Alejandro Rutty Residency

Alejandro Rutty’s compositional output includes orchestral, chamber and mixed-media music, arrangements of Argentine traditional music, and innovative outreach musical projects.

A unique feature of Rutty’s music is its affection for textures suggested by modern recording processing techniques, and the use of Tango - a genre he performs as a pianist-and other South American genres as part of the music’s surface.

Rutty’s compositions and arrangements have been played by the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra of Argentina, National Symphony Orchestra of Brazil, Porto Alegre Symphony Orchestra, New Mexico Symphony Orchestra, Linköping Symphony Orchestra, American Modern Ensemble, the New York New Music Ensemble, the Red Clay Saxophone Quartet, and the Cassatt String Quartet among other groups. Rutty’s music has been published by Effiny Music, SCI/European American Music, and Ricordi Sudamericana.

Recordings of his music have been released by Navona Records, Capstone Records, Arizona University Recordings, and ERM Media, PAI Records. 

Alejandro Rutty (PhD SUNY Buffalo) is currently Associate Professor of Music Composition at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Steven Kazuo Takasugi Residency

Steven Kazuo Takasugi, born 1960 in Los Angeles, is a composer of electro-acoustic concert music. This involves the collecting and archiving of recorded, acoustic sound samples into large databases, each classifying thousands of individual, performed instances collected over decades of experimentation and research, mostly conducted in his private sound laboratory. These are then subjecting to computer-assisted, algorithmic composition, revised and adjusted until the resulting emergent sound phenomena, energies, and relationships reveal hidden meanings and contexts to the composer. Against this general project of fixed-media is the addition of live performers, described as an accompanying project: "When people return . . ." This relationship often creates a "strange doubling" playing off the "who is doing what?" inherent with simultaneous live and recorded media: a ventriloquism effect of sorts.


Takasugi received his doctoral in music composition at the University of California, San Diego. He is currently an Associate of the Harvard Music Department. He is a 2022 Creative Capital Awardee, 2017 Civitella Ranieri Fellow, the 2016 Riemen and Bakatel Fellow for Music at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and is the recipient of awards including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, four Ernst von Siemens Foundation Commissions, and a Japan Foundation Artist Residency in Tokyo. His work has been performed extensively worldwide. Takasugi is also a renowned teacher of composition associated with masterclasses in New York City, Singapore, Stuttgart, Tel Aviv, Darmstadt, Bludenz, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has taught at the University of California, San Diego, Harvard University, California Institute for the Arts, and the Kunitachi College of Music in Tokyo. Takasugi is also an extensive essayist on music and was one of the founding editors of Search Journal for New Music and Culture. He has organized numerous discussion panels and fora on New Music including colloquia and conferences at Harvard Music and the Darmstadt Forum.

 

Christopher Trapani Residency

The American/Italian composer Christopher Trapani synthesizes disparate influences, weaving American and European stylistic strands into a personal aesthetic that defies easy classification.

Allusions to Delta Blues, Appalachian folk tunes, dance band foxtrots, shoegaze guitar effects, and Turkish makam can be heard alongside spectral swells and meandering canons. As in Christopher’s hometown of New Orleans, diverse traditions coexist and intermingle, swirled into a rich melting pot.

Consonance is a central preoccupation; microtonality and just intonation are often employed. Timbral explorations are also manifold, from experiments with a wide range of mutes and preparations to an unusual instrumentarium, with works that call for custom electric guitars, dulcimer, qanûn, stroh violin, and retuned autoharps. Several of Christopher’s compositions bear the mark of his training in literature, influenced by novelists and poets including Thomas Pynchon, Geoff Dyer, and C. P. Cavafy. Many recent works also incorporate an idiosyncratic use of electronics, expanding the possibilities of color, pitch, and timing beyond the acoustic realm.

Christopher Trapani was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1980. He holds a Bachelor’s degree from Harvard College, where he studied composition with Bernard Rands and poetry under Helen Vendler. He spent most of his twenties overseas: a year in London, working on a Master’s degree at the Royal College of Music with Julian Anderson; a year in Istanbul, studying microtonality in Ottoman music on a Fulbright grant; and seven years in Paris, where he studied with Philippe Leroux and worked at IRCAM. Starting in 2010, Christopher spent a decade in and out of New York City, where he completed a doctorate at Columbia University in 2017, studying with Tristan Murail, Georg Friedrich Haas, Fred Lerdahl, and George Lewis.

Christopher is the winner of the 2016-17 Luciano Berio Rome Prize, as well as the 2007 Gaudeamus Prize, the first American in over 30 years to win the international young composers’ award. Other honors include a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2015), the Julius F. Ježek Prize (2013), three Morton Gould Young Composers Awards from ASCAP (2005, 2006, and the Leo Kaplan Award in 2009), and a BMI Student Composer Award (2006).

