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Seventh Annual UNCG New Music Festival September 21-23, 2010 Greensboro, NC Schedule at a Glance Tuesday, September 21, 2010—Greensboro, NC Lecture I Bruce Mahin, Radford University Developing iPhone applications to promote your music UNCG Music Building Room 223 11:00-11:50 a.m. Free Walking Music Performances by Virginia Tech University L2Ork laptop orchestra, UNCG Percussion Ensemble, assorted performing groups UNCG Campus, various locations, outdoors 12:00 p.m. Free Lecture II Ico Bukvic, Virginia Tech University Putting Together a Laptop Orchestra UNCG Music Building, Room 129/131 (Electronic Music Studios) 3:30-4:45 p.m. Free Concert I Works and Performances by L2Ork laptop orchestra, Bruce Mahin, Anthony Taylor, Ron Coulter, Belinda Haikes and the Robert Rauschenberg Pilottone Experience Weatherspoon Art Museum, Atrium 7:30 p.m. Free Wednesday, September 22, 2010 —Greensboro Lecture III Masterclass with the NOW Ensemble UNCG Music Building, Room 233 10:00-10:50 a.m. Free Lecture IV CEMT Concert and Lecture Series Janice Misurell-Mitchell, Art Institute of Chicago Ellipse: Saxing Up the String Quartet (bring your lunch for this Brown Bag Lunch event) UNCG Music Building, Room 217 12:00-12:50 p.m. Free Lecture V Missy Mazzoli, MATA Festival of New Music Cathedral City: The Music of Missy Mazzoli (coffee will be provided for this after lunch event) UNCG Music Building, Room 217 1:00-1:50 p.m. Free Concert II UNCG Music Convocation Performances by the SKIN Ensemble, Marjorie Bagley, Kelly Burke, Carla Copeland-Burns, Mark Engebretson, Alex Ezerman, Kris Keeton, Scott Rawls Works by Janice Misurell-Mitchell, Alejandro Rutty, Kostas Karathanasis UNCG Music Building Recital Hall 4:00-4:50 p.m. Free Lecture VI NOW Ensemble discusses Music Business UNCG Music Building Computer Lab (Room 116) 5:00-5:50 p.m. Free Concert III Performances by the NOW Ensemble Works by Patrick Burke, Mark Dancigers, Judd Greenstein, Missy Mazzoli UNCG Music Building Recital Hall 7:30 p.m. $10 general / $6 seniors / $4 students / $3 UNCG students For tickets, contact the UNCG Box Office at 334.4849 Thursday, September 23, 2010—Greensboro Reading Session David Felberg, violin Presenting readings of new works by students Cody Curtis and Nicholas Rich UNCG Music Building, Room 223 11:00-11:50 a.m. Free Roundtable Discussion (bring your lunch for this Brown Bag Round Table Discussion) Discussion with Linda Dusman, Bernd Gottinger, Kostas Karathanasis, Alex Kotch, John Supko UNCG Music Building, Room 223 12:00-12:50 p.m. Free Lecture VII Bernd Gottinger, SUNY Fredonia Composing Production/Library Music UNCG Music Building, Room 129/131 (Electronic Music Studios) 3:30-4:45 p.m. Free CONCERT IV Performances by Marjorie Bagley, Susan Fancher, David Felberg, Kris Keeton, Janice Misurell- Mitchell, Clara OʼBrien Works by Pierre Boulez, Linda Dusman, Mark Engebretson, Alex Kotch, John Supko UNCG Music Building Recital Hall 7:30 p.m. $10 general / $6 seniors / $4 students / $3 UNCG students For tickets, contact the UNCG Box Office at 334.4849 Concert Programs Tuesday, September 21, 2010 Concert I – Weatherspoon Art Museum 7:30 pm, Free Future Past (10:00) Pilottone The Robert Rauschenberg Pilottone Experience Hassan Pitts, Belinda Haikes, Jennida Chase, laptop, sounds and images For Every Season… (8:30) Bruce Mahin Anthony Taylor, clarinet Half-Life (8:30) Ivica Ico Bukvic L2Ork Ivica Ico Bukvic, director Jared Denniston, Philip Dimotsis, Kyle Ellis, Hillary Guilliams, Zachary Gulsby, Michael Lipnick, Miles Mabry, Michael Matthews, Tyler McDonald, David Mudre, Steven Querry, Maya Renfro, Kaj Verschra, Andrew Street, Elizabeth Ullrich, Christopher Usher, Adam Wirdzek Citadel (5:00) Ivica Ico Bukvic Nicole Bonfiglio, soprano L2Ork 13 (8:30) Ivica Ico Bukvic Ron Coulter, percussion L2Ork Whatʼs He Building? (7:00) Tom Waits arr. Ivica Ico Bukvic Ron Coulter, narrator L2Ork Wednesday, September 22, 2010 Concert II – UNCG Convocation UNCG Music Building Recital Hall 4:00 pm, Free Dionysus (2009) Kostas Karathanasis 11:30 Kristopher Keeton, percussion Ellipse (2009) Janice Misurell-Mitchell 13:00 Kevin Geraldi, conductor Marjorie Bagley, violin Scott Rawls, viola Mark Engebretson, baritone saxophone Alexander Ezerman, cello Black Box Bossa (2010) Alejandro Rutty (world premiere) SKIN Ensemble Carla Copeland-Burns, flute Kelly Burke, clarinet Marjorie Bagley, violin Alexander Ezerman, cello James Douglass, piano Wednesday, September 22, 2010 Concert III – Music Building, UNCG Performances by NOW Ensemble Recital Hall, 7:30 pm $10 general / $6 seniors / $4 students / $3 UNCG students NOW Ensemble Abigail Fischer, mezzo-soprano Andrew Rehrig, flute Sara Budde, clarinet and bass clarinet Michael Mizrahi, electric guitar Logan Coale, double bass Change (2009) Judd Greenstein 13:00 Awake (2008) Patrick Burke 10:00 Burst (2008) Mark Dancigers 6:00 Intermission The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt music by Missy Mazzoli (excerpts) (2009) films by Stephen Taylor 40:00 Thursday, September 23, 2010 Concert IV – Music Building, UNCG Recital Hall, 7:30 pm $10 general / $6 seniors / $4 students / $3 UNCG students Anthèmes 2 (1998) Pierre Boulez 17:00 David Felberg, violin Strange Things Begin to Happen When a Meteor Mark Engebretson Crashes in the Arizona Desert (2010) text by Michael Basinski (world premiere) images by Wendy Collin Sorin 14:00 Janice Misurell-Mitchell, flute/voice Magnificat3: lament (2005) Linda Dusman 11:00 Marjorie Bagley, violin Intermission this window makes me feel (2005) John Supko 15:00 Clara OʼBrien, mezzo-soprano James Douglass, piano Kristopher Keeton, percussion Polyptoton (2009) Alex Kotch 8:00 Susan Fancher, tenor saxophone 2010 UNCG New Music Festival Bios and Program Notes Table of Contents I. People II. Ensembles III. Program Notes IV. Lecture Abstracts Entries are in alphabetical order: I. People Violinist Marjorie Bagley made her Lincoln Center concerto debut in 1997 with the Little Orchestra Society after beginning her performing career at the age of nine in her home state of North Carolina with the Asheville, Winston-Salem, and North Carolina Symphonies. Having graduated from the Manhattan School of Music in the first class of Pinchas Zukerman, she is active as a recitalist, chamber musician, and teacher. Marjorie has also performed as soloist with the Utah Symphony, Idaho Falls Symphony, Ann Arbor Symphony, the University of Michigan Symphony, and the Washington Square Music Series. As first violinist and founding member of the Arcata String Quartet, Marjorie performed in the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie, Londonʼs Wigmore Hall, and across Western Europe and the United States. She is also an active proponent for new music and has premiered works by Paul Chihara, David Noon, Nils Vigeland, and Judith Shatin. Through her travels to music festivals, Marjorie has had the opportunity to play with some of the great artists of our time including Pinchas Zukerman, Itzhak Perlman, Joseph Kalichstein, members of the Guarneri, Emerson, American, Tokyo, and Borromeo String Quartets. Ms. Bagley can be heard on recordings for the VOX, New World and Summit labels, and a recording of music for violin and percussion on the Equilibrium label featuring a concerto by Lou Harrison. Marjorie is the Co-Director of the Juniper Chamber Music Festival in Logan, Utah, which is becoming one of the most elite chamber music festivals in the nation. Ms. Bagley has been on the faculty of Ohio University, Utah State University, and the International Music Academy in Pilsen, Ms. Bagley has also taught at the Brevard Music Center, the Perlman Music Program, the Kinhaven Music School, and the Manhattan School of Music Preparatory Program. Michael Basinski is the Assistant Curator of the Poetry/Rare Books Collection of the University Libraries, SUNY at Buffalo.His poems, articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications including: Proliferation, Terrible Work, Deluxe Rubber Chicken, Boxkite, The Mill Hunk Herald, Yellow Silk, The Village Voice, Object, Oblek, Score, Generator, Juxta, Poetic Briefs, Another Chicago Magazine, Sure: A Charles Bukowski Newsletter, Moody Street Irregulars: A Jack Kerouac Newsletter, Kiosk, Earth's Daughters, Atticus Review, Mallife, Taproot, Transmog, B-City, House Organ, First Intensity, Mirage No.4/Period(ical), Lower Limit Speech, Texture, R/IFT, Chain, Antenym, Bullhead, Poetry New York, First Offence, and many others. For more than twenty years he has performed his choral voice collages and sound texts with his intermedia performance ensemble: The Ebma, which has released two Lps: SEA and Enjambment. Basinksiʼs books include: Idyll (Juxta Press, 1996), Heebee-jeebies (Meow Press, 1996), SleVep (Tailspin Press, 1995), Vessels (Texture Press, 1993), Cnyttan (Meow Press, 1993), Mooon Bok (Leave Books, 1992) and Red Rain Too (1992) and Flight to the Moon (1993) from Run Away Spoon Press. Pierre Boulez (born 1925) is a French composer of contemporary classical music and a conductor. One of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, Boulez continues today to be one of the foremost proponents of musical modernism. Sara Budde (clarinet/bass clarinet) performs frequently as a recitalist and chamber musician. Studying with David Shifrin, she recently received her Master of Music degree in clarinet performance from Yale University. Having premiered many works, including Kyle Gann's Last Chance Sonata and Judd Greenstein's The Sirens, for bass clarinet, Budde focuses primarily on recent and contemporary music, emphasizing newly-emerging composers. Sara has appeared with such dynamic groups as Bang on a Can, The American Composers Orchestra, Tactus, Arête Ensemble, The Woodstock Chamber Orchestra and The American Symphony Orchestra. The art of composer and multimedia sculptor Ivica Ico Bukvic (b.1976) is driven by the notion of ubiquitous interactivity. Bukvicʼs passion for computer music, multimedia art, and technology in conjunction with his traditional music composition background has resulted in a growing portfolio of aural and visual, acoustic and electronic, performances and installations, creative technologies, as well as research publications, grants and awards. Dr. Bukvic is currently working at Virginia Tech as an assistant professor in music composition & technology, the founder and director of the Digital Interactive Sound and Intermedia Studio (DISIS) and Worldʼs first Linux Laptop Orchestra (L2Ork), assistant co-director of the Collaborative for Creative Technologies in the Arts and Design initiative, a member of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction, and as a faculty (by courtesy) in departments of Computer Science and Art & Art History. Kelly Burke joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1989. She is currently the principal clarinetist of the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra and bass clarinetist of the Eastern Music Festival Orchestra. Equally at home playing Baroque to Bebop, she has appeared in recitals and as a soloist with symphony orchestras throughout the United States, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, and Russia. An avid chamber musician, Burke is frequently heard in concert with the Mallarmé Chamber Players, for whom she plays both clarinet and bass clarinet, the East Wind Trio d'Anches, Middle Voices (clarinet, viola and piano), and the Cascade Wind Quintet. Burke's discography includes several recent releases with Centaur Records: The Russian Clarinet, with works by Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Glinka, Melkikh, and Goedicke; Middle Voices: Chamber Music for Clarinet and Viola, featuring works by several American composers; and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: Chamber Music featuring the quintet and nonet. She has also recorded for Telarc, Albany and Arabesque labels. Burke has received several teaching awards, including UNCG's Alumni Teaching Excellence Award, the School of Music Outstanding Teacher Award, has been named several times to Who's Who Among America's Teachers, and was recently honored with the 2004 UNC Board of Governor's Teaching Excellence Award. She is the author of numerous pedagogical articles and the critically acclaimed book Clarinet Warm-Ups: Materials for the Contemporary Clarinetist. She holds the BM and MM degrees from the Eastman School of Music and the DMA. from the University of Michigan. Burke is an artist/clinician for Rico International and Buffet Clarinet. Patrick Burke composes visceral, emotionally charged music for chamber ensemble, orchestra, vocals, and electronic media. Formally tight, narrative structures are balanced with lyricism and a dream-like logic that is often inspired by film. He is a co-founder and core member of NOW Ensemble, a young group on the forefront of the indie classical scene “suggesting the shape of the sounds that will define art music in the early part of this new century" (Ed Montgomery, Context Studios). Patrickʼs works have been performed by the Minnesota Orchestra, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, eighth blackbird, the Yale Philharmonic, the Eugene Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, IonSound Project and Alia Musica. In 2007, Patrick composed the score for Behind Forgotten Eyes, an award-winning WWII documentary featured on History Channel Asia. His music appears on NPRʼs All Things Considered, and on NOW Ensembleʼs debut album, named one of the top classical recordings of 2008 by The New Yorker critic, Alex Ross. Jennida Chase is an electronic artist who currently explores and combines several aspects of media-based art, ranging from film, video, animation, sound and photography. Her BFA was completed at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998 with a concentration in film, video and sound. In 2009 she completed her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth Universityʼs department of Photography and Film. Themes within her work deal with relational interaction played out in society at large. Her work has been extensively shown in galleries and film/video festivals. She currently collaborates in and performs with experimental sound and multi-media ensemble Pilottone, and is a member of the HzCollective based in the mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. NOW Ensemble double bassist Logan Coale is a native of Portland, Oregon. Mr. Coale is the Assistant Principal Bass of the Sarasota Opera Orchestra and is on faculty at the Kinhaven Music School in Weston, Vermont. In New York, Mr. Coale is a member of NOW Ensemble, The Knights Chamber Orchestra, and William Brittelle's Television Landscape. He also performs with Alarm Will Sound, the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, the Wordless Music Orchestra, and The Long Count with members of The National. Mr. Coale is a graduate of the Tanglewood Music Center where he was a fellow in 2004 and 2006, and has participated in the Aspen, Schlesswig- Holstein, Domaine-Forget, National Repertory Orchestra, and Moritzburg Festival Academy summer music programs. He holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees in double bass performance from Boston University. His teachers include Edwin Barker, Principal Bass of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, BSO member Todd Seeber and Tim Pitts, Principal Bass of the Houston Symphony. Mr. Coale can be heard on Sony Classical with The Knights, XL Recordings and Parlophone Records with Jonsi Birgisson of Sigur Ros, and on New Amsterdam Records with NOW Ensemble and Television Landscape. Carla Copeland-Burns, flute, enjoys an active freelancing career with several ensembles including the North Carolina Symphony, the Opera Company of North Carolina, and the Carolina Ballet among others. She has performed over 300 concerts with the North Carolina Symphony, including numerous appearances as Principal flute. Since 1995 Burns has served as Piccoloist for the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra, Principal Flute in the Salisbury Symphony, and in the ongoing chamber groups Blue Mountain Ensemble (flute/bassoon/piano) and the Cascade Wind Quintet, a North Carolina Arts Council Touring Roster Ensemble. Chamber Music activity includes recital appearances across the United States, as well as in Canada and New Zealand, and at international conferences. Burns has recorded with ensembles on the Albany, Centaur, and Klavier labels and has been heard on several editions of NPRʼs Performance Today. Burns holds a Bachelor of Music with Honors degree from the Florida State University, the Master of Music in Flute Performance from the New England Conservatory, and is a Doctoral Candidate in Flute Performance from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (CCM). Ron Coulter is Senior Lecturer of Percussion Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and an Educational Endorser with the ProMark Corporation. He has toured internationally appearing in 43 U.S. states, Europe, Canada, and Japan. He has performed with the Glenn Miller Orchestra, Four Aces, Sean Jones, L2Ork, Al Martino, Tatsuya Nakatani, Sandy Duncan, Bolokada Condé, and Rapture7, among others. Ron has presented at numerous conferences including: ISIM, PASIC, MENC, IMEA, JEN, Futurisms, Sound Lines, RadiaLx, Athena Festival VI. He is co-founder of the Percussion Art Ensemble, RED VIXA, duende entendre, and artistic director of the Perkusiv Arts Elektronik and Southern Illinois Improvisation Series. Other performance credits include the Youngstown Symphony, Paducah Symphony, Chicago Chamber Orchestra, and Music from China. Additional interests include noise, acoustic ecology, interdisciplinary collaboration, and organizing Fluxusconcerts. As a composer, Ron has created more than 100 compositions and is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies. www.roncoulter.org Mark Dancigersʼ music has been called “entrancing”, “beguiling”, and “rich” (The New York Times). He has written music for the New York Youth Symphony, Opus 21, the Minnesota Orchestra, and members of So Percussion. His music has been heard at the Virginia Arts Festival, the Cabrillo Festival, the Percussive Arts Society International Conference, Merkin Hall, and BAM Café. As a guitarist he has performed with Tactus, the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, and has premiered a concerto by Kathryn Alexander. Mark studied composition at Yale and the Yale School of Music, and he is currently completing a PhD at Princeton University. James Douglass, assistant professor of collaborative piano and auditions coordinator for applications to the Accompanying and Chamber Music degree program, has been involved in diverse genres including chamber music, vocal arts, opera, choral arts, symphonic repertoire, jazz, cabaret, and musical theater. He received the BM and MM in piano performance from the University of Alabama and the DMA in collaborative piano from the University of Southern California where he was a student of Dr. Alan L. Smith; additional studies with collaborative Anne Epperson and Martin Katz. While at USC he received a Koldofsky Fellowship and the Outstanding Keyboard Collaborative Arts award. Douglass has served on the faculties of Mississippi College, Occidental College LA, USC, and Middle Tennessee State University where he was coordinator of the collaborative piano degree program. In 2003 he began teaching in the summer study program AIMS (American Institue of Musical Studies) in Graz, Austria as the instructor of collaborative piano and a coach in the lieder program with Harold