Paolo Cavallone since graduating from the University at Buffalo...

Composer and UB alumnus Paolo Cavallone has recently returned to Buffalo after lecturing in New Zealand and Canada, and having had works premiered and toured in Italy, Portugal, and Brazil. We met with Paolo and asked him to fill us in on his recent activities abroad since graduating with a PhD in music composition in 2009.

Paolo Cavallone
photo by Luca Del Monaco 

“I just returned to Buffalo last Friday from Florence, Italy, where I had been invited by renown Italian composer Giorgio Battistelli to participate in ‘Festival Play It!’ a three day-long festival dedicated to contemporary Italian music, which, this year, celebrated the 80th birthday of great Italian composer and artist Sylvano Bussotti. It was a privilege to be a part of this fantastic showcase of Italian music played by some of Italy’s greatest musicians and broadcast live by Italy’s public radio station, Radio RAI. My symphony, Porte, was premiered there by Orchestra Toscana under the baton of Tonino Battista, and received an enthusiastic response by the audience (see the complete program here). It was a very special event, as painters, poets, and artists from all over the country would open the day’s activities with presentations and lectures about their art. Florence has a rich environment full of history and beautiful architecture, and was a magical place to be.

“It has been a very productive time for me in many ways since graduating from the University at Buffalo. Recently I gave visiting lectures as a composer at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, and Conservatorio Santa Cecilia in Rome, Italy. Moreover, after a year at UB as a piano accompanist and research collaborator for the Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music, I spent the fall of 2010 in New Zealand as a visiting professor teaching composition and orchestration at the New Zealand School of Music in Wellington at Victoria University. I am excited to be returning there next year for the premiere of my flute concerto, commissioned by the Siemens Foundation, for the Stroma New Music Ensemble conducted by Hamish McKeich, and featuring flute legend Roberto Fabbriciani, whom I originally met when he visited the University at Buffalo to give a lecture and concert. Many of the performers I’ve developed successful working relationships with I met through the music department here at UB.

“I am very glad to announce the upcoming release of my new monographic CD, Confini, on the Tactus label. The CD is the fruit of the collaboration between my publisher, RAI Trade, and the Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music, and includes a bonus DVD and video documentary, Paolo Cavallone: Potrait of a Composer, which shows footage of UB and interviews with conductor Harvey Sollberger, saxophonist Gaetano Di Bacco, violist Luca Sanzò, and David Felder, among others. The CD itself features many UB musicians such as Tony Arnold, Jean Kopperud, Jonathan Golove, Catarina Domenici, Sabatino Scirri, Christian Baldini, Nicholas Isherwood, and Movses Pogossian. The first track on the CD, (Dis)tensioni, for clarinet and piano, was a commission by Jean Kopperud and Stephen Gosling for the ‘Rated X Project’ which I composed during my time in the PhD program at UB and having composition lessons with David Felder. Both Jean and Steve gave a remarkable interpretation of the piece, performing complex, virtuosic passages, extended techniques, and gestures that perhaps only they are able to play, such as pitches outside of the normal range of the clarinet, which Jean was able to execute with extreme facility. The CD will be released by the end of November and be available on the internet and at most major CD retailers (more information about the CD can be found at Paolo’s website, and will soon be available at Tactus Records).

"My perspective as an artist is based on framing a unique musical gesture/object from different angles, so after completing my studies at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, I was eager to expand my artistic vision in an international environment, and experience a different side of Western culture in America. At the University at Buffalo I met a faculty full of first-rate scholars and musicians. First and foremost was my composition teacher, David Felder, who has a rare sense of musical form, and is able, as a teacher, to integrate the students’ perspective without imposing a pre-formed musical aesthetic or compositional school onto the student. I learned from other professors at UB as well – I still remember the high quality of Michael Long’s class on Medieval and Renaissance notation, and Jeffrey Stadelman’s class on contemporary music. I am happy to be back in Buffalo for a while, where I can enjoy and participate in the musical activities at UB and the Center for 21st Century Music."

Bernard Rands, Gil Rose, and Julia Bentley visit the Center next week

Julia Bentley

Next week will be a very exciting and interesting one for all of us at the Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music, as we will be hosting top tier musicians from all over the country. Mezzo-soprano Julia Bentley, conductor Gil Rose, and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Bernard Rands will be visiting the University at Buffalo and converging for a concert with the Slee Sinfonietta on November 1st at 7:30 p.m.

Julia Bentley, who has previously performed at June in Buffalo, is a dizzyingly accomplished singer and voice teacher at the Music Institute of Chicago and has been featured as a soloist with orchestras led by Pierre Boulez, George Manahan, Raymond Leppard, Oliver Knussen, and Robert Shaw. She has taken on leading roles in several operas including Carmen and Rosina, as well as performed and premiered some of contemporary music’s most engaging and virtuosic works. The New York Times recently gave a glowing review of her singing in Pierre Boulez’s Le Marteau sans Maître, stating, “The mezzo-soprano Julia Bentley brought rich sound, deep expressivity and an uncanny sense of pitch to the work's restless vocal lines, alive with sudden skips and spiky rhythms one moment, hushed and Impressionistic the next.” She will join the Slee Sinfonietta in Tuesday night’s concert in Lippes Concert Hall for an evening of works by Bernard Rands, Iannis Xenakis, Igor Stravinsky, and Nikos Skalkottas.

Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project

The concert will be conducted by Gil Rose, who in 1996 founded the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, one of the world’s leading professional orchestras dedicated exclusively to performing and recording music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Throughout his tenure as the music director of the BMOP, Gil has received numerous awards from Columbia University and ASCAP, among others, as well as worked laboriously to record an extensive discography of world premieres by Louis Andriessen, John Cage, Robert Erickson, Lukas Foss, John Harbison, Lee Hyla, David Lang, Tod Machover, Steven Mackey, Bernard Rands, George Rochberg, Elena Ruehr, Gunther Schuller, Reza Vali, and Evan Ziporyn on such labels as Albany, Arsis, Cantaloupe, Chandos, ECM, Innova, Naxos, New World, and BMOP/sound, the Grammy-nominated label for which he serves as Executive Producer. His recordings have appeared on the year-end "Best of" lists of The New York Times, Time Out New York, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, American Record Guide, NPR, and Downbeat Magazine (learn more about Gil Rose and the BMOP here).

Bernard Rands

Bernard Rands will be joining us for the concert as well as giving a lecture the following day on Wednesday, November 2nd at 3:00 p.m. in Baird Recital Hall, on his recent work Vincent, an opera about the life of Vincent van Gogh with libretto written by American poet J.D. McClatchy. Vincent was premiered last April in Bloomington, Indiana after being commissioned by the Indiana University School of Music and Opera Department. According to the program note, the two act opera is a “succession of ‘tableaux’ each placing Vincent in contexts which were his real experiences thus revealing his complex character - that of genius artist, religious fanatic, alcoholic, epileptic, unstable of temperament resulting in behavior ranging unpredictably between kindly affability and violent aggression.”

Below is a video of Bernard Rands discussing the tumultuous life of Vincent van Gogh, his captivating works as a painter, and their effect on Rands and his opera.

Composer Derek Charke since graduating UB...

We recently caught up with University at Buffalo alumnus and composer Derek Charke, who has had a very exciting career since graduating from the UB composition program in 2005.  Derek currently teaches music composition and theory at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, and is kept busy composing and fulfilling commissions. We sat down with Derek and asked him about his time at UB and to fill us in on his recent projects.

"I remember my time at SUNY Buffalo fondly.  Prior to this I had studied with Louis Andriessen in Holland, at the Royal Academy in London, and at the University of North Texas.  I wanted to find a place that allowed for experimentation and cross fertilization of ideas and aesthetics.  Composer Rodney Sharman, a UB grad himself, encouraged me to apply.  What I encountered at UB was a top notch faculty, an assortment of amazing new music performers, and a thoughtful and diverse bunch of fellow students, each with their own individual voices.  At UB there was an openness, and a free exchange of ideas, that made the environment invigorating.

Derek Charke

"First off, I’ve got to give kudos to David Felder, for his inspiration, and for his guidance.  He has an uncanny ability to get to the heart of the matter, to be flexible in identifying what an individual student is trying to get at aesthetically, formally, etc., and for his ability to impart solid advice on what the next step(s) should be in order to fully realize a particular idea.  I gained many valuable insights from David that will stick with me throughout my career.

"I had the great privilege of studying flute with the late Cheryl Gobbetti-Hoffman.  Cheryl was a nurturing instructor whose pedagogical use of ‘extended’ techniques in her approach to both contemporary and traditional flute literature was inspiring.  I worked closely with the flute studio, performing concerts with the contemporary ensemble (under Jonathan Golove), the Slee Sinfonietta, JiB, Augenmusik (a composer collective), and in the Pantasmagoria flute festival, which was run by Cheryl, and where I had the opportunity to work with visiting artists like Robert Dick, Mathias Ziegler, and Peter Lloyd.  UB allowed me to combine my interests in composition and flute performance.  I ended up with two degrees; a Masters in flute performance, and; a PhD in composition.  No surprise then that my dissertation ended up as a concerto for flute and chamber orchestra!

"Theory and history courses with Michael Long, Charles Smith and Jeffrey Stadelman, and four years as a TA/GA, helped me obtain my current position as an associate professor of music.  And the electronic music courses with Cort Lippe gave me the necessary skills to work with Max/MSP.  Soundscapes and electronics have rapidly become an important facet of my compositional activity––so much so that very few works these days are without some sort of EA component.

"Much has happened since I graduated from SUNY Buffalo six years ago.  I'm currently on my first sabbatical leave from Acadia University.  Recent commissions have come from established ensembles like the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, the St. Lawrence String Quartet, the National Flute Association, and the Katona Twins, as well from many local performers and ensembles in Atlantic Canada.  As a professor I’ve had the opportunity to start my own new music festival, Shattering the Silence, which is now into its sixth year (more information on Shattering the Silence here).  And I continue to perform regularly on the flute.

"A recent commission highlight is my first full-length symphony.  ‘Symphony no. 1 - Transient Energies’ is a 45 minute work that was commissioned in 2010 by Symphony Nova Scotia.  It uses an electronic soundscape consisting of sounds from energy production and usage: wind turbines, diesel power generators, electric hums, sounds of shoveling coal, train whistles, car engines, etc...  Sounds are triggered using Max/MSP from a laptop performer in the orchestra.  'Transient Energies' was premiered to much acclaim this past April, and is currently available on CBC Radio, Concerts on Demand website (click here to listen to 'Symphony no. 1 - Transient Energies'). 

