helsinki Festival, and the Musica nel Nostro Tempo Festival, in Milan. His works have been performed by such major orchestras as the National Symphony Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the American Composers Orchestra. Albany and Capstone Records have recently released recordings featuring Mumford’s chamber and piano works.