Heiberg. Performances as a collaborative pianist have included recitals and television/radio broadcasts across the United States and in Europe (France, Germany, Austria, Hungary); in master classes given by artists Dawn Upshaw, Carol Vaness, Vladimir Chernov, Norman Luboff, Paul Salamunovich, Natalie Hinderas, Leon Bates. Douglass is also active as a clinician and recently completed a recording with soprano Hope Koehler of John Jacob Niles songs which was released on the Albany label in 2008. Linda Dusmanʼs compositions provide stimulating and thought-provoking listening experiences for audiences throughout the world. Recent premieres include her piano trio Diverging Flints, Skra for clarinet and fixed media, and Triptych of Gossips for soprano and violin. Her work has been awarded by the International Alliance for Women in Music, the State of Maryland (in both the Music: Composition and the Visual Arts: Media categories), and in February 2009 she was in residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts as a Mid-Atlantic Arts Fellow. Her compositions are published by Silent Editions and are recorded on the NEUMA, Capstone, and New Albany labels. As a frequent contributor to the literature on contemporary music and performance, Dr. Dusmanʼs articles have appeared in the journals Link, Perspectives of New Music, and Interface, as well as a number of anthologies. She was a founding editor of the journal Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, and is as an associate editor for Perspectives of New Music. Recently, she founded I Resound Press, a digital press/archive for music by women composers. Dr. Dusman is a Professor of Music at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), and served as Chair of the Music Department there from 2000-2008. Prior to her tenure at UMBC, she held the Jeppson Chair in Music at Clark University in Massachusetts. Mark Engebretson (b. 1964) is Associate Professor of Composition and Electronic Music at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He received commissions from the Fromm Music Foundation and the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts. His works have been presented at SEAMUS, ICMC, Bowling Green Festival of New Music, Third Practice Festival, Wien Modern, Gaida Festival, Sonoimagenes, Hörgänge Festival, Ny Musikk, Indiana State University New Music Festival, the Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival, ISCM Festivals, World Saxophone Congresses. He founded the UNCG New Music Festival in 2004, and is director of the A.V. Williams Electronic Music Studio at UNCG. Alexander Ezerman comes from a family where the cello runs four generations deep, including two former associate principals of the Philadelphia Orchestra. A prize winner in national and international competition, he has appeared as a soloist and chamber musician across the United States, Canada, Europe and South America. He is newly appointed to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro as Associate Professor of Violoncello. His previous position was at Texas Tech University, where he was a founding member of the Botticelli String Quartet. He also regularly performs with his wife, violinist Stephanie Ezerman, as the Ezerman Duo. An active advocate and performer of new music, he has been involved in numerous premiers, and has performed all twelve of the “Sacher” pieces for solo cello in a single recital. His most recent premiere, Ignis Fatuus for solo cello, by composer Teresa LeVelle, has been recorded on the Innova Label. During the summer, he is on the faculty of the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival in Burlington Vermont. He has previously been on the faculties of the Brevard Music Center and the Killington Music Festival. Ezerman holds a BM degree from Oberlin College Conservatory and a Master of Music and Doctorate of Musical Arts from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His primary mentors include Timothy Eddy, Norman Fischer, David Wells and his grandmother Elsa Hilger. Susan Fancher is known for her deep and poetic musical interpretations. A much sought after performer of new music, she has inspired and premiered dozens of new works for saxophone. The 2010-2011 season includes premiere performances of Lance Hulme's Sax Attractor for soprano saxophone and piano, to be presented in Chengdu and Beijing, China, as well as the premiere performances of Michael Torke's Concerto for soprano saxophone in its new version, commissioned by Susan Fancher together with a consortium of wind ensembles. This concert season also features the premiere performance of Chester Udell's Wakdjunkaga (the Trickster), commissioned by SEAMUS (Society of Electroacoustic Music in the US). Other recent performances as a concerto soloist include the world premiere of Hilary Tann's Shakkei for soprano saxophone and orchestra with the National Orchestra of Brazil under the leadership of Ligia Amadio and the Asian premiere with the Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Allan McMurray. Her 2009 CD release In Two Worlds (Innova 736) features music for saxophone and electronics by John Anthony Lennon, James Paul Sain, Mark Engebretson, Reginald Bain, Judith Shatin, Morton Subotnick and Edmund Campion. Susan Fancher is a regularly featured columnist for the nationally distributed Saxophone Journal. She is a clinician for the Selmer and Vandoren companies and teaches saxophone at Duke University. Violinist David Felberg, currently the associate concertmaster of the New Mexico Symphony, was recently named concertmaster of The Santa Fe Symphony Orchestra. He has recently appeared as soloist with the Santa Fe Symphony, New Mexico Symphony Orchestra, Albuquerque Philharmonic, Palo Alto Philharmonic, and the Balcones Orchestra, Upcoming solo performances include Shostakovich Concerto No. 1 with the New Mexico Symphony in 2011. He is an advocate of performing contemporary violin repertoire, and has performed works of composers such as Pierre Boulez, David Lang, John Adams and Richard Hermann. He is Conductor and Musical Director of Chatter, a chamber orchestra dedicated to 20th and 21st century music, Conductor of the Albuquerque Philharmonia, and Assistant Conductor of The University of New Mexico Symphony Orchestra. He is also artistic director of the Church of Beethoven, a Sunday morning concert series that was recently featured on NPR's All Things Considered. He was a participant in the American Academy of Conducting at the Aspen Music Festival in the summer of 2000. Felberg attended the University of Arizona where he received a degree in history, and went on to earn a Masters of Music degree in conducting from the University of New Mexico. In addition, he took advanced string quartet studies at the University of Colorado with the Takacs Quartet. Felberg made his New York City recital debut in Merkin Hall in June of 2005 and plays an 1829 J.B. Vuillaume violin. Equally expert at music from the Baroque era to contemporary work, mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer has performed with New York Collegium, Early Music New York, the Rebel Ensemble, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the Boston Pops, and has given world premieres of music by John Zorn, Elliot Carter, Nico Muhly, Missy Mazzoli, Bernard Rands, and the Bang on a Can artists. Recent highlights include the VOX contemporary opera showcase and the Chandler Carter opera Strange Fruit with New York City Opera, and an outreach production of Hansel and Gretel with New Jersey State Opera. Other recent productions include the Lee Hoiby premiere This is the Rill Speaking with American Opera Projects, and the Peter Westergaard premiere Alice in Wonderland with Center for Contemporary Opera. Ms. Fischerʼs relationship with new music ensembles such as Continuum and Sequitur has led to performances from Lincoln Center to Jakarta, Indonesia. She is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music (MM) and Vassar College (BA), and has been a resident artist at the Banff Music Centre, the Tanglewood Music Center, the Aspen Music Festival and School, Opera North, and the Lucerne Festival Academy. Kevin Geraldi is Associate Director of Bands and Director of Orchestral Activities at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In this capacity, he conducts the UNCG Symphony Orchestra, Symphonic Band, and Casella Sinfonietta, and is associate conductor of the UNCG Wind Ensemble. Dr. Geraldi appears regularly as a guest conductor and he maintains an active schedule as a clinician throughout the country. With the UNCG Wind Ensemble, he has performed in the Music Center at Strathmore, at the national CBDNA convention in Austin, Texas, at the NCMEA conference, and on several commercially available compact discs. A proponent of contemporary music and chamber music, he has commissioned and premiered numerous compositions and published articles in the Music Educators Journal, the Journal of Band Research,the Journal of the World Association of Symphonic Bands and Ensembles, andvolume 7 of Teaching Music Through Performance in Band. His compact disc leading the Minerva Chamber Players, featuring nonets by Johannes Brahms and Louise Farrenc, is available on the Centaur Records label. Dr. Geraldi holds the Doctor of Musical Arts and Master of Music degrees in instrumental conducting from the University of Michigan where he studied with H. Robert Reynolds and Michael Haithcock. He received his Bachelor of Music Education degree from Illinois Wesleyan University, where he studied conducting with Steven Eggleston. Bernd Gottinger has been active producing and engineering classical, contemporary, and popular music tracks and records for various international and national recording labels for over twenty years. His particular interest lies in commercial music composition and audio mixing and mastering. Dr. Gottinger is also a committed educator in the field of audio engineering and has held the position of Associate Professor of Music and Chair of the Sound Recording Technology Bachelors of Science program at the State University of New York in Fredonia since 1999. He holds a Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at New York University with a dissertation investigating sonic signatures in sound recording technology. Judd Greenstein was born and raised in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City, where he began his compositional life by writing hip hop beats as a teenager. His concert works reflect those origins, as well as his traditional piano background, combining an urban, beat-oriented sensibility with a late Romantic classical harmonic language. He has received degrees from Williams College and the Yale School of Music, has been a Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center and the Bang on a Can Summer Institute of Music, and is currently a fifth-year doctoral Fellow and Taplin Scholar at Princeton University, where he is writing a dissertation on hip hop music. Belinda Haikes is an interdisciplinary artist working in social media, digital media as well as traditional mediums. Influenced by having lived in three countries by the time she was 15, her work is centered on the poetics of identity construction in the post-human world and how technology creates connections to each other through art. Recent exhibitions include the Asian Arts Initiative, Philadelphia, Los Angeles Center for the Digital Art, Village Nomad, France, Digital Fringe, Australia, and the Weatherspoon Museum in North Carolina. Currently a PhD candidate in the Media Art and Text Program at Virginia Commonwealth University. She currently holds the position of Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, teaching in the digital design program. Konstantinos Karathanasis is an electroacoustic composer who draws inspiration from modern poetry, artistic cinema, abstract painting, mysticism, and the writings of Carl Jung. His compositions have been performed at numerous festivals and have received awards in international competitions, including Bourges, Musica Nova, and SEAMUS/ASCAP. Recordings of his music are released by SEAMUS, ICMA, Musica Nova, and broadcast by the Art of the States. Konstantinos holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from the University at Buffalo, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Composition & Music Technology at the University of Oklahoma. You can find more at http://music.ou.edu/oukon. Kristopher Keeton joined the School of Music faculty as Assistant Professor of Percussion in 2009. Prior to his appointment at UNCG, he served on the faculties of Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of Richmond, Trinity International University and the Eastern Music Festival. Keeton, a member of the Percussive Arts Society (PAS) Keyboard Committee, is active as a soloist and as a member of the Sympatico Percussion Group. He is a former member of the Eastern Philharmonic Orchestra, Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Owensboro Symphony Orchestra, and Phantom Regiment Drum and Bugle Corps. Keetonʼs performing credits also include the Chicago Symphony Orchestra MusicNOW Ensemble, Eighth Blackbird contemporary ensemble, Virginia Symphony, Louisville Orchestra, Chicagoland Pops Orchestra and Nashville Chamber Orchestra. He performed several concerts across Europe in January 2008 with the professional Swedish percussion ensemble Global Percussion Network. Keeton made his Carnegie Hall debut in March 2008, performing as featured soloist with the VCU Wind Ensemble. Keeton has appeared as a performer and soloist at multiple Percussive Arts Society International Conventions. Dr. Keeton earned doctoral and masters degrees at Northwestern University School of Music, with additional studies at Western Kentucky University. Keeton has studied with acclaimed percussionists Michael Burritt and Christopher Norton, James Ross of the Chicago Symphony, and drum set artists Chester Thompson and Paul Wertico. Kristopher Keeton is a Yamaha Performing Artist and an artist/educator for Innovative Percussion and Zildjian. Alex Kotch (b. 1983 in North Carolina) is a fresh new voice in contemporary music, fusing instrumental composition with an electronic dance style. In bringing together "propulsive, post- Minimalist rhythms" (New York Times) with an extensive background in jazz, pop, experimental, electronic, and West African music, he has received honors and fellowships from ASCAP, The Transatlantic Arts Consortium, Duke University, the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Sequenza21, and Juventas, and commissions from Ensemble Zellig, Trio Saxiana, Nicolas Prost, Silvia Lenzi, Michael Straus, EAR Duo, and Rachael Elliott. Alex's works, heard throughout the United States and France, have also seen performances by eighth blackbird, Odd Appetite, the Lost Dog Ensemble, and Susan Fancher. As a multimedia artist, he has received coverage from ABC News and The Associated Press, and as a performer on clarinet, saxophone, and laptop, he plays concerts and DJ sets along the East Coast. With a B.A. in Music from Brown University and a Masterʼs in Composition from Duke University, Alex is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Duke. Recent premieres include a multimedia opera in Los Angeles, a work for cello, electronica, and dancer in Paris, and Pas de deux, for alto saxophone, bassoon, and electronica, which Rachael Elliott and Susan Fancher have recorded for Rachael's upcoming album. Alex's next premiere is a work for bassoon and electronica, commissioned by Rachael Elliott, in Vermont this November, and his next DJ performance is September 30 at the Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Arts in Minneapolis, MN. Bruce P. Mahin is a Professor of Music, and Director of the Radford University Center for Music Technology. He received the B.Mus from West Virginia University, M.Mus from Northwestern University and the Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the Peabody Conservatory of The Johns Hopkins University. Mahin is a former president of the Southeastern Composers League, a former co-chair of Society of Composers Region 3, a former research fellow at the University of Glasgow (Scotland), and the recipient of awards from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, Meet the Composer, Annapolis Fine Arts Foundation, Res Musica, Southeastern Composers League and others. His works are available on compact disc through Capstone Recordings (CPS-8747, CPS- 8624 and CPS-8611) and published in score by Pioneer Percussion, Ltd. and in the Society of Composers Journal of Musical Scores. Missy Mazzoli was recently deemed "one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York" by the New York Times and "Brooklyn's post-millenial Mozart" by Time Out New York. Her music has been performed all over the world by the Kronos Quartet, the Minnesota Orchestra, eighth blackbird, the Spokane Symphony, and the South Carolina Philharmonic. Missy is also active as an educator, arts advocate, and performer. She is Executive Director of the MATA Festival of New Music, a festival which was co-founded by Philip Glass and is devoted to young composers. She recently taught at Yale University and has been a composer-in-residence with the Carnegie Hall Academy Program. Missy also performs regularly as a member of Victoire, an "all-star, all female quintet" (Time Out New York) that she founded in 2007 to perform her own music. Janice Misurell-Mitchell, composer, flutist and vocal artist is on the faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A member of CUBE Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, she was recently a featured composer at Art Chicago, the International Alliance for Women in Music Congress in Beijing, the Voices of Dissent series at the Bowling Green College of Musical Arts, the Outside the Box Festival at Southern Illinois University, the Robert Helps Festival at the University of South Florida, the Festival of Winds in Novara, Italy, and at the Randspiele Festival in Berlin. Her honors include grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, Meet the Composer, residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Ragdale Foundation, and awards and commissions from the National Flute Association, the Youth Symphony of DuPage, the International Alliance for Women in Music, Northwestern University and others. Her works are performed throughout the United States and Europe and have been played on the Public Broadcasting Network, the National Flute Association Conventions, at the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C, the Museum of Contemporary Art and Symphony Center in Chicago, and at Carnegie Hall. Her music is available on compact disks produced by MMC Recordings, OPUS ONE Recordings, Capstone Records, and Arizona University Recordings and is published by Margun Music (available through the Music Sales Group), the Needham Publishing Company, and Arizona University Publications. A CD featuring her music for flute, voice and percussion will be released by Southport Records later this year. Pianist Michael Mizrahi has been hailed for his “splendid powers of concentration” (The Washington Post) and performances that are “exciting to watch and hear” (The San Diego Union- Tribune). Dazzling audiences and critics alike, Mizrahi has been hailed for his compelling performances of a wide-ranging selection of music and his ability to connect with audiences of all ages. He has appeared as concerto soloist with some of the leading orchestras of the United States in addition to appearances as recitalist, chamber musician, and music educator. He has won