"One of the most fruitful collaborations since leaving UB has been a series of commissions for the Kronos Quartet.  Interestingly enough, this came about as a direct result of my studies at UB.  During a particular composition seminar with David Felder, we were given the task of creating small chamber works to be recorded in the UB recording studio.  I transcribed some Inuit throat song games and reworked them for string quartet––I’ve always had an interest in the arctic.  Using experimental circle and vertical bowing techniques (and assisted by fellow student Carter Williams) I created a set of 11 throat songs.  Subsequently, I sent these to a call for scores with the Kronos Quartet.  David Harrington called me a few months later and, out of the blue, commissioned a new work.  ‘Cercle du Nord III’ for string quartet and a soundtrack of northern sounds was created.  Kronos premiered this work, alongside a selection of the original Inuit throat song games, in 2006.  They went on tour with them, including some illustrious spots along the way, like Carnegie Hall and the Vienna Concert House.  With this success, Kronos commissioned a second work, this time including Inuit throat singing superstar, Tanya Tagaq.  ‘Tundra Songs’ (a 30 minute work) was premiered in May 2008 at the Walt Disney Hall in LA (audio samples available on Derek's website).  

"Now, I’m completing a third commission for the Kronos Quartet, a 22 minute concerto for amplified string quartet and orchestra (commissioned by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra), that will be premiered on March 3rd, 2012 at the New Creations Festival at Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto (more information available here).  I hope to see some of you there!"

The Meridian Arts Ensemble at the University at Buffalo

The Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music is pleased to welcome the Meridian Arts Ensemble to the University at Buffalo for a week of original and virtuosic music for brass quintet. The Meridian Arts Ensemble, a long-time friend of the Center, has commissioned and premiered over fifty new works, and has emerged as one of the most important new music ensembles in the world. Having released nine critically acclaimed CD recordings on the Channel Classics label, the group somehow manages to also commission new composers, tour and perform on nine continents, and regularly win performance competitions. 

The Meridian Arts Ensemble

Featuring UB’s own Professor Jon Nelson, the Meridian Arts Ensemble began as a traditional brass quintet in 1987 and quickly rose to prominence winning four competitions in their first two years. In 1990 they won First Prize in the Concert Artists Guild New York Competition, which launched the group’s international career. With the addition of a percussionist, the group has performed extensively throughout the world in Cuba, Japan, Taiwan, Brazil, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Mexico, Austria, Costa Rica and Colombia. The Meridian Arts Ensemble has toured extensively throughout the U.S. as well, and has been hosted by prestigious venues and concert halls such as the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Merkin Hall, Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood, Chicago’s Symphony Hall and Pick-Staiger Hall, Los Angeles’ Ambassador Auditorium, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and Atlanta’s Spivey Hall (more information on their catalogue and recent activities can be found here).

On Tuesday, October 18th at 4:00 p.m. in Lippes Concert Hall, the Meridian Arts Ensemble will host a composer workshop of seven of the University at Buffalo’s graduate composers including Esin Gunduz, Dan Bassin, David Rappenecker, Ethan Hayden, Ryo Nakayama, Juan Colón-Hernández, and Kenichi Saeki. The UB music department is populated by an incredibly original and diverse array of young composers from all over the world, and Tuesday’s composer workshop will be a great chance to see them workshop their music live with one of today’s top ensembles. Ethan Hayden’s piece, Chiral Fanfare, is based on the chemical phenomenon of ‘chirality’ in which two molecules consisting of the same atomic structure – but arranged as mirror images of one another – can have surprisingly different physical properties. The form consists of two sections, each of which feature the same few motivic gestures in drastically different environments, affecting the function and character of the resulting musical fabric. Contrastingly, Esin Gunduz’s piece, On texts of wisdom, will feature voice alongside trumpet and trombone, and include text from 13th century Turkish poet and Sufi mystic Yunus Emre. Each of the composers in UB’s composition program has a wildly unique voice and different musical background, making their concerts and workshops a very engaging listening pleasure full of skillful nuances and surprises, and Tuesday’s composer workshop promises to be no exception.

On Friday, October 21st, the Meridian Arts Ensemble will treat us to a very special 25th Anniversary Concert of works they have commissioned from composers Dave Ballou and David Sanford, as well as perform their own arrangement of 16th century Italian Renaissance composer Giovanni Gabrieli’s Venetian Canzoni. The concert will begin at 7:30 p.m. and take place in Lippes Concert Hall. 

Below is a video of the Meridian Arts Ensemble performing Frank Zappa’s Echidna's Arf from a 2007 concert in Timosoara, Romania:

Guitarists Magnus Andersson and Arturo Tallini at the Center this week...

This will be a very active and guitar-filled week at the Robert and Carol Center for 21^st Century Music. Magnus Andersson, virtuoso guitarist and long time friend of the Center, will be at UB premiering student works written especially for him at an informal workshop and recording session on September 28. The following day he will be joined by Arturo Tallini for a concert of today’s most demanding and complex pieces for guitar duet in Baird Recital Hall.