Recent commissions have come from the BBC, the JACK Quartet, Ensemble Modern, and Radio France, and his works have been heard at Carnegie Hall, the Venice Biennale, Southbank Centre, Ruhrtriennale, IRCAM, Ravenna Festival, and Wigmore Hall. In March 2011, Christopher was featured in a portrait concert on the Philharmonia Orchestra’s Music of Today series at the Royal Festival Hall in London.

His debut CD, Waterlines, featuring performances by Talea Ensemble, JACK Quartet, and others, was released on New Focus Recordings in 2018. A second recording of Waterlines by ICTUS was released in 2020.

Christopher is a 2019 fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and a winner of a 2019 Fromm Commission from Harvard University, along with the 2020 Barlow Prize.

In 2021-2022 he is serving as Visiting Assistant Professor of Composition at the USC Thornton School of Music. He splits his time between Los Angeles and Palermo.

 

Matthew Schrebeis Residency

The Center for 21st Century Music is excited to announce the residency of the composer Matthew Schreibeis!

Matthew Schreibeis is an American composer based in Hong Kong. His compositions, which span orchestral, chamber, and vocal music and include a series of works for traditional Korean instruments, represent a personal musical vision characterized by vivid color, imagination, and a clear sense of drama. A recipient of the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, his works have been performed throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia by the Albany Symphony and David Alan Miller, New York New Music Ensemble, Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, Mivos Quartet, soprano Tony Arnold, and members of eighth blackbird and Alarm Will Sound, among others.

The 2020-21 season includes premieres of Parallel Lives by ensemble mise-en in New York and Tree of Life for solo violin, along with the release of his Albany Records portrait CD, Sandburg Songs, featuring soprano Tony Arnold and Zohn Collective.   

Honors include commissions from the Hanson Institute for American Music, Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; grants from the Ditson Fund of Columbia University and the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, Copland House, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Camargo Foundation in France. American Composers Forum sponsored a portrait concert of his chamber music in Philadelphia, and his music has been recorded on the Synnara label in South Korea.

An artist of wide-ranging interests, he has published (with Jiyoon Lee) on the role of music in second language teaching and is the author of a forthcoming article on the orchestral works of Bernard Rands. Most recently, he was awarded a major grant from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong to support a multi-year study of the music of his former teacher, the late Steven Stucky, including archival work at the Library of Congress.

Matthew Schreibeis began his musical studies in Pittsburgh and received degrees from the Eastman School of Music (B.M.) and the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D.). He studied composition with Samuel Adler, David Liptak, Eric Moe, James Primosch, Jay Reise, Christopher Rouse, Steven Stucky, Anna Weesner, and Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon. He also studied orchestration with Augusta Read Thomas and violin with Lynn Blakeslee. His mentors also include composers Robert Beaser, Bernard Rands, and George Tsontakis.

A committed educator, he taught composition at the soundSCAPE Festival in Italy and served as Visiting Assistant Professor at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and Visiting Professor at Korea University’s International Summer Campus in Seoul. Currently he is Assistant Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University.

Matt Sargent

The Center for 21st Century Music is excited to welcome Matt Sargent (website) to campus for a masterclass followed by a lecture on his compositions.

Matt Sargent (b. 1984) is a composer, guitarist, and music technologist based in upstate New York. His work grows from interests in resonance, computer models of intelligence, and the making/breaking of long-form patterns.

His compositions have been described as “bringing a sharpened sense of the transcendental into the 21st century.” (Paul Muller, Sequenza21) On his 2018 album, Ghost Music, Bill Meyer writes, “this music isn’t about following in anyone’s footsteps; it uses bare resources to establish a bounded and essential place.” (The Wire Magazine)

His albums include Tide (A Wave Press), Separation Songs (Cold Blue Music), Tide (for ten basses) (Marginal Frequency), and Ghost Music (Weighter Recordings).

In demand as an audio engineer and technical producer for contemporary music, Matt recently recorded Alvin Lucier’s Ricochet Lady (Black Truffle), Sarah Hennies’s Spectral Malsconcities (New World Records), Ensemble Signal / David Felder’s Les Quatre Temps Cardinaux (Coviello Contemporary), and Paul Catanese’s Century of Progress / Sleep, among others. He developed networked scoring software for Alvin Lucier and the Swiss-based Ever Present Orchestra, which facilitates performance of numerous large ensemble works composed by Alvin Lucier. In 2021, he co-composed A Murmur in the Trees, for twenty-four basses, with Eve Beglarian and bassist Robert Black. Praising his work on Robert Carl’s album, Splectra (Cold Blue Music), Fanfare Magazine writes, “he could find no better collaborator than composer and sound designer Matt Sargent.”

Matt is a visiting assistant professor of music at Bard College.