several prizes in major competitions and has appeared in several prominent music festivals around the world. Mezzo Soprano Clara OʼBrien comes to the University of North Carolina Greensboro after more than twenty years of performing in Europe and the United States. For over seventeen years, Professor OʼBrien based her career in Germany and has appeared on the operatic and concert stages of such cities as Berlin, Luxembourg, Strasbourg, Dresden, Frankfurt, Chicago, Dallas and many others. Her professional career began when she was awarded the Sonderpreis des Badischen Staatstheater, a prize created specially for her at the 1st International Coloratura Competition, Sylvia Geszty. Her many roles range from Baroque to contemporary and include Octavian, Komponist, Adalgisa, Mignon, Dorabella, Donna Elvira, Elisabetta (Maria Stuarda), Rosina, Angelina (Cenerentola), Musetta, Helene (La Belle Hélène), Fenena (Nabucco) and numerous roles at the International Handel Festpiel. Her performances have been noted in Opernwelt as Best Performances in both the Emerging and Established Artist categories. Other awards include 1st Prize, Erika Koth Meisterkurs and Finalist in the International Belvedere Competition. Recordings include releases on the Bella Musica and Albany Records labels and she has been recorded and broadcast on Southwest German Radio and Television. Ms. O'Brien studied at the Eastman School of Music (M.M., Performance Certificate), the Curtis Institute of Music ,the Dana School of Music (B.M., Summa cum laude) and the Hochschule fur Musik, Heidelberg/Manneheim. She was an apprentice with the Chicago Lyric Opera Center for American Artists, the Aspen Music Festival and the Boris Goldovski Opera Institute. She received a Fulbright Grant to Germany and was awarded a fellowship to the Münchener Singschulʼ. Her teachers included Jan DeGaetani, Astrid Varnay, Erika Köth and Daniel Ferro. Hassan Pitts is an interdisciplinary artist interested in fashioning images around absorption, sensation, emotion, movement and gesture. Currently he splits his time examining issues of masculine gestures of the everyday and themes of transience, both emotional and physical. Hassan received a BFA in photography from Kutztown University, a BA in German studies from Dennison University and has most recently completed his MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University in photography and film. Hassan has shown regionally throughout the Mid-Atlantic and in Miami, Fl. Virginia is where he currently resides and produces work. Scott Rawls has appeared as soloist and chamber musician in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Japan, and Europe. Chamber music endeavors include performances with the Diaz Trio, Kandinsky Trio and Ciompi Quartet as well as with members of the Cleveland, Audubon and Cassatt String Quartets. His most recent CD recording, released on the Centaur label, features the chamber music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and was released summer 2004. His recording of chamber works for viola and clarinet was released spring 2003 on the same label. The ensemble, Middle Voices, will record another disc for Centaur featuring the chamber music of American composer, Eddie Bass. Additional chamber music recordings can be heard on the CRI, Nonesuch, Capstone, and Philips labels. Also a champion of new music, Rawls has toured extensively as a member of Steve Reich and Musicians since 1991. As the violist in this ensemble, he has performed the numerous premieres of The Cave and Three Tales, multimedia operas by Steve Reich and Beryl Korot, videographer. Dr. Rawls currently serves as Associate Professor of Viola in the School of Music, Theatre and Dance at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Under the baton of maestro Dmitry Sitkovetsky, he plays principal viola in the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra. He is very active as guest clinician, adjudicator, and master class teacher at universities and festivals in America and Europe. During the summers, Rawls plays principal viola in the festival orchestra at Brevard Music Center where he also coordinates the viola program. He holds a BM degree from Indiana University and a MM and DMA from State University of New York at Stony Brook. His major mentors include Abraham Skernick, Georges Janzer, and John Graham. First alternate flutist Andrew Rehrig began his studies of the flute at the age of 12 and two years later gave his concerto debut with the Ludwig Symphony Orchestra in Atlanta, GA. He went on to continue studies at Indiana University with Thomas Robertello, where he received his Bachelor of Music degree. While still an undergraduate, Mr. Rehrig was invited to become a member of the Columbus, IN Philharmonic Orchestra, a position he held until graduation. During that time he was also invited to play with several orchestras throughout Indiana and Kentucky, including the Owensboro Symphony and the Evansville Philharmonic. Having completed a Master's degree at Stony Brook University under the direction of Carol Wincenc, Mr. Rehrig appeared regularly as a substitute flutist forBeauty and the Beast on Broadway, as well as with the Brooklyn Philharmonic and the New England Symphonic Ensemble. Mr. Rehrig is a finalist for and substitute flutist with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, the New World Symphony and the Charleston, (SC) Symphony Orchestra. He was the guest principal second flutist of the Florida Grand Opera and the principal flutist of the Chamber Orchestra of New York. As a proponent of new music, Mr. Rehrig is dedicated to commissioning and premiering new works for flute, as well as the regular performances of contemporary music. Born in Argentina, composer Alejandro Ruttyʼs output includes orchestral, chamber, mixed-media music, and arrangements of Argentine traditional music. Ruttyʼs compositions and arrangements have been played by the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra of Argentina, National Symphony Orchestra of Brazil, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, among other groups. Recordings of his music have been released by Capstone Records, Arizona University Recordings, and ERM. Media Founder and Artistic Director of the Hey, Mozart! Project, Alejandro Rutty is currently Assistant Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Wendy Collin Sorin, of Durham, North Carolina, received her B.F.A. in printmaking from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1993. She later studied waterless lithography with Nik Semenoff at the University of Saskatchewan. She has taught his experimental methods at Zygote Press in Cleveland, Ohio and at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. In addition to exhibiting her work in print, drawing and collage, her artist book collaborations include: Strange Things Begin to Happen When a Meteor Crashes in the Arizona Desert (with poet Michael Basinski; Burning Press; 2001), which was awarded an Ohio Arts Council project grant, Ghost of a Chance, (with Robert Miltner; Zygote Press and Idlewild Press; 2002), ABZU (with Michael Basinski; Runaway Spoon Press; 2003), P.S. At Least We Died Trying to Make You in the Backseat of the Taxidermist (with Derek White; calamari press; 2005), name cloud (with John M. Bennett; fabelhaft press and Luna Bisonte Prods.; 2005 ) and TELLTHISMUCH (with Carlos M.Luis; Runaway Spoon Press; 2005.) W the Movie, a film inspired by Strange Things Begin to Happen When a Meteor Crashes in the Arizona Desert, and done in collaboration with Indiana filmmaker Alfred Eaker, won Best Experimental Film at the New York International Independent Film & Video Festival in March 2009. In 2000, Sorin was an artist-in-residence at the Grafikwerkstatt in Dresden, a yearly exchange program sponsored by the Ohio Arts Council between the German printmaking workshop and Zygote Press. In 2004, she was project director and co-curator for a traveling retrospective exhibition (Cleveland, Columbus, Dresden) of the exchange program which included a bilingual catalogue. Sorinʼs work is in numerous private and public collections including The Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry (Miami Beach, Florida); Avant Writing Collection, The Ohio State University (Columbus); Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (New Haven, Connecticut); Brown University Library (Providence, Rhode Island); Poetry/Rare Books Collection, State University of New York, Buffalo; Ashland University, Ashland, Ohio; The Cleveland Institute of Art artistsʼ book collection; Millersville University, Millersville, PA; Hahn, Loeser & Parks LLP, Cleveland; Ohio Building Commission, Columbus, Ohio; Champion International Corporation, Hamilton, Ohio. Composer John Supko was born in 1980 on Long Island, New York. He holds degrees from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music (BM) and Princeton University (MFA & PhD). He is a recipient of the Fulbright (2002) and Georges Lurcy (2007) fellowships, both for Paris, France, where he studied at the Ecole Normale de Musique. He has won numerous prizes and grants, among which the BMI Student Composer Award, two ASCAP/Morton Gould Young Composers Awards (including the 2008 Leo Kaplan Award), the Grand Prize of the National Young Composers Competition, the Perkins Prize of the Princeton University Music Department and a Commissioning Music/USA Meet The Composer commission. His work has been published in collaborative editions with the poet Philippe Denis by Collection Mémoires (Paris) and, most recently, by Harpo & (Marseille). Future projects include a string quartet for the Ciompi Quartet and an opera on the lives of Paul and Jane Bowles with poet Karren LaLonde Alenier. John Supko lives in Durham, NC, where he is Assistant Professor of Composition at Duke University. A commercial DVD of the works This Window Makes Me Feel and Littoral is scheduled for release in September 2011 on New Amsterdam Records. More information is available at www.johnsupko.com. Anthony Taylor joined the UNCG School of Music faculty in 2007, and was also recently appointed as Principal Clarinet of the Winston-Salem Symphony. He is also an active solo, chamber, and jazz musician. This fall, he presented a paper on his research into John Adamsʼs clarinet concerto Gnarly Buttons in Bangor, Wales at the International Conference on Music and Minimalism. Recent performance highlights include the world premiere of Seattle composer Gail Grossʼs Bossa Velha at the Washington State Music Teacherʼs Association convention, solo performances with jazz piano master Dick Hyman, and the world premiere recording of Gregory Yasinitskyʼs solo clarinet work For All That Has Been Given. He has been a member of the Spokane Symphony, the Boise Philharmonic, Spokane Opera and professional contemporary music ensemble Zephyr. He has been on the faculties of Washington State University, Eastern Washington University, Whitman College and Gonzaga University. Each August, Taylor also teaches at the Midsummer Musical Retreat, a week-long camp for adult amateur musicians. In summer 2007, he completed his doctorate at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and also holds degrees from The Florida State University and Washington State University. Stephen Taylor has been directing and editing documentary films for the past seven years, working in New York and Europe. He directed and edited four award-winning half-hour documentaries on various criminal-justice-related subjects while working for Youth Rights Media, an acclaimed youth-oriented documentary production company. With American Beat Films, where he currently works as an editor and director, he has directed and edited two hour-long documentaries, and co-produced several others. Tom Waits (born 1949) is an American singer-songwriter, composer and actor. Waits has a distinctive voice, described by critic Daniel Durchholz as sounding "like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car.” (Wikipedia) II. Ensembles Linux Laptop Orchestra (L2Ork): L2Ork, founded by Dr. Ivica Ico Bukvic in May 2009, is part of the latest interdisciplinary initiative by the Virginia Tech Music Departmentʼs Digital Interactive Sound & Intermedia Studio (DISIS). As the worldʼs first Linux-based laptop orchestra L2Ork offers optimal infrastructure for creative research at minimal cost. By providing a seamless integration of arts and sciences it is in part designed to bridge the gap between STEM and the Arts, with particular focus on K-12 education. As an emerging contemporary intermedia ensemble, L2Ork thrives upon the quintessential form of collaboration found in the western classical orchestra and its cross-pollination with increasingly accessible human-computer interaction technologies for the purpose of exploring expressive power of gesture, communal interaction, discipline-agnostic environment, and the multidimensionality of arts. Hailed as "a deft young group gaining attention" (Alex Ross, The New Yorker) and "a smart young chamber group that straddles a line between contemporary classical music and indie rock," (John Schaefer, WNYC), NOW Ensemble is a collection of performers and composers dedicated to making new chamber music for the 21st century. With a unique instrumentation of flute (Alex Sopp/ Andrew Rehrig), clarinet (Sara Budde), electric guitar (Mark Dancigers), double bass (Logan Coale), and piano (Michael Mizrahi), NOW Ensemble brings a fresh sound and a new perspective to the classical tradition, infused with a blend of musical influences that reflects the diverse backgrounds and listening experiences of their members. NOW has premiered over 60 works, including those by composer-members Patrick Burke, Mark Dancigers, and Judd Greenstein, along with many more by a cross-section of the top young voices in contemporary composition, such as Ryan Brown, David T. Little, Missy Mazzoli, Nico Muhly, and dozens more. NOW Ensemble has performed at a wide variety of venues, such as the Bang on a Can Marathon, the Festival Internacional de Chihuahua, Pittsburgh's Music on the Edge, the Carlsbad Music Festival, Sarasota's New Music New College, Wordless Music, and Look & Listen; in New York, they can regularly be heard at diverse venues such as Le Poisson Rouge, Joe's Pub, Galapagos Art Space and the Chelsea Art Museum, as well as on WNYC radio. Their first album, NOW, was released in 2008 to rave reviews around the country, including on AllMusic.com (five stars): "a first-class debut...more of this is demanded, not requested." Newsweek's Seth Colter Walls wrote, "NOW... imports a catchy inflection to classical forms... Striking a balance between the old and the new has rarely sounded this good.” The Robert Rauschenberg Pilottone Experience is an experimental sound ensemble with a revolving cast of members. Three core members include Jennida Chase, Belinda Haikes and Hassan Pitts. Pilottoneʼs live work is electronically driven sound improvisation, which occasionally employs more traditional instrumentation. Pilottone includes video in their live performances and has also created sound tracks for still photography and makes non-trad ʻmusicʼ videos. The group has performed with Stephen Vitiello, Blevin Blectum, Anduin, Caustic Castle, The Grapefruit Experiment and many other sound/noise artists. III. Program Notes 13 (Ivica Ico Bukvic) is a game of prime numbers and primal instincts pitting timbre against rhythm. Driven by conductorʼs oversight over an array of performer-specific and ensemble-wide parameters, a networked ensemble acts as one large meta-tracker where each individual performer contributes its own gesture-driven motives or tracks. The ensuing meta-tracker texture is superimposed against improvised acoustic percussion in a search of a meaningful discourse and ultimately musical synergy. Awake (Patrick Burke) combines the cyclic processes and layers of Javanese gamelan music with harmonies and colors of Western classical and popular music. From a very quiet beginning of plucked piano strings and electric guitar, the music builds momentum and gradually accelerates to a frenetic pace, only to slow down and settle into a new cycle that seems to transcend all that came before it. Personally, I see this as a journey from the anxieties of daily life to an awareness of the larger world and all of the possibilities within it. In Buddhism there is a principle that the self and the universe are mutually inclusive--the entire universe is contained within the self, and the self permeates the entire universe. Awake is a meditation on this principle. Black Box Bossa (Alejandro Rutty) is a Bossa Nova living inside a granular sampler. As such, this metaphorical sampler segments the song into tiny grains, only to play them in erratic back-and- forth patterns, altering the length of the excerpts, the starting and ending place of the samples, and the size of the grains or segments. After hearing Black Box Bossa It may be possible, perhaps, to reconstruct the (newly composed) song, but even if it were not possible, the bossa will infuse the black box with a calm, tropical sense of longing. Burst (Mark Dancigers) combines some elaborate African-inspired guitar licks with Mozart-inspired counterpoint and harmony. The piece cycles through its main themes twice, the second time doubling each melody with two instruments. Change (Judd Greenstein): In times when people seem ready to entrust our broken systems with their hopes of making positive change, it's most important to step up and, as Gandhi said, 'be the change you want to see in the world'. This piece represents my own reminder to myself to always keep that fire lit. Citadel (Ivica Ico Bukvic) for soprano and L2Ork draws inspiration from a famous poem "Himna Slobodi" (Hymn to Freedom) by the 17th century Croatian poet Ivan Gundulic. As the first piece ever written for the newfound ensemble, it relies upon pervasive tonality, in many ways posing as an electronic counterpart to a traditional string ensemble. Using the infinite-bow metaphor to create lush tonal harmonies the piece forms a compelling aural foundation for a lyrical showcase of soloist's vocal talent. Dionysus (Kostas Karathanasis): Changing forms, volatile, brutal, benevolent, chased and menacing, dismembered and resurrected, ceremonious, clamorous, mystic, inspirational, ecstatic, patron of tragedy and comedy. Dionysus is the god who embodies primitive instinctual forces of life, irresistible, inexorable, ever triumphing. The piece is written in MaxMSP. The software tracks the percussionistʼs attacks, amplitude, rhythm and density. This information is used to trigger various real-time sound transformation routines and pre-recorded materials. The whispered texts are from Euripides Bacchae. Many thanks to Dr. Ricardo Souza for commissioning this work and for his enhancing suggestions. Dionysus was also made possible with the partial support of funds from the Research Council of University of Oklahoma. Ellipse (Janice Misurell-Mitchell), for baritone saxophone, violin, viola and cello, was commissioned by composer and saxophonist Mark Engebretson. It is dedicated to the memory of our dear, late friend and my mentor, M. William Karlins (1932 – 2005), Professor of Music Theory and Composition at Northwestern University from 1967 to 2001. In 1974 Bill wrote his Quintet for Alto Saxophone and String Quartet, a piece about which we had had numerous discussions. As I began writing it became clear to me that I needed to find a way to recognize some of Billʼs ideas in my own piece. Thus there is an “In Memoriam” section in two parts: the first uses one of Billʼs note series in an espressivo form, as