Wednesday’s program of solo readings will feature six of UB’s graduate composers: Daniel Bassin, Juan-Colón Hernandez, Colin Tucker, Zane Merritt, Nathan Heidelberger, and Chung Ting Pang. The informal session will take place at 3:00 p.m. in Baird Recital Hall on Wednesday, Sep. 28, and will be a great opportunity to hear new music from UB’s incredibly creative and diverse body of young composers. Daniel Bassin’s piece, Gerard, features a timbrally evocative tuning with a unique microtonal scordatura and borrows from Olivier Messiaen’s musical alphabet, which Messiaen created to transcribe theological writings into his musical works. Language plays a large role in some of the other pieces we will hear Wednesday as well – Nathan Heidelberger’s a refrain One keeps playing year after year, concerning the nature of things as they are, includes text adapted from Wallace Steven’s 1937 book of poetry, “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” and will showcase Magnus Andersson’s vocal talents as he speaks and sings the text, simultaneously mimicking the diverse sounds of the guitar he is performing on. The graduate student composers at the University at Buffalo bring their originality from tremendously different geographic and aesthetic backgrounds, and tomorrow will be a terrific opportunity to hear all the diversity and talent staged back-to-back and performed by a world-class musician.

Arturo Tallini

On Thursday, September 29, at 7:30 p.m. in Baird Recital Hall, Arturo Tallini will team up with Magnus to present a concert of modern composers who have written for guitar duet, including Bruno Maderna, Sylvano Busotti, Brian Ferneyhough, and Helmut Lachenmann. Lachenmann’s piece, Salut für Caudwell, artfully runs through a dizzying combination of guitar techniques and performance styles, and includes sounds from the entire body of the guitar, as well as incorporates fingertips, knuckles, the guitar slide, picks, and a wide variety of other plectrums. Both performers speak text from British author Christopher Caudwell and Friedrich Nietzsche while they play, often hocketing with the music and creating a delightful interplay of words and sounds. Thursday’s concert will be a great chance to hear some of the most creative and demanding pieces for guitar duet written in the past few decades.

Below is an excellent video feature of Magnus Andersson and Arturo Tallini performing Ferneyhough’s No time (at all), at the Conservatorio di Musica S. Cecilia in Rome, Italy, from March of 2010. 

The Tierney Sutton Band at UB and Kleinhans Music Hall

The Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21^st Century Music is very excited to have the Tierney Sutton Band in town this week for a jazz ensemble master class at the University at Buffalo Music Department and an exclusive benefit event at Kleinhans Music Hall. The Tierney Sutton Band is a three-time Grammy Nominee for “Best Jazz Vocal Album,” and has headlined at The Hollywood Bowl, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and Carnegie Hall. The group has garnered remarkably positive press, and The Buffalo News has recently released a glowing review of their latest album, American Road, and described it as “Gorgeous. Witty. And absolutely fresh. Every bit of it.”

The Tierney Sutton Band

On Thursday, pianist Christian Jacobs, bassist Kevin Axt, drummer Ray Brinker, and singer Tierney Sutton hosted a master class in Baird Hall at the University at Buffalo and coached student jazz musicians on the ins and outs of improvisation, instrumental technique, and the nuances of musical life as a jazz ensemble. The workshop began with stunning performances by The Anthony Rideout Quintet, a student jazz group at UB featuring bassist Anthony Rideout and lead singer Esin Gunduz under the tutelage of Buffalo-based jazz saxophonist Dave Schiavone. Esin, originally from Turkey, had an instant rapport with Tierney Sutton, and members of the band raved about their experiences touring and performing in Esin’s hometown, Istanbul. After offering praise, pointers, tips, and well-received feedback to the quintet, the Tierney Sutton Band took to the stage and gave the packed hall a few of their own unique and dynamic interpretations of jazz standards. They ended their set with a very creative and musical rendition of the traditional folk song, “Shenandoah,” which was met with tremendous enthusiasm and applause.

On Friday, September 23^rd, the Tierney Sutton Band will perform at an exclusive event, sponsored by Robert and Carol Morris, to benefit the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra in the Blue Room at Kleinhans Music Hall. The event promises to be very special, as the Blue Room will have the atmosphere and ambience of an intimate jazz club for the evening. Seats for Gold and Silver Circle Patrons have already sold out, but some tickets may still available. More information about tickets, availability, and the event itself can be found at the BPO’s website here. 

Below is a video of the Tierney Sutton Band performing their unique adaptation of the jazz hit, “I Get a Kick Out of You.”

2011-2012 Season Overview

The Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21^st Music is pleased to announce a very active 2011-2012 season, which has already kicked off to an exciting start with last Thursday’s concert, “Secret Messages,” where members of The Genkin Philharmonic performed works by UB’s own Moshe Shulman and Jeff Stadelman, as well as works by Morton Feldman, Milton Babbitt, and Iannis Xenakis. Jon Nelson and The Genkin, as always, provided us with a beautiful and well-crafted program, with members of the ensemble improvising between pieces to create a seamless and absorbing flow of music.

The upcoming week will be a vigorous one for the Slee Sinfionetta, as they tour a program of music by some of today’s best composers to Buffalo, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. The excitement begins at UB’s Slee Hall on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. with works by Erb, Rindfleisch, Rosenblum, D’Alessio, and Felder. The tour will then continue to Cleveland State University on Wednesday and to the University at Pittsburgh on Friday. The Slee Sinfionetta will be under the baton of James Baker and guest conductor Andrew Rindfleisch, who is currently a Professor of Music and the Head of Music Composition Studies at Cleveland State University (click here for more information about Andrew Rindfleisch). The Slee Sinfionetta will also be joined by internationally renowned guitarist Magnus Andersson, who will perform on David Felder’s Requiescat.

