Visiting artist Elliot Caplan

 

We are happy to announce that the Emmy-award winning filmmaker Elliot Caplan, famed for his work with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and John Cage will be giving a lecture to graduate composition students on Friday November 6th. Caplan served as the filmmaker-in-residence for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. His work in documentary, art filmmaking, and performance with choreographer Cunningham, composer John Cage video artist Nam June Paik and filmmaker Bruce Baillie is internationally recognized.  Caplan’s films and videos are in museum and film collections throughout the world. Caplan received an Emmy Award for “Outstanding Cultural and Historical Programming” for his work on the PBS Network. He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards. Film and video retrospectives have been presented in Portugal, Holland, Japan and the United States. He has taught courses, lectured and been in residence at colleges and universities in the United States and abroad including co-direction with Michael Kidd and Stanley Donen of the Dance/Film/Video Workshop at the Sundance Institute. In 1996, Caplan founded Picture Start Films to facilitate his artistic work.

Guest composer James Romig

We are very pleased to welcome the composer James Romig back to Buffalo since last his last visit in 2012. He was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Music, responds to an increasingly fragmented and accelerated world by creating highly isomorphic works that evolve slowly and reveal themselves gradually. Endeavoring to reflect the fragile intricacy of the natural world, his compositional designs exert influence on both small-scale iteration and large-scale structure, obscuring boundaries between form and content. Critics have described his music as “rapturous, slow-moving beauty” (San Francisco Chronicle), "developing with the naturalness of breathing" (The New Yorker), and “profoundly meditative... haunting” (The Wire). He is a two-time Copland House award recipient and has served as artist-in-residence at numerous national parks including Everglades, Grand Canyon, and Petrified Forest. Recordings have been released by New World Records, Navona, Blue Griffin, and Perspectives of New Music. His scores are published exclusively by Parallax Music Press.
 
Romig's music combines the systematic, rigerous pitch processes and complex harominic languages often found in the tradition of American Serialism, including that of his former teachers Charles Wuorinen and Milton Babbitt with the minimalist, repetitious soundworlds of the New York minimalists.

On Friday, November 6th, James Romig will give a talk introducing his large-scale piano piece Still and host a masterclass with several of the University at Buffalo PhD composition students.

October 29 -- University at Buffalo PhD Composers Livestream Concert!

 

On Thursday, October 29th, at 7:30 pm EDT, the Century for 21st Century Music will livestream a concert of University at Buffalo PhD composers performing their own works from Lippes Concert Hall. 

The program will include:

Edgar Girtain, 4 improvisations for Solo Piano, performed by Eric Huebner

Tyler Adamthwaite, Where I go to be alone, for solo violin, performed by the composer

Matias Homar, Landó, for electronic guitar and live processes, performed by the composer

John Aulich, Skr, for electronics and vocals, performed by the composer

Livestream the concert here: https://youtu.be/RKNQFleTNNg

You can read a little more about each composer, and others at UB, on a blogpost from earlier this year here. As always, Center for 21st Century Music livestream concerts at the University at Buffalo are free and require no online ticket or password.