a development of the section that precedes it; the second uses it as a more direct “steal” from the third movement of Billʼs piece—a movement, which, ironically, uses the same first five pitches that my row for Ellipse uses. (I choose not to make much of this, even though the relationship was not intentional...) The piece takes its title from the image of the ellipse: the shape appears in either upright or inverted forms in the ensembleʼs phrases, and often in the relationship of the voices to each other. The baritone saxophone is used at times as an equal member of the ensemble and at other times as a soloist. I would like to thank the Ragdale Foundation for providing me with support and solitude in 2008 as I worked on this piece. For Every Season . . . (Bruce Mahin) is representative of my interest in creating expressive, interesting music from very economical structures. Hence, the inspiration for the work is emotional and spiritual. The actual composition, however, is based solely on a four-note unordered pitch collection (C-C#-F-G) manipulated by transposition, inversion and various re-orderings. Pilottoneʼs performance Future Past springs form William Gibsonʼs idea of “Locative arts”, an art that finds the hidden history, the ghost moments of what has gone before. It is the remnants of memory given to the future. Using electronic media, sound and video, pilottone brings the audiovisual history of points in time to present. Half-Life (Ivica Ico Bukvic) for solo narrator and L2Ork is a texture-based exploration of electronic percussion and its recontextualization through the use of unique opportunities inherent to the L2Ork ensemble. The ensuing soundscape draws inspiration from the writings and experiences of Elena Filatova on her solo motorcycle ride through Chernobylʼs dead zone. The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt (Missy Mazzol, music; Stephen Taylor, film) INTRODUCTION Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904) was an explorer, nomad, journalist, novelist, passionate romantic, Sufi, and one of the most unique and unusual women of her era. At age twenty, after the death of her mother, brother and father, she left her life in Switzerland for a nomadic and unfettered existence in the deserts of North Africa. She traveled extensively through the desert on horseback, often dressed as a man, relentlessly documenting her travels through detailed journals. At age twenty-seven Isabelle drowned in a flash flood in the desert. The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt uses texts inspired by her writing to immerse the audience in the surreal landscapes of Isabelle's life; she describes the death of her family, the thrill of her arrival in Africa, her tentative joy at falling in love, the elation of self-discovery and the mystery of death. COMPOSER'S NOTE In 2004, within hours of picking up a copy of her journals in a Boston bookstore, I officially became obsessed with Isabelle Eberhardt's strange and moving life story. Within two weeks I had read everything she had ever written and nearly everything written about her, but despite my compulsive reading habits, I still had more questions than answers. I was struck by the universal themes of her story – how much her struggles, her questions, her passions, mirrored those of women throughout the 20th and 21st century. Isabelle made a great effort to define herself as an independent woman under extreme circumstances. She dressed as a man, seeing this as the only way to move freely and live the life of her choice. She let herself fall deeply in love but struggled to maintain her independent lifestyle. I knew immediately that I wanted to create a large-scale work about Isabelle, and I knew that I wanted it to be more of a personal response to her life than a detailed retelling of her story. I needed to start answering my own questions, imagining how she felt, filling in the spaces between journal entries and exploring the universality that make her story so vibrant and relevant to me over one hundred years after her death. In 2007, three years after discovering Isabelle, I began work on the libretto for The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt, pulling phrases and ideas from her journals and creating singable texts that, over the following year, I set to music. Working in response to my score, Stephen Taylor started to create films using archival footage from the early 20th century, generating a collection of images that went beyond a mere depiction of Isabelle's story to reflect the emotional themes of each section. Early in 2009 Steve and I began our collaboration with director Gia Forakis, who worked with us to stage the work and bring together all the elements of the project. I wrote this work for NOW Ensemble and Abigail Fischer, musicians whose virtuosic technique and adventurous spirit made them an ideal choice for what I envisioned. What you are seeing tonight is a concert version of what we hope will one day be an evening-length opera. PROGRAM NOTES/LIBRETTO 1. Overture "I am alone, sitting facing the grey expanse of the shifting sea... I am alone... alone as I've always been everywhere, as I'll always be throughout this seductive and deceptive universe…" 2. This World Within Me is Too Small "What urges me, though, to restlessness and keeps thrusting me onto life's roads, is not the wisest voice in my soul; it is a side of me that finds the earth too limited, and is unable to find in myself a sufficient universe." [Isabelle is reeling after the death of her mother, father and brother. Her only solace is the thought of leaving Geneva for Africa.] Death moves his hands through me again A lonely outsider among men I'll keep my silence here I'll leave this place alone I'll give myself to no one at all Death moves his hands through me again A lonely outsider among men This world within me is too small But still inside me something sings I'll keep my silence here I'll leave this place alone 3. Interlude 1 "My soul, too, has begun to stir again. A nomad I was even when I was very small and would stare at the road, that spellbinding white road headed straight for the unknown... and I shall stay a nomad all my life, in love with changing horizons, unexplored, far-away places, for any voyage, even to the most crowded and well-traveled countries, is an exploration." 4. I Have Arrived "Everything has come to life again, and so has my soul. Yet, as always, I also feel a boundless sadness, an inarticulate longing for something I cannot describe, a nostalgia for some other place for which I have no name.” [Isabelle arrives in Algeria at age twenty-one.] I have arrived- I'll pick out my own song, a music that will bleed the heart into silence. I have arrived - I'll pick out my own song, line by line, and at last throw back my head and sing. 5. You are the Dust "And all the time the secret joy of knowing that I will leave tomorrow at dawn, leave all these things which are still pleasing and dear to me this evening. Who but a nomad, a vagabond, could understand this double rejoicing? Once more astounded by all that has captured me and all I have left, I tell myself that love is a worry and that what's necessary is to love to leave - persons and things being loveliest when left behind." [Isabelle falls in love with Slimene Ehnni, an Algerian soldier. Their relationship is marked by long periods apart, during which Isabelle restlessly roams the desert on horseback.] you are the dust you are the sand you are the breathing earth you are the flood you are the road you are the flood you are the one the one most loved when left behind 6. Interlude 2 "Where is destiny taking me?!" 7. Where Footprints Erase the Graves "Soon, the solitary, woeful figure that I am will vanish from this earth, where I have always been a spectator, an outsider among men." [Isabelle is killed when a flash flood destroys her house, and she drowns in the desert she loves. She is twenty-seven years old.] here where footprints erase the graves a tranquil heart is mine here where footprints erase the graves these hours are no more than moments of light in this blanket of blazing stars "It seems to me that I am not meant to disappear without having plumbed the depths of this enigma, from its strange beginnings to the present." SONG FROM THE UPROAR: The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt is underwritten by the American Composers Forum with funds provided by the Jerome Foundation, with additional support from Free Speech Zone Productions and the American Music Center. magnificat 3: lament (Linda Dusman): My music in recent years comprises a weaving together of disparate elements. Commissioned by Airi Yoshioka as a work for violin and electronics, I began contemplating magnificat 3 during the US occupation of Iraq, and began composing it as the 17-year cicadas emerged during the spring of 2004, with final revisions in 2005. This composition is the third in a series of works that began as a reflection on the Virgin Maryʼs text: “My soul doth magnify the lord,” but which were interrupted by world events beginning with September 11, 2001. I realized that “magnificat 3” was a lament late one night when I was working on the piece and my 8-year-old son woke screaming from a nightmare in which “the war in Iraq came here.” Afterward I realized how much world events had been weighing on me as well. I imagined how much worse, and more frequent, must be the nightmares of the children in Iraq, whose parents cannot shelter them from the constant violence there. “magnificat 3” in the end is a lament for all children who are victims of violence. Polyptoton (Alex Kotch) is a rhetorical figure in which words from the same root but with different inflections appear in close proximity. For example, Robert Frost wrote, “Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.” Of the great Latin poets, Ovid is most well known for his use of this figure. He uses many variations of polyptoton in his works, and one such variation is two pairs of words in symmetric order: quid, Agenore nate, peremptum serpentem spectas? et tu spectabere serpens. (Metamorphoses, iii 97-98) Why gaze, son of Agenor, at the serpent you have killed? You too shall be a serpent to be gazed on. Latinʼs flexible word order allowed writers to use rhetorical figures quite liberally; music is the same way. The piece includes plenty of true repetition, but it also features many musical polyptotons, or slightly altered repetition. The first fast section, when repeated phrases slowly shift their rhythms and occasionally their pitch while still maintaining the same character, and a later section, which emulates a skipping compact disc by varying the particular segment of the phrase that is repeated, are just two instances that embody the workʼs title. The work was originally commissioned by Nicholas Prost for saxophonist Jean-Yves Chevalier for performance at the 2009 Festival Saxophone en Fête in Paris on January 31, 2009. Tonight is the version for saxophone and electronica, written for Susan Fancher. All of the electronic playback is derived from a recording of Susan playing her tenor saxophone. Work on Strange Things Begin to Happen When a Meteor Crashes in the Arizona Desert (Mark Engebretson/Michael Basinksi/Wendy Collin Sorin) began shortly after enigmatic sound/art/poet Michael Basinskiʼs appearance at the 2008 UNCG New Music Festival. I asked Michael whether he had any text I might consider setting, and he responding with this extraordinary book—all black and white--of the same name he produced in collaboration with visual artist Wendy Collin Sorin (see Wendyʼs note on her engagement with this project). The book contains, when read front to back, a collection of texts in Basinskiʼs highly personal idiom of invented letters, imagery, ciphers and symbolism. Read backwards (and upside-down), the book presents a “mutated rondeau” in relatively “normal” language. Using this rondeau as the basis for my composition, I had friends, family and colleagues read one or two pages each, and then used their recorded voices to generated a “musicalized” electronic score. This was developed in conjunction with a solo flute part, which brings us back many years earlier when my friend from Chicago, Janice Misurell-Mitchell and I cooked up the idea that we would each write pieces for each other, and do performances in our home locales and abroad. Janice specializes in, among other things, the performance of text while playing her instrument, and I thought this would be a perfect match for her, my music, and the book. The flute interacts in many ways with the electronic score as well as the visual element, for example by commenting on the “upside down” portions of text, dramatizing or vocalizing certain text fragments, or interacting with the musical element of the spoken/musicalized texts in a more or less conventional musical way. Finally, with the kind contribution of color pictures Wendy had provided, I created a kind of montage of the images that syncs up with the musical element, trying to capture the flavor of the process of overlapping emails and photocopies that she and Basinski used in the original book. --Mark Engebretson Strange Things Begin to Happen When a Meteor Crashes in the Arizona Desert began in 1998 with a “sex-text” performance poem in need of visual imagery and a format. Men, women, the flying patterns of bees, and codes were tied together by a snaking trail of overprinted emails written between poet Michael Basinski, publisher/typographer luigi-bob drake and myself. The book caught the attention of Indiana filmmaker Alfred Eaker and began its next transformation: W the movie, with additions from a script by Eaker and the Anti-War Manifesto of Columbus poet John M. Bennett. Through four years of writing, drawing, ongoing conversation, filming and editing, new images were generated and further informed by current events: a Dr. Strangelove on steroids with bombs & Saddam, W. & the Rapture. Earlier this year, Mark Engebretson contacted me asking for permission to use the images from the book for a video to accompany his composition inspired by meteors and all things strange. I sent him the additional, reworked drawings from the film project: STBtHWaMCitAD, Part 3. --Wendy Collin Sorin This Window Makes Me Feel (John Supko) was composed in 2005 as part of the requirements for the General Examination in the Music Department at Princeton University. The music, scored for mezzo soprano, keyboards, percussion and electronics, is a partial setting of Robert Fittermanʼs enormous text of the same name. In his work, Fitterman uses the phrase “This window makes me feel” as the basis of hundreds of Google searches in which the results complete the sentence over and over again, creating over time a unique portrait of humanity. Sometimes funny, sometimes mundane, often surprisingly meaningful, the text accumulates a poignancy that I found intriguing. I also saw in it a simple musical structure, with the title phrases acting as a ʻrefrainʼ and each search result supplying the verses. I applied this structure to the musical setting in which the mezzo-soprano sings “This window makes me feel” continuously in long, slow phrases while a recorded voice whispers the rest of the text. After I finished the music, I had the idea to approach Don Sheehy, at that time a senior in Princetonʼs Computer Science Department, about making a video for my piece. He agreed, and got to work taking a digital camera – often clandestinely, sometimes illegally – around New York. Though there is nothing explicitly connected to New York in the text, we felt that it gave the impression of being in the middle of a bustling city in which each sentence represented a different personʼs private thoughts. This view of the text provided a meditative counterpoint to the image of contemporary urban life and, we hope, can be heard and seen in the various sonic and visual layers of work. Whatʼs He Building? (Tom Waits, arr. Coulter/Bukvic): An adaptation of Tom Waitsʼ famous work for L2Ork and narrator explores juxtaposition of concrete and digital, sound and choreography; an exercise in participatory listening; a communal experience of the American Dream gone awry. IV. Lecture Abstracts Inspirations, Ideals, and the Reality – How L2Ork Turned My Creativity (and my Life!) Upside Down Ivica Ico Bukvic, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Linux Laptop Orchestra or simply L2Ork is by far the most demanding undertaking of my creative career. Not only has it reshaped my creative focus, it has also redefined the very core values that have been the driving force behind my creativity for more than a decade. I would like to use this opportunity to share with the audience L2Orkʼs exhilarating journey, important lessons I learned along the way, and a vision of what I see as the future of human-centric and ensemble-driven computer music. Composing Production/Library Music Bernd Gottinger, SUNY Fredonia, New York Production or Library Music belongs to the realm of music publishing and has experienced a considerable growth in the past couple of decades. Large conglomerates such as Sony ATV, Warner Chappell, and Universal Music Publishing, among others, are strong contenders in the field, and are concerned with growing their catalogues. Since production music often is created by a single person who delivers the work in the form of a recorded master, it requires a combination of traditional music production skills; music performance, music composition, electronic synthesis, and audio engineering. Combining these different skills and talents successfully may result in a significant source of income for a technologically savvy composer. The presentation will feature a demonstration of how the production of library music may be approached. Furthermore it seeks to answer questions pertaining to the nature, time frame, styles, and financial ramifications of production music. Developing iPhone applications to promote your music. Bruce Mahin, Radford University, Virginia Social networking sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, and RealSpace, have become the way to promote your music and your skills as a musician. Mobile devices, like the iPhone, offer another way to help people access your music 24/7. This presentation will show you how to get started developing your own iPhone application as a promotion tool. It will cover the potential inherent in these applications, the basic logistics of getting started, and introduce you to the programming skills involved in developing your own applications. Ellipse: “Saxing up the String Quartet” Janice Misurell-Mitchell, Art Institute of Chicago Ellipse, for baritone saxophone, violin, viola and cello, was commissioned by composer and saxophonist Mark Engebretson. In writing for saxophone and strings I wanted to explore the combination from different viewpoints: an overall unified sound; the instruments in pairs, often with contrasting musical ideas; the saxophone as a soloist with a trio of strings; and all four voices as independent, but with a common rhythmic foundation. I was also interested in creating music that at times had more of a string quartet style, and more of a saxophone quartet style at others. I found that the baritone saxophone blended quite well with the strings, complementing the sound with added warmth and darkness, rather than standing out as an intruder (this works also because of the timbre of the baritone saxophone). The piece takes its title from the image of the ellipse: the shape appears in either upright or inverted forms in the ensembleʼs phrases, and often in the relationship of the voices to each other.