The activity continues throughout September as UB music faculty participate in President Satish K. Triparthi’s Investiture Week, with clarinetist Jean Kopperud performing Sep. 19th at 3:00 p.m. for the Annual Celebration of Academic Excellence at the Center for the Arts. The week will conclude with a university-wide ceremony on Friday, Sep. 23rd at 3:00 p.m., also at the Center for the Arts, where Carl T. Hayden, Chairman of the State University of New York Board of Trustees, and SUNY Chancellor Nancy L. Zimpher will formally invest President Tripathi with his new office. During the ceremony we will be treated to a performance of David Felder’s “Funfares,” a new work written especially for the investiture of UB’s new president.

Investiture Week at the University at Buffalo

The month will conclude with Magnus Andersson returning to UB on September 28th, to lead a composer master class and workshop pieces by Dan Bassin, Nathan Heidelberger, and some of UB’s incoming graduate composers. On the following evening, Sep. 29th, Magnus will pair with fellow guitarist Arturo Tallini for a concert in Baird Recital Hall at 7:30 p.m.

The rest of the fall semester will be packed with visits from the contemporary music scene’s leading ensembles, singers, conductors, and composers. On October 18th acclaimed brass quintet The Meridian Arts Ensemble will lead a composer workshop with UB’s graduate composers, and on November 1st the Slee Sinfionetta, conducted by Gil Rose and featuring mezzo-soprano Julia Bentley, will give a concert featuring works by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Bernard Rands. Bernard Rands will be staying in Buffalo and presenting a guest lecture to the music department the following day (learn about his recent projects here). The semester will begin wrapping up on November 15, when the Bonne Action Contemporary Music Ensemble will put on a concert of contemporary music in Lippes Concert Hall.

Bernard Rands

Next Spring at The Center for 21^st Century Music will be just as active as the Fall, as we will be welcoming the return of Mathias Pintscher to conduct the Slee Sinfionetta on April 3rd. Many other distinguished performers and composers will be visiting the Center as well, including distinguished Mozart scholar and pianist Robert Levin and Italian virtuoso flutist Mario Caroli. There will also be several composer workshops featuring works by UB graduate composers, including the Antares New Music Quartet and the Talujon Percussion Ensemble. 

The season will conclude explosively with June in Buffalo 2012, which promises to be one of the largest and most exciting contemporary music events of the year. This year's festival showcases an incredible cadre of faculty composers: Louis Andriessen, Robert Beaser, Steven Stucky, Fred Lerdahl, and David Felder. June in Buffalo 2012 will also feature an all-star lineup of ensembles and soloists, including CIKADA, Ensemble Interface, New York New Music Ensemble, SIGNAL, UB Percussion Ensemble, Slee Sinionetta, and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. Special guests James Baker, Roberto Fabricciani, and Brad Lubman will also participate in the festival this year.  

Some of the many opportunities provided by the composition program at UB...

Following up on our series of posts by recent and soon-to-be graduates of UB’s composition program, we invited Robert Phillips to share some of his thoughts on his time at UB. Robert is currently finishing up his PhD in composition and working on multimedia and chamber music works with musicians in London, Montreal, Stockholm, Paris, San Diego, and the Buffalo area. He attributes much of his artistic and professional growth as a composer to opportunities he received while studying at UB.

Robert Phillips
photo by Megan Metté

Robert says, “I grew tremendously as an artist through the generous opportunities presented by the composition program at UB. I received incredible professional support there and have a long list of projects for which I relied on help from UB and The Center for 21^st Century Music, which I’m terribly grateful for. Some of the most exciting sponsorship I ever received was the help traveling to Madison, Wisconsin, to rehearse and record Mapuana mai kekahi (scent of another), before The Nonsense Company toured it throughout the U.S. Shortly after, the Center helped me fly to Amsterdam to oversee Mapuana’s performance in the International Gaudeamus Musikweek Composer’s Competition by the Ear Massage Percussion Quartet. David Felder and the Center’s support were instrumental in bringing forth a complex work involving lap steel guitars, Hawaiian records, ukuleles, Tibetan singing bowls, and all sorts of bizarre, but carefully chosen miscellany, to many locations in the U.S. and to festivals and concert halls in Europe.

“Also, studying at UB helped me to grow as an electronic music composer, primarily through working in the Lejaren Hiller Music Studios with Cort Lippe. He has a very sophisticated mind for manipulating and working with samples and sound synthesis, and part of the culmination of working with him was a recent piece of mine involving cut-up a cappella samples of vocalist Gucci Mane, entitled gucci might be, which was recently selected for opening night performance at the Toronto Electroacoustic Symposium. It was a great pleasure to diffuse the piece live over 16 speakers placed strategically over the Wychwood Theatre and participate in such a dynamic and exciting sound environment, and have some of the U.K.’s and Canada’s top electroacoustic composers in the audience.

“Some of my greatest pleasures during my time at UB have been while working with the incredible performance faculty. Clarinetist Jean Kopperud was able to do things that very few clarinetists are able to do, and she did them with a grace and artistry that exceeded my compositional fantasy. Trumpeter Jon Nelson was also a lot of fun to work with and was able to immediately apply powerful interpretive rigor to some very iconoclastic brass music I wrote. Perhaps most recently, I got to work in the Slee Recording Studios with one of my favorite singers, Tony Arnold, who was able to affect incredibly delicate vibrato shadings and was a tremendous compositional inspiration (you can listen to In der Luft, da bleibt deine Wurzel, a selection from heterogeneous blends, with Tony Arnold, here until Robert's website is up and running).