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Title | 2010-09-21 New Music Festival [recital program] |
Date | 2010 |
Creator | University of North Carolina at Greensboro. School of Music, Theatre and Dance |
Subject headings |
University of North Carolina at Greensboro. School of Music, Theatre and Dance University of North Carolina at Greensboro |
Place | Greensboro (N.C.) |
Description | Summer and Fall 2010 programs for recitals by students in the UNCG School of Music. |
Type | Text |
Original format | programs |
Original publisher | Greensboro N.C.: The University of North Carolina at Greensboro |
Contributing institution | Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives, UNCG University Libraries |
Source collection | UA9.2 School of Music Performances -- Programs and Recordings, 1917-2007 |
Series/grouping | 1: Programs |
Finding aid link | https://libapps.uncg.edu/archon/index.php?p=collections/controlcard&id=608 |
Rights statement | http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/ |
Additional rights information | NO COPYRIGHT - UNITED STATES. This item has been determined to be free of copyright restrictions in the United States. The user is responsible for determining actual copyright status for any reuse of the material. |
Object ID | UA009.002.BD.2010FA.999 |
Digital publisher | The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, University Libraries, PO Box 26170, Greensboro NC 27402-6170, 336.334.5304 |
Full Text | Seventh Annual UNCG New Music Festival September 21-23, 2010 Greensboro, NC Schedule at a Glance Tuesday, September 21, 2010—Greensboro, NC Lecture I Bruce Mahin, Radford University Developing iPhone applications to promote your music UNCG Music Building Room 223 11:00-11:50 a.m. Free Walking Music Performances by Virginia Tech University L2Ork laptop orchestra, UNCG Percussion Ensemble, assorted performing groups UNCG Campus, various locations, outdoors 12:00 p.m. Free Lecture II Ico Bukvic, Virginia Tech University Putting Together a Laptop Orchestra UNCG Music Building, Room 129/131 (Electronic Music Studios) 3:30-4:45 p.m. Free Concert I Works and Performances by L2Ork laptop orchestra, Bruce Mahin, Anthony Taylor, Ron Coulter, Belinda Haikes and the Robert Rauschenberg Pilottone Experience Weatherspoon Art Museum, Atrium 7:30 p.m. Free Wednesday, September 22, 2010 —Greensboro Lecture III Masterclass with the NOW Ensemble UNCG Music Building, Room 233 10:00-10:50 a.m. Free Lecture IV CEMT Concert and Lecture Series Janice Misurell-Mitchell, Art Institute of Chicago Ellipse: Saxing Up the String Quartet (bring your lunch for this Brown Bag Lunch event) UNCG Music Building, Room 217 12:00-12:50 p.m. Free Lecture V Missy Mazzoli, MATA Festival of New Music Cathedral City: The Music of Missy Mazzoli (coffee will be provided for this after lunch event) UNCG Music Building, Room 217 1:00-1:50 p.m. Free Concert II UNCG Music Convocation Performances by the SKIN Ensemble, Marjorie Bagley, Kelly Burke, Carla Copeland-Burns, Mark Engebretson, Alex Ezerman, Kris Keeton, Scott Rawls Works by Janice Misurell-Mitchell, Alejandro Rutty, Kostas Karathanasis UNCG Music Building Recital Hall 4:00-4:50 p.m. Free Lecture VI NOW Ensemble discusses Music Business UNCG Music Building Computer Lab (Room 116) 5:00-5:50 p.m. Free Concert III Performances by the NOW Ensemble Works by Patrick Burke, Mark Dancigers, Judd Greenstein, Missy Mazzoli UNCG Music Building Recital Hall 7:30 p.m. $10 general / $6 seniors / $4 students / $3 UNCG students For tickets, contact the UNCG Box Office at 334.4849 Thursday, September 23, 2010—Greensboro Reading Session David Felberg, violin Presenting readings of new works by students Cody Curtis and Nicholas Rich UNCG Music Building, Room 223 11:00-11:50 a.m. Free Roundtable Discussion (bring your lunch for this Brown Bag Round Table Discussion) Discussion with Linda Dusman, Bernd Gottinger, Kostas Karathanasis, Alex Kotch, John Supko UNCG Music Building, Room 223 12:00-12:50 p.m. Free Lecture VII Bernd Gottinger, SUNY Fredonia Composing Production/Library Music UNCG Music Building, Room 129/131 (Electronic Music Studios) 3:30-4:45 p.m. Free CONCERT IV Performances by Marjorie Bagley, Susan Fancher, David Felberg, Kris Keeton, Janice Misurell- Mitchell, Clara OʼBrien Works by Pierre Boulez, Linda Dusman, Mark Engebretson, Alex Kotch, John Supko UNCG Music Building Recital Hall 7:30 p.m. $10 general / $6 seniors / $4 students / $3 UNCG students For tickets, contact the UNCG Box Office at 334.4849 Concert Programs Tuesday, September 21, 2010 Concert I – Weatherspoon Art Museum 7:30 pm, Free Future Past (10:00) Pilottone The Robert Rauschenberg Pilottone Experience Hassan Pitts, Belinda Haikes, Jennida Chase, laptop, sounds and images For Every Season… (8:30) Bruce Mahin Anthony Taylor, clarinet Half-Life (8:30) Ivica Ico Bukvic L2Ork Ivica Ico Bukvic, director Jared Denniston, Philip Dimotsis, Kyle Ellis, Hillary Guilliams, Zachary Gulsby, Michael Lipnick, Miles Mabry, Michael Matthews, Tyler McDonald, David Mudre, Steven Querry, Maya Renfro, Kaj Verschra, Andrew Street, Elizabeth Ullrich, Christopher Usher, Adam Wirdzek Citadel (5:00) Ivica Ico Bukvic Nicole Bonfiglio, soprano L2Ork 13 (8:30) Ivica Ico Bukvic Ron Coulter, percussion L2Ork Whatʼs He Building? (7:00) Tom Waits arr. Ivica Ico Bukvic Ron Coulter, narrator L2Ork Wednesday, September 22, 2010 Concert II – UNCG Convocation UNCG Music Building Recital Hall 4:00 pm, Free Dionysus (2009) Kostas Karathanasis 11:30 Kristopher Keeton, percussion Ellipse (2009) Janice Misurell-Mitchell 13:00 Kevin Geraldi, conductor Marjorie Bagley, violin Scott Rawls, viola Mark Engebretson, baritone saxophone Alexander Ezerman, cello Black Box Bossa (2010) Alejandro Rutty (world premiere) SKIN Ensemble Carla Copeland-Burns, flute Kelly Burke, clarinet Marjorie Bagley, violin Alexander Ezerman, cello James Douglass, piano Wednesday, September 22, 2010 Concert III – Music Building, UNCG Performances by NOW Ensemble Recital Hall, 7:30 pm $10 general / $6 seniors / $4 students / $3 UNCG students NOW Ensemble Abigail Fischer, mezzo-soprano Andrew Rehrig, flute Sara Budde, clarinet and bass clarinet Michael Mizrahi, electric guitar Logan Coale, double bass Change (2009) Judd Greenstein 13:00 Awake (2008) Patrick Burke 10:00 Burst (2008) Mark Dancigers 6:00 Intermission The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt music by Missy Mazzoli (excerpts) (2009) films by Stephen Taylor 40:00 Thursday, September 23, 2010 Concert IV – Music Building, UNCG Recital Hall, 7:30 pm $10 general / $6 seniors / $4 students / $3 UNCG students Anthèmes 2 (1998) Pierre Boulez 17:00 David Felberg, violin Strange Things Begin to Happen When a Meteor Mark Engebretson Crashes in the Arizona Desert (2010) text by Michael Basinski (world premiere) images by Wendy Collin Sorin 14:00 Janice Misurell-Mitchell, flute/voice Magnificat3: lament (2005) Linda Dusman 11:00 Marjorie Bagley, violin Intermission this window makes me feel (2005) John Supko 15:00 Clara OʼBrien, mezzo-soprano James Douglass, piano Kristopher Keeton, percussion Polyptoton (2009) Alex Kotch 8:00 Susan Fancher, tenor saxophone 2010 UNCG New Music Festival Bios and Program Notes Table of Contents I. People II. Ensembles III. Program Notes IV. Lecture Abstracts Entries are in alphabetical order: I. People Violinist Marjorie Bagley made her Lincoln Center concerto debut in 1997 with the Little Orchestra Society after beginning her performing career at the age of nine in her home state of North Carolina with the Asheville, Winston-Salem, and North Carolina Symphonies. Having graduated from the Manhattan School of Music in the first class of Pinchas Zukerman, she is active as a recitalist, chamber musician, and teacher. Marjorie has also performed as soloist with the Utah Symphony, Idaho Falls Symphony, Ann Arbor Symphony, the University of Michigan Symphony, and the Washington Square Music Series. As first violinist and founding member of the Arcata String Quartet, Marjorie performed in the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie, Londonʼs Wigmore Hall, and across Western Europe and the United States. She is also an active proponent for new music and has premiered works by Paul Chihara, David Noon, Nils Vigeland, and Judith Shatin. Through her travels to music festivals, Marjorie has had the opportunity to play with some of the great artists of our time including Pinchas Zukerman, Itzhak Perlman, Joseph Kalichstein, members of the Guarneri, Emerson, American, Tokyo, and Borromeo String Quartets. Ms. Bagley can be heard on recordings for the VOX, New World and Summit labels, and a recording of music for violin and percussion on the Equilibrium label featuring a concerto by Lou Harrison. Marjorie is the Co-Director of the Juniper Chamber Music Festival in Logan, Utah, which is becoming one of the most elite chamber music festivals in the nation. Ms. Bagley has been on the faculty of Ohio University, Utah State University, and the International Music Academy in Pilsen, Ms. Bagley has also taught at the Brevard Music Center, the Perlman Music Program, the Kinhaven Music School, and the Manhattan School of Music Preparatory Program. Michael Basinski is the Assistant Curator of the Poetry/Rare Books Collection of the University Libraries, SUNY at Buffalo.His poems, articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications including: Proliferation, Terrible Work, Deluxe Rubber Chicken, Boxkite, The Mill Hunk Herald, Yellow Silk, The Village Voice, Object, Oblek, Score, Generator, Juxta, Poetic Briefs, Another Chicago Magazine, Sure: A Charles Bukowski Newsletter, Moody Street Irregulars: A Jack Kerouac Newsletter, Kiosk, Earth's Daughters, Atticus Review, Mallife, Taproot, Transmog, B-City, House Organ, First Intensity, Mirage No.4/Period(ical), Lower Limit Speech, Texture, R/IFT, Chain, Antenym, Bullhead, Poetry New York, First Offence, and many others. For more than twenty years he has performed his choral voice collages and sound texts with his intermedia performance ensemble: The Ebma, which has released two Lps: SEA and Enjambment. Basinksiʼs books include: Idyll (Juxta Press, 1996), Heebee-jeebies (Meow Press, 1996), SleVep (Tailspin Press, 1995), Vessels (Texture Press, 1993), Cnyttan (Meow Press, 1993), Mooon Bok (Leave Books, 1992) and Red Rain Too (1992) and Flight to the Moon (1993) from Run Away Spoon Press. Pierre Boulez (born 1925) is a French composer of contemporary classical music and a conductor. One of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, Boulez continues today to be one of the foremost proponents of musical modernism. Sara Budde (clarinet/bass clarinet) performs frequently as a recitalist and chamber musician. Studying with David Shifrin, she recently received her Master of Music degree in clarinet performance from Yale University. Having premiered many works, including Kyle Gann's Last Chance Sonata and Judd Greenstein's The Sirens, for bass clarinet, Budde focuses primarily on recent and contemporary music, emphasizing newly-emerging composers. Sara has appeared with such dynamic groups as Bang on a Can, The American Composers Orchestra, Tactus, Arête Ensemble, The Woodstock Chamber Orchestra and The American Symphony Orchestra. The art of composer and multimedia sculptor Ivica Ico Bukvic (b.1976) is driven by the notion of ubiquitous interactivity. Bukvicʼs passion for computer music, multimedia art, and technology in conjunction with his traditional music composition background has resulted in a growing portfolio of aural and visual, acoustic and electronic, performances and installations, creative technologies, as well as research publications, grants and awards. Dr. Bukvic is currently working at Virginia Tech as an assistant professor in music composition & technology, the founder and director of the Digital Interactive Sound and Intermedia Studio (DISIS) and Worldʼs first Linux Laptop Orchestra (L2Ork), assistant co-director of the Collaborative for Creative Technologies in the Arts and Design initiative, a member of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction, and as a faculty (by courtesy) in departments of Computer Science and Art & Art History. Kelly Burke joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1989. She is currently the principal clarinetist of the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra and bass clarinetist of the Eastern Music Festival Orchestra. Equally at home playing Baroque to Bebop, she has appeared in recitals and as a soloist with symphony orchestras throughout the United States, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, and Russia. An avid chamber musician, Burke is frequently heard in concert with the Mallarmé Chamber Players, for whom she plays both clarinet and bass clarinet, the East Wind Trio d'Anches, Middle Voices (clarinet, viola and piano), and the Cascade Wind Quintet. Burke's discography includes several recent releases with Centaur Records: The Russian Clarinet, with works by Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Glinka, Melkikh, and Goedicke; Middle Voices: Chamber Music for Clarinet and Viola, featuring works by several American composers; and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: Chamber Music featuring the quintet and nonet. She has also recorded for Telarc, Albany and Arabesque labels. Burke has received several teaching awards, including UNCG's Alumni Teaching Excellence Award, the School of Music Outstanding Teacher Award, has been named several times to Who's Who Among America's Teachers, and was recently honored with the 2004 UNC Board of Governor's Teaching Excellence Award. She is the author of numerous pedagogical articles and the critically acclaimed book Clarinet Warm-Ups: Materials for the Contemporary Clarinetist. She holds the BM and MM degrees from the Eastman School of Music and the DMA. from the University of Michigan. Burke is an artist/clinician for Rico International and Buffet Clarinet. Patrick Burke composes visceral, emotionally charged music for chamber ensemble, orchestra, vocals, and electronic media. Formally tight, narrative structures are balanced with lyricism and a dream-like logic that is often inspired by film. He is a co-founder and core member of NOW Ensemble, a young group on the forefront of the indie classical scene “suggesting the shape of the sounds that will define art music in the early part of this new century" (Ed Montgomery, Context Studios). Patrickʼs works have been performed by the Minnesota Orchestra, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, eighth blackbird, the Yale Philharmonic, the Eugene Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, IonSound Project and Alia Musica. In 2007, Patrick composed the score for Behind Forgotten Eyes, an award-winning WWII documentary featured on History Channel Asia. His music appears on NPRʼs All Things Considered, and on NOW Ensembleʼs debut album, named one of the top classical recordings of 2008 by The New Yorker critic, Alex Ross. Jennida Chase is an electronic artist who currently explores and combines several aspects of media-based art, ranging from film, video, animation, sound and photography. Her BFA was completed at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998 with a concentration in film, video and sound. In 2009 she completed her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth Universityʼs department of Photography and Film. Themes within her work deal with relational interaction played out in society at large. Her work has been extensively shown in galleries and film/video festivals. She currently collaborates in and performs with experimental sound and multi-media ensemble Pilottone, and is a member of the HzCollective based in the mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. NOW Ensemble double bassist Logan Coale is a native of Portland, Oregon. Mr. Coale is the Assistant Principal Bass of the Sarasota Opera Orchestra and is on faculty at the Kinhaven Music School in Weston, Vermont. In New York, Mr. Coale is a member of NOW Ensemble, The Knights Chamber Orchestra, and William Brittelle's Television Landscape. He also performs with Alarm Will Sound, the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, the Wordless Music Orchestra, and The Long Count with members of The National. Mr. Coale is a graduate of the Tanglewood Music Center where he was a fellow in 2004 and 2006, and has participated in the Aspen, Schlesswig- Holstein, Domaine-Forget, National Repertory Orchestra, and Moritzburg Festival Academy summer music programs. He holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees in double bass performance from Boston University. His teachers include Edwin Barker, Principal Bass of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, BSO member Todd Seeber and Tim Pitts, Principal Bass of the Houston Symphony. Mr. Coale can be heard on Sony Classical with The Knights, XL Recordings and Parlophone Records with Jonsi Birgisson of Sigur Ros, and on New Amsterdam Records with NOW Ensemble and Television Landscape. Carla Copeland-Burns, flute, enjoys an active freelancing career with several ensembles including the North Carolina Symphony, the Opera Company of North Carolina, and the Carolina Ballet among others. She has performed over 300 concerts with the North Carolina Symphony, including numerous appearances as Principal flute. Since 1995 Burns has served as Piccoloist for the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra, Principal Flute in the Salisbury Symphony, and in the ongoing chamber groups Blue Mountain Ensemble (flute/bassoon/piano) and the Cascade Wind Quintet, a North Carolina Arts Council Touring Roster Ensemble. Chamber Music activity includes recital appearances across the United States, as well as in Canada and New Zealand, and at international conferences. Burns has recorded with ensembles on the Albany, Centaur, and Klavier labels and has been heard on several editions of NPRʼs Performance Today. Burns holds a Bachelor of Music with Honors degree from the Florida State University, the Master of Music in Flute Performance from the New England Conservatory, and is a Doctoral Candidate in Flute Performance from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (CCM). Ron Coulter is Senior Lecturer of Percussion Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and an Educational Endorser with the ProMark Corporation. He has toured internationally appearing in 43 U.S. states, Europe, Canada, and Japan. He has performed with the Glenn Miller Orchestra, Four Aces, Sean Jones, L2Ork, Al Martino, Tatsuya Nakatani, Sandy Duncan, Bolokada Condé, and Rapture7, among others. Ron has presented at numerous conferences including: ISIM, PASIC, MENC, IMEA, JEN, Futurisms, Sound Lines, RadiaLx, Athena Festival VI. He is co-founder of the Percussion Art Ensemble, RED VIXA, duende entendre, and artistic director of the Perkusiv Arts Elektronik and Southern Illinois Improvisation Series. Other performance credits include the Youngstown Symphony, Paducah Symphony, Chicago Chamber Orchestra, and Music from China. Additional interests include noise, acoustic ecology, interdisciplinary collaboration, and organizing Fluxusconcerts. As a composer, Ron has created more than 100 compositions and is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies. www.roncoulter.org Mark Dancigersʼ music has been called “entrancing”, “beguiling”, and “rich” (The New York Times). He has written music for the New York Youth Symphony, Opus 21, the Minnesota Orchestra, and members of So Percussion. His music has been heard at the Virginia Arts Festival, the Cabrillo Festival, the Percussive Arts Society International Conference, Merkin Hall, and BAM Café. As a guitarist he has performed with Tactus, the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, and has premiered a concerto by Kathryn Alexander. Mark studied composition at Yale and the Yale School of Music, and he is currently completing a PhD at Princeton University. James Douglass, assistant