“One of the greatest things about the University at Buffalo is all of the incredible musicians that are constantly visiting. I’ve had many happy surprises walking the stairs of Baird Hall and bumping into one of the world’s top performers who happened to be stopping by, and I attribute much of my growth as a composer to having worked with so many renown ensembles that have come through and given workshops and master classes. Earlier this year, I was fortunate enough to work on a studio project with the JACK Quartet through resources provided by the Mark Diamond Research Fund. The four of them were some of the most engaging and sensitive performers I’ve ever had the opportunity to work with, and they were surprisingly adept at negotiating a complex work that borrows an aesthetic strangely adapted from turntable practice and requiring delicate glissando motion. The piece, Ohr, will be finished this fall and feature material for live electronics and digital turntables.

“Best yet, some of the ensembles that have come through have resulted in exciting possibilities for collaboration – last year Pascal Gallois, Rohan de Saram, and Magnus Andersson spent some time here offering a workshop with student composers and giving a concert which lead to a handful of commissions for me. One of the projects will be the largest I’ve ever been able to work on, and I’m really looking forward to learning from these performers and exploiting their sophisticated musical personalities after they did such an incredible job with my recent trio, Larghetto Rubato (available here).  

“Working and studying with David Felder has been hugely influential in helping me develop my personal style. He approaches composition lessons with profoundly open ears, and has a strong desire to hear the student’s unique voice emerge over time. This skill requires deep patience and sensitivity and is very rare in a composition teacher – its effect has served to purge my music of some of the clichés common to composers today and strengthen the unique characteristics of my own sonic imagination. In this respect, I feel UB is incredibly unique as an academic institution in that I didn’t so much learn a craft, like ‘composition,’ but rather, made seminal discoveries about myself as a musician and as an artist.”

"A Positive Signal"

Garaud MacTaggart of the Buffalo News offered another view of Signal's June in Buffalo concert on June 9. Headlined "A Positive Signal," MacTaggart's review praised the playing of this much-lauded group: "The same care and attention to detail that Signal displayed during their workshop for student composers on Tuesday afternoon was evidenced at Thursday night’s performance of scores by more mature composers. Given the level of material they had to work with in the later concert, the results were even more impressive.

"David Felder’s Journal from 1990 was the first composition on the evening’s program and it was clear from the start that if the bones of the score were sturdy, then Signal could flesh out the sound. Under the guidance of the troupe’s conductor, Brad Lubman, the music was revealed as a tautly constructed work but not one so tightly wound that emotion was banished..."

As in Daniel J. Kushner's review, MacTaggart reserved his highest praise for the classic score that ended the concert, Ligeti's Chamber Concerto, which "received a marvelous performance that had echoes of Debussy and Bartok with occasional brief stabs of sound reminiscent of the shower scene from Psycho as a change of pace. OK, that’s a bit of an overstatement but the change in sonic textures from loud to soft, from prickly to flowing had a logic to it that Lubman and Signal were able to convey with the conviction Ligeti deserved to receive. It was probably the highlight performance of the evening."

You can read MacTaggart's entire review here.

The Fickle Judge

To help wrap up our coverage of June in Buffalo 2011, we're pleased to welcome guest blogger Daniel J. Kushner, reviewing the June 9 concert with Signal and guest violinist Irvine Arditti. Daniel is a music critic whose work has been published by Opera News, The Huffington Post, NewMusicBox, and Symphony, among others.  His vivid and insightful writing can be found at  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-j-kushner and http://postpostrock.com. Though his subject matter ranges widely, he most often writes about the burgeoning musical region in which classically-trained musicians and artists from the world of indie rock are finding common ground. Here follows Daniel's review. 
_______________________

The Fickle Judge

By Daniel J. Kushner

June in Buffalo is a festival for the new music cognoscenti—a welcome destination for some, an alienating locale for others.  But new music sprawls itself out over a vast landscape, and great variety can coexist even with pieces of comparable aesthetic value.  The festival’s June 9 concert, featuring the New York-based chamber ensemble Signal led by conductor Brad Lubman, exemplified this truth.

The program began with David Felder’s 1990 work Journal for chamber orchestra.  Signal communicated with vibrant poignancy the sonorous, cataclysmic evidence of fear made audible, of some unspoken yet inescapable conflict.  Within the composition, melodies are not shaped and sheltered by phrases, but are rather splintered into three and four-note shards, and then dispelled into the ether.  If Felder’s Shamayim—a 2009 collaboration with filmmaker Elliot Caplan performed earlier in the week at the festival—felt cold and clinical, Journal exudes an emotional, reverberating warmth that doesn’t circumvent Felder’s arresting harmonic sensibility, but instead speaks through it.  The work is at times lush and lyrical, even while possessing a thin, fragile texture capable of some impending devolution—hinted at toward the outset—that never comes. 

Featuring a smaller configuration of Signal aided by solo violinist Irvine Arditti, Brice Pauset’s highly gestural and expressionistic Vita Nova (2006) evinced the atonal priorities so readily embraced in many compositional circles of academia.  While certainly intriguing, the piece seemed destined to retreat from my recollection into oblivion.  But why?  Clearly the composition was well constructed, with a keen spatial sense of orchestration and containing proven techniques of modern articulation, including the ingenuous effect of strumming the string instruments with guitar picks.  Its lack of readily discernible melodies is not in and of itself grounds for dismissal.

But if melody does not implant itself in the ear, some other compositional (component(s) may need to take its place—an alluring succession of harmonies, or a novel polyrhythmic device—to bridge the chasm between performance and memory (I took with issue with Hilda Paredes’s Ah Paaxo’ob of 2001, which closed the concert, for similar reason).  One doesn’t even necessarily need to remember a single note of the composition, but rather the response it elicited from within.  Ultimately, the hard reality is that it comes down to the decision of a manifestly fickle, yet unerring judge—emotional resonance.

Fortunately, György Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto (1969-1970) exemplified the atonal aesthetic at its most vibrant and engaging—from the bleary, circular phrases in the woodwinds to the crystalline dizziness of the harpsichord, to the ominous trills in the violins.  Each sonic occurrence seemed to impart some mystical coded meaning.   In the moment, Chamber Concerto struck me as more focused, less visceral yet more palpable, more ethereal yet less distant than the works I had heard earlier in the evening.

Was my response the effect of a placebo?  Does a piece by the venerated Ligeti immediately deserve more respect?  Perhaps vain pride would have me answer, “Yes.”  But, in the interest of being as much of a new-music-hipster as possible, the answer could just as easily be “No.”  In the end, I was drawn in by Ligeti’s use of technical proficiency through such musically volatile means, to achieve such emotionally immediate ends.

Jeffrey Stadelman: "Meaning is sedimented form"

On the eve of the opening of June in Buffalo 2011, we conclude our series of posts on this year's Senior Faculty with composer Jeffrey Stadelman, Associate Chair of UB's Music Department. 

Stadelman's music -- once described by a Los Angeles Times reviewer as "painterly . . . , deftly dispersed in time and glazed with a dry wit" --  has been performed in the U.S and Europe by a number of the leading groups active in contemporary music performance. This list of ensembles -- including the New York New Music Ensemble, Boston Musica Viva, the California Ear Unit, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Het Trio, 175 East Ensemble (New Zealand), Earplay, the New World and Cassatt String Quartets, the League/ISCM and the June in Buffalo and Wellesley Conference Players, among others -- continues to grow as Stadelman's work attracts increasing attention in the U.S. and abroad.

Originally from Wisconsin, Stadelman studied composition as an undergraduate with Stephen Dembski at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and went on to receive the Ph.D. in Music from Harvard University, where his principal teachers were Milton Babbitt, Earl Kim, Donald Martino and Stephen Mosko. Stadelman has since received commissions and invitations for compositions from, among others, the Fromm Foundation and Boston Musica Viva, Nuove Sincronie, Concert Artists Guild, Trio Italiano Contemporaneo, Phantom Arts, Bernhard Wambach, Elizabeth McNutt, Jon Nelson and UW-Madison. Grants and awards include those from Meet the Composer, Harvard University, Friends and Enemies of New Music, and the Darmstadt Summer Courses.

The composer taught at Harvard University during the 1992-93 academic year, and currently serves as Associate Professor of Music at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he teaches composition and twentieth-century music. Stadelman's music is published by APNM and BMG Ariola. Recently completed and ongoing projects include Eight Songs, a collection for bass-baritone and piano; House Taken Over for the flutist Elizabeth McNutt, with and without electronics; a quintet for a University at Buffalo faculty quintet; and a violin concerto, entitled Pity Paid, for Movses Pogossian with the Slee Sinfonietta. The latter work was released as the centerpiece of an eponymously-titled CD in 2008 on the Centaur label. 

A number of recent electroacoustic works have been performed at June in Buffalo 2004, SEAMUS conferences (Ball State and University of Oregon), ICMC 2004 Miami, the University of North Texas/CEMI, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, COMA 2005 (Vaxjo, Sweden), and other venues.

Also active as a writer on musical subjects, Stadelman has authored a number of analytic papers since 1986, and made presentations on Babbitt and Schoenberg at universities and festivals in the U.S. and Europe. 

Stadelman is a cogent thinker whose forthright remarks on composition are laced with wit in this interview by James Gardner of Radio New Zealand. Responding to a question about recent compositional paradigms, Stadelman says, "I tend to prefer the choral model, imagining not reflection and amplification of the lone voice—but instead repetition and massing of plural voices in a social context. That's what's so compelling about the origins of classical polyphony to me. A kind of splitting of the solo song, and then its multiplication..."

Brice Pauset

June in Buffalo always has a strong international flavor, drawing participants and faculty from around the globe.  French composer Brice Pauset travels from his home in Germany to join this year's Senior Faculty, bringing his unique musical and intellectual perspective to the festival. His background includes studies in piano, violin, electronic music at IRCAM, medieval philosophy (in which he holds a doctorate), along with Baroque musical practice and instrumental design.

Born in 1965, Pauset has studied with many of Europe's modernist heavyweights, including Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gérand Grisey, Brian Ferneyhough, Franco Donatoni, Stefano Gervasoni, Klaus Huber, and Michael Jarrell, among others. Yet it's clear from interviews and writings that his Baroque forebears have had as profound an effect on his music as his contemporaries. A fascinating interview in Paris Transatlantic magazine illuminates his thinking. When writer Dan Warburton asked Pauset which century he would prefer to live in, given a choice, Pauset replied, "I think, of course, the fourteenth century. The Ars Subtilior. In the medieval epoch, there was no music as such--it was a part of a larger discipline including mathematics, philosophy, astronomy.. If you look around this room, we have mathematics--there are three computers (one of which doesn't work), and there is a philosophical dimension to this work.. (Pause.) Yes, I would go back to the fourteenth century. When music didn't exist." Pauset's moody, compelling Adagio Dialettico for piano and ensemble can be heard in this audio clip (with static image).