professor of collaborative piano and auditions coordinator for applications to the Accompanying and Chamber Music degree program, has been involved in diverse genres including chamber music, vocal arts, opera, choral arts, symphonic repertoire, jazz, cabaret, and musical theater. He received the BM and MM in piano performance from the University of Alabama and the DMA in collaborative piano from the University of Southern California where he was a student of Dr. Alan L. Smith; additional studies with collaborative Anne Epperson and Martin Katz. While at USC he received a Koldofsky Fellowship and the Outstanding Keyboard Collaborative Arts award. Douglass has served on the faculties of Mississippi College, Occidental College LA, USC, and Middle Tennessee State University where he was coordinator of the collaborative piano degree program. In 2003 he began teaching in the summer study program AIMS (American Institue of Musical Studies) in Graz, Austria as the instructor of collaborative piano and a coach in the lieder program with Harold Heiberg. Performances as a collaborative pianist have included recitals and television/radio broadcasts across the United States and in Europe (France, Germany, Austria, Hungary); in master classes given by artists Dawn Upshaw, Carol Vaness, Vladimir Chernov, Norman Luboff, Paul Salamunovich, Natalie Hinderas, Leon Bates. Douglass is also active as a clinician and recently completed a recording with soprano Hope Koehler of John Jacob Niles songs which was released on the Albany label in 2008. Linda Dusmanʼs compositions provide stimulating and thought-provoking listening experiences for audiences throughout the world. Recent premieres include her piano trio Diverging Flints, Skra for clarinet and fixed media, and Triptych of Gossips for soprano and violin. Her work has been awarded by the International Alliance for Women in Music, the State of Maryland (in both the Music: Composition and the Visual Arts: Media categories), and in February 2009 she was in residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts as a Mid-Atlantic Arts Fellow. Her compositions are published by Silent Editions and are recorded on the NEUMA, Capstone, and New Albany labels. As a frequent contributor to the literature on contemporary music and performance, Dr. Dusmanʼs articles have appeared in the journals Link, Perspectives of New Music, and Interface, as well as a number of anthologies. She was a founding editor of the journal Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, and is as an associate editor for Perspectives of New Music. Recently, she founded I Resound Press, a digital press/archive for music by women composers. Dr. Dusman is a Professor of Music at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), and served as Chair of the Music Department there from 2000-2008. Prior to her tenure at UMBC, she held the Jeppson Chair in Music at Clark University in Massachusetts. Mark Engebretson (b. 1964) is Associate Professor of Composition and Electronic Music at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He received commissions from the Fromm Music Foundation and the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts. His works have been presented at SEAMUS, ICMC, Bowling Green Festival of New Music, Third Practice Festival, Wien Modern, Gaida Festival, Sonoimagenes, Hörgänge Festival, Ny Musikk, Indiana State University New Music Festival, the Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival, ISCM Festivals, World Saxophone Congresses. He founded the UNCG New Music Festival in 2004, and is director of the A.V. Williams Electronic Music Studio at UNCG. Alexander Ezerman comes from a family where the cello runs four generations deep, including two former associate principals of the Philadelphia Orchestra. A prize winner in national and international competition, he has appeared as a soloist and chamber musician across the United States, Canada, Europe and South America. He is newly appointed to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro as Associate Professor of Violoncello. His previous position was at Texas Tech University, where he was a founding member of the Botticelli String Quartet. He also regularly performs with his wife, violinist Stephanie Ezerman, as the Ezerman Duo. An active advocate and performer of new music, he has been involved in numerous premiers, and has performed all twelve of the “Sacher” pieces for solo cello in a single recital. His most recent premiere, Ignis Fatuus for solo cello, by composer Teresa LeVelle, has been recorded on the Innova Label. During the summer, he is on the faculty of the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival in Burlington Vermont. He has previously been on the faculties of the Brevard Music Center and the Killington Music Festival. Ezerman holds a BM degree from Oberlin College Conservatory and a Master of Music and Doctorate of Musical Arts from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His primary mentors include Timothy Eddy, Norman Fischer, David Wells and his grandmother Elsa Hilger. Susan Fancher is known for her deep and poetic musical interpretations. A much sought after performer of new music, she has inspired and premiered dozens of new works for saxophone. The 2010-2011 season includes premiere performances of Lance Hulme's Sax Attractor for soprano saxophone and piano, to be presented in Chengdu and Beijing, China, as well as the premiere performances of Michael Torke's Concerto for soprano saxophone in its new version, commissioned by Susan Fancher together with a consortium of wind ensembles. This concert season also features the premiere performance of Chester Udell's Wakdjunkaga (the Trickster), commissioned by SEAMUS (Society of Electroacoustic Music in the US). Other recent performances as a concerto soloist include the world premiere of Hilary Tann's Shakkei for soprano saxophone and orchestra with the National Orchestra of Brazil under the leadership of Ligia Amadio and the Asian premiere with the Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Allan McMurray. Her 2009 CD release In Two Worlds (Innova 736) features music for saxophone and electronics by John Anthony Lennon, James Paul Sain, Mark Engebretson, Reginald Bain, Judith Shatin, Morton Subotnick and Edmund Campion. Susan Fancher is a regularly featured columnist for the nationally distributed Saxophone Journal. She is a clinician for the Selmer and Vandoren companies and teaches saxophone at Duke University. Violinist David Felberg, currently the associate concertmaster of the New Mexico Symphony, was recently named concertmaster of The Santa Fe Symphony Orchestra. He has recently appeared as soloist with the Santa Fe Symphony, New Mexico Symphony Orchestra, Albuquerque Philharmonic, Palo Alto Philharmonic, and the Balcones Orchestra, Upcoming solo performances include Shostakovich Concerto No. 1 with the New Mexico Symphony in 2011. He is an advocate of performing contemporary violin repertoire, and has performed works of composers such as Pierre Boulez, David Lang, John Adams and Richard Hermann. He is Conductor and Musical Director of Chatter, a chamber orchestra dedicated to 20th and 21st century music, Conductor of the Albuquerque Philharmonia, and Assistant Conductor of The University of New Mexico Symphony Orchestra. He is also artistic director of the Church of Beethoven, a Sunday morning concert series that was recently featured on NPR's All Things Considered. He was a participant in the American Academy of Conducting at the Aspen Music Festival in the summer of 2000. Felberg attended the University of Arizona where he received a degree in history, and went on to earn a Masters of Music degree in conducting from the University of New Mexico. In addition, he took advanced string quartet studies at the University of Colorado with the Takacs Quartet. Felberg made his New York City recital debut in Merkin Hall in June of 2005 and plays an 1829 J.B. Vuillaume violin. Equally expert at music from the Baroque era to contemporary work, mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer has performed with New York Collegium, Early Music New York, the Rebel Ensemble, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the Boston Pops, and has given world premieres of music by John Zorn, Elliot Carter, Nico Muhly, Missy Mazzoli, Bernard Rands, and the Bang on a Can artists. Recent highlights include the VOX contemporary opera showcase and the Chandler Carter opera Strange Fruit with New York City Opera, and an outreach production of Hansel and Gretel with New Jersey State Opera. Other recent productions include the Lee Hoiby premiere This is the Rill Speaking with American Opera Projects, and the Peter Westergaard premiere Alice in Wonderland with Center for Contemporary Opera. Ms. Fischerʼs relationship with new music ensembles such as Continuum and Sequitur has led to performances from Lincoln Center to Jakarta, Indonesia. She is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music (MM) and Vassar College (BA), and has been a resident artist at the Banff Music Centre, the Tanglewood Music Center, the Aspen Music Festival and School, Opera North, and the Lucerne Festival Academy. Kevin Geraldi is Associate Director of Bands and Director of Orchestral Activities at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In this capacity, he conducts the UNCG Symphony Orchestra, Symphonic Band, and Casella Sinfonietta, and is associate conductor of the UNCG Wind Ensemble. Dr. Geraldi appears regularly as a guest conductor and he maintains an active schedule as a clinician throughout the country. With the UNCG Wind Ensemble, he has performed in the Music Center at Strathmore, at the national CBDNA convention in Austin, Texas, at the NCMEA conference, and on several commercially available compact discs. A proponent of contemporary music and chamber music, he has commissioned and premiered numerous compositions and published articles in the Music Educators Journal, the Journal of Band Research,the Journal of the World Association of Symphonic Bands and Ensembles, andvolume 7 of Teaching Music Through Performance in Band. His compact disc leading the Minerva Chamber Players, featuring nonets by Johannes Brahms and Louise Farrenc, is available on the Centaur Records label. Dr. Geraldi holds the Doctor of Musical Arts and Master of Music degrees in instrumental conducting from the University of Michigan where he studied with H. Robert Reynolds and Michael Haithcock. He received his Bachelor of Music Education degree from Illinois Wesleyan University, where he studied conducting with Steven Eggleston. Bernd Gottinger has been active producing and engineering classical, contemporary, and popular music tracks and records for various international and national recording labels for over twenty years. His particular interest lies in commercial music composition and audio mixing and mastering. Dr. Gottinger is also a committed educator in the field of audio engineering and has held the position of Associate Professor of Music and Chair of the Sound Recording Technology Bachelors of Science program at the State University of New York in Fredonia since 1999. He holds a Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at New York University with a dissertation investigating sonic signatures in sound recording technology. Judd Greenstein was born and raised in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City, where he began his compositional life by writing hip hop beats as a teenager. His concert works reflect those origins, as well as his traditional piano background, combining an urban, beat-oriented sensibility with a late Romantic classical harmonic language. He has received degrees from Williams College and the Yale School of Music, has been a Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center and the Bang on a Can Summer Institute of Music, and is currently a fifth-year doctoral Fellow and Taplin Scholar at Princeton University, where he is writing a dissertation on hip hop music. Belinda Haikes is an interdisciplinary artist working in social media, digital media as well as traditional mediums. Influenced by having lived in three countries by the time she was 15, her work is centered on the poetics of identity construction in the post-human world and how technology creates connections to each other through art. Recent exhibitions include the Asian Arts Initiative, Philadelphia, Los Angeles Center for the Digital Art, Village Nomad, France, Digital Fringe, Australia, and the Weatherspoon Museum in North Carolina. Currently a PhD candidate in the Media Art and Text Program at Virginia Commonwealth University. She currently holds the position of Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, teaching in the digital design program. Konstantinos Karathanasis is an electroacoustic composer who draws inspiration from modern poetry, artistic cinema, abstract painting, mysticism, and the writings of Carl Jung. His compositions have been performed at numerous festivals and have received awards in international competitions, including Bourges, Musica Nova, and SEAMUS/ASCAP. Recordings of his music are released by SEAMUS, ICMA, Musica Nova, and broadcast by the Art of the States. Konstantinos holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from the University at Buffalo, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Composition & Music Technology at the University of Oklahoma. You can find more at http://music.ou.edu/oukon. Kristopher Keeton joined the School of Music faculty as Assistant Professor of Percussion in 2009. Prior to his appointment at UNCG, he served on the faculties of Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of Richmond, Trinity International University and the Eastern Music Festival. Keeton, a member of the Percussive Arts Society (PAS) Keyboard Committee, is active as a soloist and as a member of the Sympatico Percussion Group. He is a former member of the Eastern Philharmonic Orchestra, Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Owensboro Symphony Orchestra, and Phantom Regiment Drum and Bugle Corps. Keetonʼs performing credits also include the Chicago Symphony Orchestra MusicNOW Ensemble, Eighth Blackbird contemporary ensemble, Virginia Symphony, Louisville Orchestra, Chicagoland Pops Orchestra and Nashville Chamber Orchestra. He performed several concerts across Europe in January 2008 with the professional Swedish percussion ensemble Global Percussion Network. Keeton made his Carnegie Hall debut in March 2008, performing as featured soloist with the VCU Wind Ensemble. Keeton has appeared as a performer and soloist at multiple Percussive Arts Society International Conventions. Dr. Keeton earned doctoral and masters degrees at Northwestern University School of Music, with additional studies at Western Kentucky University. Keeton has studied with acclaimed percussionists Michael Burritt and Christopher Norton, James Ross of the Chicago Symphony, and drum set artists Chester Thompson and Paul Wertico. Kristopher Keeton is a Yamaha Performing Artist and an artist/educator for Innovative Percussion and Zildjian. Alex Kotch (b. 1983 in North Carolina) is a fresh new voice in contemporary music, fusing instrumental composition with an electronic dance style. In bringing together "propulsive, post- Minimalist rhythms" (New York Times) with an extensive background in jazz, pop, experimental, electronic, and West African music, he has received honors and fellowships from ASCAP, The Transatlantic Arts Consortium, Duke University, the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Sequenza21, and Juventas, and commissions from Ensemble Zellig, Trio Saxiana, Nicolas Prost, Silvia Lenzi, Michael Straus, EAR Duo, and Rachael Elliott. Alex's works, heard throughout the United States and France, have also seen performances by eighth blackbird, Odd Appetite, the Lost Dog Ensemble, and Susan Fancher. As a multimedia artist, he has received coverage from ABC News and The Associated Press, and as a performer on clarinet, saxophone, and laptop, he plays concerts and DJ sets along the East Coast. With a B.A. in Music from Brown University and a Masterʼs in Composition from Duke University, Alex is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Duke. Recent premieres include a multimedia opera in Los Angeles, a work for cello, electronica, and dancer in Paris, and Pas de deux, for alto saxophone, bassoon, and electronica, which Rachael Elliott and Susan Fancher have recorded for Rachael's upcoming album. Alex's next premiere is a work for bassoon and electronica, commissioned by Rachael Elliott, in Vermont this November, and his next DJ performance is September 30 at the Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Arts in Minneapolis, MN. Bruce P. Mahin is a Professor of Music, and Director of the Radford University Center for Music Technology. He received the B.Mus from West Virginia University, M.Mus from Northwestern University and the Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the Peabody Conservatory of The Johns Hopkins University. Mahin is a former president of the Southeastern Composers League, a former co-chair of Society of Composers Region 3, a former research fellow at the University of Glasgow (Scotland), and the recipient of awards from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, Meet the Composer, Annapolis Fine Arts Foundation, Res Musica, Southeastern Composers League and others. His works are available on compact disc through Capstone Recordings (CPS-8747, CPS- 8624 and CPS-8611) and published in score by Pioneer Percussion, Ltd. and in the Society of Composers Journal of Musical Scores. Missy Mazzoli was recently deemed "one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York" by the New York Times and "Brooklyn's post-millenial Mozart" by Time Out New York. Her music has been performed all over the world by the Kronos Quartet, the Minnesota Orchestra, eighth blackbird, the Spokane Symphony, and the South Carolina Philharmonic. Missy is also active as an educator, arts advocate, and performer. She is Executive Director of the MATA Festival of New Music, a festival which was co-founded by Philip Glass and is devoted to young composers. She recently taught at Yale University and has been a composer-in-residence with the Carnegie Hall Academy Program. Missy also performs regularly as a member of Victoire, an "all-star, all female quintet" (Time Out New York) that she founded in 2007 to perform her own music. Janice Misurell-Mitchell, composer, flutist and vocal artist is on the faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A member of CUBE Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, she was recently a featured composer at Art Chicago, the International Alliance for Women in Music Congress in Beijing, the Voices of Dissent series at the Bowling Green College of Musical Arts, the Outside the Box Festival at Southern Illinois University, the Robert Helps Festival at the University of South Florida, the Festival of Winds in Novara, Italy, and at the Randspiele Festival in Berlin. Her honors include grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, Meet the Composer, residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Ragdale Foundation, and awards and commissions from the National Flute Association, the Youth Symphony of DuPage, the International Alliance for Women in Music, Northwestern University and others. Her works are performed throughout the United States and Europe and have been played on the Public Broadcasting Network, the National Flute Association Conventions, at the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C, the Museum of Contemporary Art and Symphony Center in Chicago, and at Carnegie Hall. Her music is available on compact disks produced by MMC Recordings, OPUS ONE Recordings, Capstone Records, and Arizona University Recordings and is published by Margun Music (available through the Music Sales Group), the Needham Publishing Company, and Arizona University Publications. A CD featuring her music for flute, voice and percussion will be released by Southport Records later this year. Pianist Michael Mizrahi has been hailed for his “splendid powers of concentration” (The Washington Post) and performances that are “exciting to watch and hear” (The San Diego Union- Tribune). Dazzling audiences and critics alike, Mizrahi has been hailed for his compelling performances of a wide-ranging selection of music and his ability to connect with audiences of all ages. He has appeared as concerto soloist with some of the leading orchestras of the United States in addition to appearances as recitalist, chamber musician, and music educator. He has won several prizes in major competitions and has appeared in several prominent music festivals around the world. Mezzo Soprano Clara OʼBrien comes to the University of North Carolina Greensboro after more than twenty years of performing in Europe and the United States. For over seventeen years, Professor OʼBrien based her career in Germany and has appeared on the operatic and concert stages of such cities as Berlin, Luxembourg, Strasbourg, Dresden, Frankfurt, Chicago, Dallas and many others. Her professional career began when she was awarded the Sonderpreis des Badischen Staatstheater, a prize created specially for her at the 1st International Coloratura Competition, Sylvia Geszty. Her many roles range from Baroque to contemporary and include Octavian, Komponist, Adalgisa, Mignon, Dorabella, Donna Elvira, Elisabetta (Maria Stuarda), Rosina, Angelina (Cenerentola), Musetta, Helene (La Belle Hélène), Fenena (Nabucco) and numerous roles at the International Handel Festpiel. Her performances have been noted in Opernwelt as Best Performances in both the Emerging and Established Artist categories. Other awards include 1st Prize, Erika Koth Meisterkurs and Finalist in the International Belvedere Competition. Recordings include releases on the Bella Musica and Albany Records labels and she has been recorded and broadcast on Southwest German Radio and Television. Ms. O'Brien studied at the Eastman School of Music (M.M., Performance Certificate), the Curtis Institute of Music ,the Dana School of Music (B.M., Summa cum laude) and the Hochschule fur Musik, Heidelberg/Manneheim. She was an apprentice with the Chicago Lyric Opera Center for American Artists, the Aspen Music Festival and the Boris Goldovski Opera Institute. She received a Fulbright Grant to Germany and was awarded a fellowship to the Münchener Singschulʼ. Her teachers included Jan DeGaetani, Astrid Varnay, Erika Köth and Daniel Ferro. Hassan Pitts is an interdisciplinary artist interested in fashioning images around absorption, sensation, emotion, movement and gesture. Currently he splits his time examining issues of masculine gestures of the everyday and themes of transience, both emotional and physical. Hassan received a BFA in photography from Kutztown University, a BA in German studies from Dennison University and has most recently completed his MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University in photography and film. Hassan has shown regionally throughout the Mid-Atlantic and in Miami, Fl. Virginia is where he currently resides and produces work. Scott Rawls has appeared as soloist and chamber musician in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Japan, and Europe. Chamber music endeavors include performances with the Diaz Trio, Kandinsky Trio and Ciompi Quartet as well as with members of the Cleveland, Audubon and Cassatt String Quartets. His most recent CD recording, released on the Centaur label, features the chamber music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and was released summer 2004. His recording of chamber works for viola and clarinet was released spring 2003 on the same label. The ensemble, Middle Voices, will record another disc for Centaur featuring the chamber music of American composer, Eddie Bass. Additional chamber music recordings can be heard on the CRI, Nonesuch, Capstone, and Philips labels. Also a champion of new music, Rawls has toured extensively as a member of Steve Reich and Musicians since 1991. As the violist in this ensemble, he has performed the numerous premieres of The Cave and Three Tales, multimedia operas by Steve Reich and Beryl Korot, videographer. Dr. Rawls currently serves as Associate Professor of Viola in the School of Music, Theatre and Dance at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Under the baton of maestro Dmitry Sitkovetsky, he plays principal viola in the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra. He is very active as guest clinician, adjudicator, and master class teacher at universities and festivals in America and Europe. During the summers, Rawls plays principal viola in the festival orchestra at Brevard Music Center where he also coordinates the viola program. He holds a BM degree from Indiana University and a MM and DMA from State University of New York at Stony Brook. His major mentors include Abraham Skernick, Georges Janzer, and John Graham. First alternate flutist Andrew Rehrig began his studies of the flute at the age of 12 and two years later gave his concerto debut with the Ludwig Symphony Orchestra in Atlanta, GA. He went on to continue studies at Indiana University with Thomas Robertello, where he received his Bachelor of Music degree. While still an undergraduate, Mr. Rehrig was invited to become a member of the Columbus, IN Philharmonic Orchestra, a position he held until graduation. During that time he was also invited to play with several orchestras throughout Indiana and Kentucky, including the Owensboro Symphony and the Evansville Philharmonic. Having completed a Master's degree at Stony Brook University under the direction of Carol Wincenc, Mr. Rehrig appeared regularly as a substitute flutist forBeauty and the Beast on Broadway, as well as with the Brooklyn Philharmonic and the New England Symphonic Ensemble. Mr. Rehrig is a finalist for and substitute flutist with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, the New World Symphony and the Charleston, (SC) Symphony Orchestra. He was the guest principal second flutist of the Florida Grand Opera and the principal flutist of the Chamber Orchestra of New York. As a proponent of new music, Mr. Rehrig is dedicated to commissioning and premiering new works for flute, as well as the regular performances of contemporary music. Born in Argentina, composer Alejandro Ruttyʼs output includes orchestral, chamber, mixed-media music, and arrangements of Argentine traditional music. Ruttyʼs compositions and arrangements have been played by the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra of Argentina, National Symphony Orchestra of Brazil, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, among other groups. Recordings of his music have been released by Capstone Records, Arizona University Recordings, and ERM. Media Founder and Artistic Director of the Hey, Mozart! Project, Alejandro Rutty is currently Assistant Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Wendy Collin Sorin, of Durham, North Carolina, received her B.F.A. in printmaking from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1993. She later studied waterless lithography with Nik Semenoff at the University of Saskatchewan. She has taught his experimental methods at Zygote Press in Cleveland, Ohio and at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. In addition to exhibiting her work in print, drawing and collage, her artist book collaborations include: Strange Things Begin to Happen When a Meteor Crashes in the Arizona Desert (with poet Michael Basinski; Burning Press; 2001), which was awarded an Ohio Arts Council project grant, Ghost of a Chance, (with Robert Miltner; Zygote Press and Idlewild Press; 2002), ABZU (with Michael Basinski; Runaway Spoon Press; 2003), P.S. At Least We Died Trying to Make You in the Backseat of the Taxidermist (with Derek White; calamari press; 2005), name cloud (with John M. Bennett; fabelhaft press and Luna Bisonte Prods.; 2005 ) and TELLTHISMUCH (with Carlos M.Luis; Runaway Spoon Press; 2005.) W the Movie, a film inspired by Strange Things Begin to Happen When a Meteor Crashes in the Arizona Desert, and done in collaboration with Indiana filmmaker Alfred Eaker, won Best Experimental Film at the New York International Independent Film & Video Festival in March 2009. In 2000, Sorin was an artist-in-residence at the Grafikwerkstatt in Dresden, a yearly exchange program sponsored by the Ohio Arts Council between the German printmaking workshop and Zygote Press. In 2004, she was project director and co-curator for a traveling retrospective exhibition (Cleveland, Columbus, Dresden) of the exchange program which included a bilingual catalogue. Sorinʼs work is in numerous private and public collections including The Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry (Miami Beach, Florida); Avant Writing Collection, The Ohio State University (Columbus); Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (New Haven, Connecticut); Brown University Library (Providence, Rhode Island); Poetry/Rare Books Collection, State University of New York, Buffalo; Ashland University, Ashland, Ohio; The Cleveland Institute of Art artistsʼ book collection; Millersville University, Millersville, PA; Hahn, Loeser & Parks LLP, Cleveland; Ohio Building Commission, Columbus, Ohio; Champion International Corporation, Hamilton, Ohio. Composer John Supko was born in 1980 on Long Island, New York. He holds degrees from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music (BM) and Princeton University (MFA & PhD). He is a recipient of the Fulbright (2002) and Georges Lurcy (2007) fellowships, both for Paris, France, where he studied at the Ecole Normale de Musique. He has won numerous prizes and grants, among which the BMI Student Composer Award, two ASCAP/Morton Gould Young Composers Awards (including the 2008 Leo Kaplan Award), the Grand Prize of the National Young Composers Competition, the Perkins Prize of the Princeton University Music Department and a Commissioning Music/USA Meet The Composer commission. His work has been published in collaborative editions with the poet Philippe Denis by Collection Mémoires (Paris) and, most recently, by Harpo & (Marseille). Future projects include a string quartet for the Ciompi Quartet and an opera on the lives of Paul and Jane Bowles with poet Karren LaLonde Alenier. John Supko lives in Durham, NC, where he is Assistant Professor of Composition at Duke University. A commercial DVD of the works This Window Makes Me Feel and Littoral is scheduled for release in September 2011 on New Amsterdam Records. More information is available at www.johnsupko.com. Anthony Taylor joined the UNCG School of Music faculty in 2007, and was also recently appointed as Principal Clarinet of the Winston-Salem Symphony. He is also an active solo, chamber, and jazz musician. This fall, he presented a paper on his research into John Adamsʼs clarinet concerto Gnarly Buttons in Bangor, Wales at the International Conference on Music and Minimalism. Recent performance highlights include the world premiere of Seattle composer Gail Grossʼs Bossa Velha at the Washington State Music Teacherʼs Association convention, solo performances with jazz piano master Dick Hyman, and the world premiere recording of Gregory Yasinitskyʼs solo clarinet work For All That Has Been Given. He has been a member of the Spokane Symphony, the Boise Philharmonic, Spokane Opera and professional contemporary music ensemble Zephyr. He has been on the faculties of Washington State University, Eastern Washington University, Whitman College and Gonzaga University. Each August, Taylor also teaches at the Midsummer Musical Retreat, a week-long camp for adult amateur musicians. In summer 2007, he completed his doctorate at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and also holds degrees from The Florida State University and Washington State University. Stephen Taylor has been directing and editing documentary films for the past seven years, working in New York and Europe. He directed and edited four award-winning half-hour documentaries on various criminal-justice-related subjects while working for Youth Rights Media, an acclaimed youth-oriented documentary production company. With American Beat Films, where he currently works as an editor and director, he has directed and edited two hour-long documentaries, and co-produced several others. Tom Waits (born 1949) is an American singer-songwriter, composer and actor. Waits has a distinctive voice, described by critic Daniel Durchholz as sounding "like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car.” (Wikipedia) II. Ensembles Linux Laptop Orchestra (L2Ork): L2Ork, founded by Dr. Ivica Ico Bukvic in May 2009, is part of the latest interdisciplinary initiative by the Virginia Tech Music Departmentʼs Digital Interactive Sound & Intermedia Studio (DISIS). As the worldʼs first Linux-based laptop orchestra L2Ork offers optimal infrastructure for creative research at minimal cost. By providing a seamless integration of arts and sciences it is in part designed to bridge the gap between STEM and the Arts, with particular focus on K-12 education. As an emerging contemporary intermedia ensemble, L2Ork thrives upon the quintessential form of collaboration found in the western classical orchestra and its cross-pollination with increasingly accessible human-computer interaction technologies for the purpose of exploring expressive power of gesture, communal interaction, discipline-agnostic environment, and the multidimensionality of arts. Hailed as "a deft young group gaining attention" (Alex Ross, The New Yorker) and "a smart young chamber group that straddles a line between contemporary classical music and indie rock," (John Schaefer, WNYC), NOW Ensemble is a collection of performers and composers dedicated to making new chamber music for the 21st century. With a unique instrumentation of flute (Alex Sopp/ Andrew Rehrig), clarinet (Sara Budde), electric guitar (Mark Dancigers), double bass (Logan Coale), and piano (Michael Mizrahi), NOW Ensemble brings a fresh sound and a new perspective to the classical tradition, infused with a blend of musical influences that reflects the diverse backgrounds and listening experiences of their members. NOW has premiered over 60 works, including those by composer-members Patrick Burke, Mark Dancigers, and Judd Greenstein, along with many more by a cross-section of the top young voices in contemporary composition, such as Ryan Brown, David T. Little, Missy Mazzoli, Nico Muhly, and dozens more. NOW Ensemble has performed at a wide variety of venues, such as the Bang on a Can Marathon, the Festival Internacional de Chihuahua, Pittsburgh's Music on the Edge, the Carlsbad Music Festival, Sarasota's New Music New College, Wordless Music, and Look & Listen; in New York, they can regularly be heard at diverse venues such as Le Poisson Rouge, Joe's Pub, Galapagos Art Space and the Chelsea Art Museum, as well as on WNYC radio. Their first album, NOW, was released in 2008 to rave reviews around the country, including on AllMusic.com (five stars): "a first-class debut...more of this is demanded, not requested." Newsweek's Seth Colter Walls wrote, "NOW... imports a catchy inflection to classical forms... Striking a balance between the old and the new has rarely sounded this good.” The Robert Rauschenberg Pilottone Experience is an experimental sound ensemble with a revolving cast of members. Three core members include Jennida Chase, Belinda Haikes and Hassan Pitts. Pilottoneʼs live work is electronically driven sound improvisation, which occasionally employs more traditional instrumentation. Pilottone includes video in their live performances and has also created sound tracks for still photography and makes non-trad ʻmusicʼ videos. The group has performed with Stephen Vitiello, Blevin Blectum, Anduin, Caustic Castle, The Grapefruit Experiment and many other sound/noise artists. III. Program Notes 13 (Ivica Ico Bukvic) is a game of prime numbers and primal instincts pitting timbre against rhythm. Driven by conductorʼs oversight over an array of performer-specific and ensemble-wide parameters, a networked ensemble acts as one large meta-tracker where each individual performer contributes its own gesture-driven motives or tracks. The ensuing meta-tracker texture is superimposed against improvised acoustic percussion in a search of a meaningful discourse and ultimately musical synergy. Awake (Patrick Burke) combines the cyclic processes and layers of Javanese gamelan music with harmonies and colors of Western classical and popular music. From a very quiet beginning of plucked piano strings and electric guitar, the music builds momentum and gradually accelerates to a frenetic pace, only to slow down and settle into a new cycle that seems to transcend all that came before it. Personally, I see this as a journey from the anxieties of daily life to an awareness of the larger world and all of the possibilities within it. In Buddhism there is a principle that the self and the universe are mutually inclusive--the entire universe is contained within the self, and the self permeates the entire universe. Awake is a meditation on this principle. Black Box Bossa (Alejandro Rutty) is a Bossa Nova living inside a granular sampler. As such, this metaphorical sampler segments the song into tiny grains, only to play them in erratic back-and- forth patterns, altering the length of the excerpts, the starting and ending place of the samples, and the size of the grains or segments. After hearing Black Box Bossa It may be possible, perhaps, to reconstruct the (newly composed) song, but even if it were not possible, the bossa will infuse the black box with a calm, tropical sense of longing. Burst (Mark Dancigers) combines some elaborate African-inspired guitar licks with Mozart-inspired counterpoint and harmony. The piece cycles through its main themes twice, the second time doubling each melody with two instruments. Change (Judd Greenstein): In times when people seem ready to entrust our broken systems with their hopes of making positive change, it's most important to step up and, as Gandhi said, 'be the change you want to see in the world'. This piece represents my own reminder to myself to always keep that fire lit. Citadel (Ivica Ico Bukvic) for soprano and L2Ork draws inspiration from a famous poem "Himna Slobodi" (Hymn to Freedom) by the 17th century Croatian poet Ivan Gundulic. As the first piece ever written for the newfound ensemble, it relies upon pervasive tonality, in many ways posing as an electronic counterpart to a traditional string ensemble. Using the infinite-bow metaphor to create lush tonal harmonies the piece forms a compelling aural foundation for a lyrical showcase of soloist's vocal talent. Dionysus (Kostas Karathanasis): Changing forms, volatile, brutal, benevolent, chased and menacing, dismembered and resurrected, ceremonious, clamorous, mystic, inspirational, ecstatic, patron of tragedy and comedy. Dionysus is the god who embodies primitive instinctual forces of life, irresistible, inexorable, ever triumphing. The piece is written in MaxMSP. The software tracks the percussionistʼs attacks, amplitude, rhythm and density. This information is used to trigger various real-time sound transformation routines and pre-recorded materials. The whispered texts are from Euripides Bacchae. Many thanks to Dr. Ricardo Souza for commissioning this work and for his enhancing suggestions. Dionysus was also made possible with the partial support of funds from the Research Council of University of Oklahoma. Ellipse (Janice Misurell-Mitchell), for baritone saxophone, violin, viola and cello, was commissioned by composer and saxophonist Mark Engebretson. It is dedicated to the memory of our dear, late friend and my mentor, M. William Karlins (1932 – 2005), Professor of Music Theory and Composition at Northwestern University from 1967 to 2001. In 1974 Bill wrote his Quintet for Alto Saxophone