Hilda Paredes at June in Buffalo

Continuing our alphabetical series of profiles of the Senior Faculty for June in Buffalo 2011, we encounter Hilda Paredes, who has achieved renown as one of Mexico's leading composers. Paredes was born in Tehuacan, Puebla, Mexico, and has been a prominent music teacher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Firmly established as one of the leading Mexican composers of her generation, her music is now performed widely around the world.

As an active participant in master classes at Dartington Summer School, studied with Peter Maxwell Davies and Richard Rodney Bennett. After graduating at the Guildhall School of Music, she obtained her Master of Arts at City University in London and completed her PhD at Manchester University.

Her collaboration with choreographers led her to receive the Music for Dance Award from the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1988. After taking part at the Garden Venture Opera Project in Dartington, she completed her first chamber opera "The Seventh Seed," released by Mode Records.

She has continued to be involved in the musical life of her native country, teaching at the National University in Mexico City, as radio producer of new music, as well as collaborating with the Orchestra of Baja California arranging traditional Spanish and Mexican songs.

  

Hilda now lives in London as a freelance composer, and has taught composition and lectured at Manchester University, the University of San Diego California, Mills College in California, as well as in Mexico, Spain, and Centre Acanthes in France. Her recently completed second chamber opera El Palacio Imaginado, commissioned by Musik der Jahrhunderte, English National Opera and the Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven, was premiered to much acclaim in both sides of the Atlantic.

Hilda Paredes has been commissioned by soloists, ensembles and orchestras around the world. Her music has been performed by internationally renowned ensembles such as Lontano, London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Modern, Neue Vocalsolisten, Ensemble Sospeso and Arditti Quartet and has been widely performed at important international festivals, such as Huddersfield in the UK; Eclat in Germany; Musica and Octobre en Normandie, in France; Wien Modern, in Austria; Akiyoshidai Music Festival, in Japan; Archipel, in Geneva; De Ijsbreker Chamber Music Festival, in Amsterdam; Warsaw Autumn, in Poland; Ultima, in Oslo; Melbourne Festival, in Australia; Festival of Arts and Ideas in the USA, Ars Musica in Bruxelles; Festival de Alicante, in Spain; Festival Internacional Cervantino in Mexico, amongst others. 

Here's a clip of Misplaced Flowers, a ballet choreographed by Joel Valentin-Martinez in 2010 to Paredes's music, performed here by the noted Chicago-based ensemble Fulcrum Point. 

David Felder speaks for himself

No overview of June in Buffalo would be complete without a few words on David Felder, who is not only Artistic Director of JiB, but also the Slee Sinfonietta and the Center for 21st Century Music itself. David Felder has long been recognized as a leader in his generation of American composers. His works have been featured at many of the leading international festivals for new music, and he earns continuing recognition through performance and commissioning programs. Felder’s work has been broadly characterized by its highly energetic profile, through its frequent employment of technological extension and elaboration of musical materials (including his “Crossfire” video series), and its lyrical qualities. 


He has earned numerous honors for his composition, and is widely recognized as an important teacher and mentor as well. He has served as dissertation advisor for over forty composers at Buffalo, many of whom are actively teaching, composing and performing internationally at leading institutions. 


David Felder served as Master Artist in Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in February-March, 2010. During that time, the Atlantic Center created a series of video interviews with the composer, in which he speaks eloquently on various topics, including his thoughts on collaboration, working with visual elements, and the question of who he writes his music for. Three of these follow:

Eric Chasalow

Continuing our alphabetical look at the Senior Faculty of June in Buffalo 2011, we turn to composer Eric Chasalow, who has been described as "the rare composer who is as comfortable with electro-acoustic music as he is with music for traditional ensembles. ARRAY, the journal of the International Computer Music Association, wrote that his 2003 CD Left to His Own Devices "clearly establishes him as one of the leaders of our times...offering a wondrous fusion between distinct styles and mediums...." 

Chasalow's music has been embraced by performers throughout the world, with recent performances from Boston to Berlin and San Francisco to Seoul. 

A member of the Brandeis University faculty since 1990, Chasalow directs the Brandeis Electro-Acoustic Music Studio. He produces the biennial BEAMS Electronic Music Marathon, on the Boston CyberArts Festival. Since 1996 he has curated The Video Archive of Electroacoustic Music, an oral history project chronicling the pioneer electronic music composers and engineers from 1950 to the present. 

A product of the famed Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, Chasalow studied composition with Mario Davidovsky and flute with Harvey Sollberger. He has been honored by the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.


Says Chasalow, "Over the years, the technology available to me has changed dramatically, from the hand-made cutting and splicing of the analog studio, to MIDI automation and, currently, graphical computer-based sound editing environments. While the newer tools have made the process of realizing electronic music much easier, my fundamental musical approach to these pieces has not changed much. At the core is the tradition created by the work of Mario Davidovsky. In this tradition, one uses prerecorded sounds to expand upon the acoustical characteristics of the live instruments—the real origin of the 'hyperinstrument' concept. What may be obvious is that the timbre of a traditional instrument in performance may be changed by adding electronic components—a kind of heightened orchestration… While my studio technique derives from Davidovsky, the musical character is quite different. My instrumental writing is often at an energy level drawn from my experience with improvised jazz. My recent electronic music reflects this as well. By adding layers of manipulated recordings of spoken or sung text, the sound of the human voice often emerges in surprising ways."