and String Quartet, a piece about which we had had numerous discussions. As I began writing it became clear to me that I needed to find a way to recognize some of Billʼs ideas in my own piece. Thus there is an “In Memoriam” section in two parts: the first uses one of Billʼs note series in an espressivo form, as a development of the section that precedes it; the second uses it as a more direct “steal” from the third movement of Billʼs piece—a movement, which, ironically, uses the same first five pitches that my row for Ellipse uses. (I choose not to make much of this, even though the relationship was not intentional...) The piece takes its title from the image of the ellipse: the shape appears in either upright or inverted forms in the ensembleʼs phrases, and often in the relationship of the voices to each other. The baritone saxophone is used at times as an equal member of the ensemble and at other times as a soloist. I would like to thank the Ragdale Foundation for providing me with support and solitude in 2008 as I worked on this piece. For Every Season . . . (Bruce Mahin) is representative of my interest in creating expressive, interesting music from very economical structures. Hence, the inspiration for the work is emotional and spiritual. The actual composition, however, is based solely on a four-note unordered pitch collection (C-C#-F-G) manipulated by transposition, inversion and various re-orderings. Pilottoneʼs performance Future Past springs form William Gibsonʼs idea of “Locative arts”, an art that finds the hidden history, the ghost moments of what has gone before. It is the remnants of memory given to the future. Using electronic media, sound and video, pilottone brings the audiovisual history of points in time to present. Half-Life (Ivica Ico Bukvic) for solo narrator and L2Ork is a texture-based exploration of electronic percussion and its recontextualization through the use of unique opportunities inherent to the L2Ork ensemble. The ensuing soundscape draws inspiration from the writings and experiences of Elena Filatova on her solo motorcycle ride through Chernobylʼs dead zone. The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt (Missy Mazzol, music; Stephen Taylor, film) INTRODUCTION Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904) was an explorer, nomad, journalist, novelist, passionate romantic, Sufi, and one of the most unique and unusual women of her era. At age twenty, after the death of her mother, brother and father, she left her life in Switzerland for a nomadic and unfettered existence in the deserts of North Africa. She traveled extensively through the desert on horseback, often dressed as a man, relentlessly documenting her travels through detailed journals. At age twenty-seven Isabelle drowned in a flash flood in the desert. The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt uses texts inspired by her writing to immerse the audience in the surreal landscapes of Isabelle's life; she describes the death of her family, the thrill of her arrival in Africa, her tentative joy at falling in love, the elation of self-discovery and the mystery of death. COMPOSER'S NOTE In 2004, within hours of picking up a copy of her journals in a Boston bookstore, I officially became obsessed with Isabelle Eberhardt's strange and moving life story. Within two weeks I had read everything she had ever written and nearly everything written about her, but despite my compulsive reading habits, I still had more questions than answers. I was struck by the universal themes of her story – how much her struggles, her questions, her passions, mirrored those of women throughout the 20th and 21st century. Isabelle made a great effort to define herself as an independent woman under extreme circumstances. She dressed as a man, seeing this as the only way to move freely and live the life of her choice. She let herself fall deeply in love but struggled to maintain her independent lifestyle. I knew immediately that I wanted to create a large-scale work about Isabelle, and I knew that I wanted it to be more of a personal response to her life than a detailed retelling of her story. I needed to start answering my own questions, imagining how she felt, filling in the spaces between journal entries and exploring the universality that make her story so vibrant and relevant to me over one hundred years after her death. In 2007, three years after discovering Isabelle, I began work on the libretto for The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt, pulling phrases and ideas from her journals and creating singable texts that, over the following year, I set to music. Working in response to my score, Stephen Taylor started to create films using archival footage from the early 20th century, generating a collection of images that went beyond a mere depiction of Isabelle's story to reflect the emotional themes of each section. Early in 2009 Steve and I began our collaboration with director Gia Forakis, who worked with us to stage the work and bring together all the elements of the project. I wrote this work for NOW Ensemble and Abigail Fischer, musicians whose virtuosic technique and adventurous spirit made them an ideal choice for what I envisioned. What you are seeing tonight is a concert version of what we hope will one day be an evening-length opera. PROGRAM NOTES/LIBRETTO 1. Overture "I am alone, sitting facing the grey expanse of the shifting sea... I am alone... alone as I've always been everywhere, as I'll always be throughout this seductive and deceptive universe…" 2. This World Within Me is Too Small "What urges me, though, to restlessness and keeps thrusting me onto life's roads, is not the wisest voice in my soul; it is a side of me that finds the earth too limited, and is unable to find in myself a sufficient universe." [Isabelle is reeling after the death of her mother, father and brother. Her only solace is the thought of leaving Geneva for Africa.] Death moves his hands through me again A lonely outsider among men I'll keep my silence here I'll leave this place alone I'll give myself to no one at all Death moves his hands through me again A lonely outsider among men This world within me is too small But still inside me something sings I'll keep my silence here I'll leave this place alone 3. Interlude 1 "My soul, too, has begun to stir again. A nomad I was even when I was very small and would stare at the road, that spellbinding white road headed straight for the unknown... and I shall stay a nomad all my life, in love with changing horizons, unexplored, far-away places, for any voyage, even to the most crowded and well-traveled countries, is an exploration." 4. I Have Arrived "Everything has come to life again, and so has my soul. Yet, as always, I also feel a boundless sadness, an inarticulate longing for something I cannot describe, a nostalgia for some other place for which I have no name.” [Isabelle arrives in Algeria at age twenty-one.] I have arrived- I'll pick out my own song, a music that will bleed the heart into silence. I have arrived - I'll pick out my own song, line by line, and at last throw back my head and sing. 5. You are the Dust "And all the time the secret joy of knowing that I will leave tomorrow at dawn, leave all these things which are still pleasing and dear to me this evening. Who but a nomad, a vagabond, could understand this double rejoicing? Once more astounded by all that has captured me and all I have left, I tell myself that love is a worry and that what's necessary is to love to leave - persons and things being loveliest when left behind." [Isabelle falls in love with Slimene Ehnni, an Algerian soldier. Their relationship is marked by long periods apart, during which Isabelle restlessly roams the desert on horseback.] you are the dust you are the sand you are the breathing earth you are the flood you are the road you are the flood you are the one the one most loved when left behind 6. Interlude 2 "Where is destiny taking me?!" 7. Where Footprints Erase the Graves "Soon, the solitary, woeful figure that I am will vanish from this earth, where I have always been a spectator, an outsider among men." [Isabelle is killed when a flash flood destroys her house, and she drowns in the desert she loves. She is twenty-seven years old.] here where footprints erase the graves a tranquil heart is mine here where footprints erase the graves these hours are no more than moments of light in this blanket of blazing stars "It seems to me that I am not meant to disappear without having plumbed the depths of this enigma, from its strange beginnings to the present." SONG FROM THE UPROAR: The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt is underwritten by the American Composers Forum with funds provided by the Jerome Foundation, with additional support from Free Speech Zone Productions and the American Music Center. magnificat 3: lament (Linda Dusman): My music in recent years comprises a weaving together of disparate elements. Commissioned by Airi Yoshioka as a work for violin and electronics, I began contemplating magnificat 3 during the US occupation of Iraq, and began composing it as the 17-year cicadas emerged during the spring of 2004, with final revisions in 2005. This composition is the third in a series of works that began as a reflection on the Virgin Maryʼs text: “My soul doth magnify the lord,” but which were interrupted by world events beginning with September 11, 2001. I realized that “magnificat 3” was a lament late one night when I was working on the piece and my 8-year-old son woke screaming from a nightmare in which “the war in Iraq came here.” Afterward I realized how much world events had been weighing on me as well. I imagined how much worse, and more frequent, must be the nightmares of the children in Iraq, whose parents cannot shelter them from the constant violence there. “magnificat 3” in the end is a lament for all children who are victims of violence. Polyptoton (Alex Kotch) is a rhetorical figure in which words from the same root but with different inflections appear in close proximity. For example, Robert Frost wrote, “Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.” Of the great Latin poets, Ovid is most well known for his use of this figure. He uses many variations of polyptoton in his works, and one such variation is two pairs of words in symmetric order: quid, Agenore nate, peremptum serpentem spectas? et tu spectabere serpens. (Metamorphoses, iii 97-98) Why gaze, son of Agenor, at the serpent you have killed? You too shall be a serpent to be gazed on. Latinʼs flexible word order allowed writers to use rhetorical figures quite liberally; music is the same way. The piece includes plenty of true repetition, but it also features many musical polyptotons, or slightly altered repetition. The first fast section, when repeated phrases slowly shift their rhythms and occasionally their pitch while still maintaining the same character, and a later section, which emulates a skipping compact disc by varying the particular segment of the phrase that is repeated, are just two instances that embody the workʼs title. The work was originally commissioned by Nicholas Prost for saxophonist Jean-Yves Chevalier for performance at the 2009 Festival Saxophone en Fête in Paris on January 31, 2009. Tonight is the version for saxophone and electronica, written for Susan Fancher. All of the electronic playback is derived from a recording of Susan playing her tenor saxophone. Work on Strange Things Begin to Happen When a Meteor Crashes in the Arizona Desert (Mark Engebretson/Michael Basinksi/Wendy Collin Sorin) began shortly after enigmatic sound/art/poet Michael Basinskiʼs appearance at the 2008 UNCG New Music Festival. I asked Michael whether he had any text I might consider setting, and he responding with this extraordinary book—all black and white--of the same name he produced in collaboration with visual artist Wendy Collin Sorin (see Wendyʼs note on her engagement with this project). The book contains, when read front to back, a collection of texts in Basinskiʼs highly personal idiom of invented letters, imagery, ciphers and symbolism. Read backwards (and upside-down), the book presents a “mutated rondeau” in relatively “normal” language. Using this rondeau as the basis for my composition, I had friends, family and colleagues read one or two pages each, and then used their recorded voices to generated a “musicalized” electronic score. This was developed in conjunction with a solo flute part, which brings us back many years earlier when my friend from Chicago, Janice Misurell-Mitchell and I cooked up the idea that we would each write pieces for each other, and do performances in our home locales and abroad. Janice specializes in, among other things, the performance of text while playing her instrument, and I thought this would be a perfect match for her, my music, and the book. The flute interacts in many ways with the electronic score as well as the visual element, for example by commenting on the “upside down” portions of text, dramatizing or vocalizing certain text fragments, or interacting with the musical element of the spoken/musicalized texts in a more or less conventional musical way. Finally, with the kind contribution of color pictures Wendy had provided, I created a kind of montage of the images that syncs up with the musical element, trying to capture the flavor of the process of overlapping emails and photocopies that she and Basinski used in the original book. --Mark Engebretson Strange Things Begin to Happen When a Meteor Crashes in the Arizona Desert began in 1998 with a “sex-text” performance poem in need of visual imagery and a format. Men, women, the flying patterns of bees, and codes were tied together by a snaking trail of overprinted emails written between poet Michael Basinski, publisher/typographer luigi-bob drake and myself. The book caught the attention of Indiana filmmaker Alfred Eaker and began its next transformation: W the movie, with additions from a script by Eaker and the Anti-War Manifesto of Columbus poet John M. Bennett. Through four years of writing, drawing, ongoing conversation, filming and editing, new images were generated and further informed by current events: a Dr. Strangelove on steroids with bombs & Saddam, W. & the Rapture. Earlier this year, Mark Engebretson contacted me asking for permission to use the images from the book for a video to accompany his composition inspired by meteors and all things strange. I sent him the additional, reworked drawings from the film project: STBtHWaMCitAD, Part 3. --Wendy Collin Sorin This Window Makes Me Feel (John Supko) was composed in 2005 as part of the requirements for the General Examination in the Music Department at Princeton University. The music, scored for mezzo soprano, keyboards, percussion and electronics, is a partial setting of Robert Fittermanʼs enormous text of the same name. In his work, Fitterman uses the phrase “This window makes me feel” as the basis of hundreds of Google searches in which the results complete the sentence over and over again, creating over time a unique portrait of humanity. Sometimes funny, sometimes mundane, often surprisingly meaningful, the text accumulates a poignancy that I found intriguing. I also saw in it a simple musical structure, with the title phrases acting as a ʻrefrainʼ and each search result supplying the verses. I applied this structure to the musical setting in which the mezzo-soprano sings “This window makes me feel” continuously in long, slow phrases while a recorded voice whispers the rest of the text. After I finished the music, I had the idea to approach Don Sheehy, at that time a senior in Princetonʼs Computer Science Department, about making a video for my piece. He agreed, and got to work taking a digital camera – often clandestinely, sometimes illegally – around New York. Though there is nothing explicitly connected to New York in the text, we felt that it gave the impression of being in the middle of a bustling city in which each sentence represented a different personʼs private thoughts. This view of the text provided a meditative counterpoint to the image of contemporary urban life and, we hope, can be heard and seen in the various sonic and visual layers of work. Whatʼs He Building? (Tom Waits, arr. Coulter/Bukvic): An adaptation of Tom Waitsʼ famous work for L2Ork and narrator explores juxtaposition of concrete and digital, sound and choreography; an exercise in participatory listening; a communal experience of the American Dream gone awry. IV. Lecture Abstracts Inspirations, Ideals, and the Reality – How L2Ork Turned My Creativity (and my Life!) Upside Down Ivica Ico Bukvic, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Linux Laptop Orchestra or simply L2Ork is by far the most demanding undertaking of my creative career. Not only has it reshaped my creative focus, it has also redefined the very core values that have been the driving force behind my creativity for more than a decade. I would like to use this opportunity to share with the audience L2Orkʼs exhilarating journey, important lessons I learned along the way, and a vision of what I see as the future of human-centric and ensemble-driven computer music. Composing Production/Library Music Bernd Gottinger, SUNY Fredonia, New York Production or Library Music belongs to the realm of music publishing and has experienced a considerable growth in the past couple of decades. Large conglomerates such as Sony ATV, Warner Chappell, and Universal Music Publishing, among others, are strong contenders in the field, and are concerned with growing their catalogues. Since production music often is created by a single person who delivers the work in the form of a recorded master, it requires a combination of traditional music production skills; music performance, music composition, electronic synthesis, and audio engineering. Combining these different skills and talents successfully may result in a significant source of income for a technologically savvy composer. The presentation will feature a demonstration of how the production of library music may be approached. Furthermore it seeks to answer questions pertaining to the nature, time frame, styles, and financial ramifications of production music. Developing iPhone applications to promote your music. Bruce Mahin, Radford University, Virginia Social networking sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, and RealSpace, have become the way to promote your music and your skills as a musician. Mobile devices, like the iPhone, offer another way to help people access your music 24/7. This presentation will show you how to get started developing your own iPhone application as a promotion tool. It will cover the potential inherent in these applications, the basic logistics of getting started, and introduce you to the programming skills involved in developing your own applications. Ellipse: “Saxing up the String Quartet” Janice Misurell-Mitchell, Art Institute of Chicago Ellipse, for baritone saxophone, violin, viola and cello, was commissioned by composer and saxophonist Mark Engebretson. In writing for saxophone and strings I wanted to explore the combination from different viewpoints: an overall unified sound; the instruments in pairs, often with contrasting musical ideas; the saxophone as a soloist with a trio of strings; and all four voices as independent, but with a common rhythmic foundation. I was also interested in creating music that at times had more of a string quartet style, and more of a saxophone quartet style at others. I found that the baritone saxophone blended quite well with the strings, complementing the sound with added warmth and darkness, rather than standing out as an intruder (this works also because of the timbre of the baritone saxophone). The piece takes its title from the image of the ellipse: the shape appears in either upright or inverted forms in the ensembleʼs phrases, and often in the relationship of the voices to each other. |
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