June in Buffalo Performance Institute announced!

JACK Quartet

The Center for 21st Century Music is excited to announce the details of the first ever June in Buffalo Performance Institute! For the first year ever, contemporary music performers around the world are invited to participate in masterclasses, seminars, workshops, and performances at June in Buffalo, and work with members of the June in Buffalo Performance Faculty, including the JACK Quartet, Talujon Percussion Ensemble, Tom Kolor, Jonathan Golove, and New York Philharmonic pianist-in-residence and Performance Institute director Eric Huebner. Complete details below.  


June in Buffalo Performance Institute

The June in Buffalo Performance Institute invites performers with an interest in contemporary music to take part in an intensive 10-day festival of concerts, master classes and seminars. Held on the campus of the University at Buffalo, the 2013 Performance Institute invites pianists, strings players and percussionists as well as pre-formed string quartets and percussion ensembles to apply. All participants will have the opportunity to study and collaborate with Performance Institute faculty and perform as well as attend June in Buffalo composer workshops and concerts. The Performance Institute coincides with the annual June in Buffalo festival for composers and will run from May 30th - June 8th, 2013.

Performance Institute Faculty:
Ensembles-in-Residence:

JACK Quartet
Talujon Percussion Ensemble (5/31-6/3)

Eric Huebner, piano

Performance Institute director
University at Buffalo assistant professor
New York Philharmonic principal pianist

Jonathan Golove, cello

University at Buffalo associate professor

Tom Kolor, percussion

University at Buffalo assistant professor
member, Talujon Percussion Ensemble

June in Buffalo Faculty Composers
David Felder
Augusta Read Thomas
Charles Wuorinen
Yehudi Wyner

Performance Ensembles
Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra
Ensemble Linea
Ensemble Signal, Brad Lubman, conductor
Slee Sinfonietta
Talea Ensemble, Jim Baker, conductor

Arrival day: May 29, 2013
Departure day: June 9, 2013
Tuition: $950
($750 per member for string quartets or percussion ensembles)
On-campus housing: $400 (does not include meals)

APPLICATION PROCEDURES
Please submit the following for consideration by February 15th, 2013:

- Full contact information including name, mailing address, phone number and email

- Short bio including education and performance experience

- A representative CD recording (preferably live)

- Application Fee: Check in the amount of $25 made out to "June in Buffalo"

Completed applications should be mailed to:

Prof. Eric Huebner
220 Baird Hall
University at Buffalo
Buffalo, NY 14260

For general information, contact Eric Huebner

phone: (716) 645-0637
fax: (716) 645-3824
email: erichueb@buffalo.edu

Link to this post here.

John Cage’s Europera 5 at the Burchfield Penney Art Center!

We in Buffalo have been celebrating John Cage’s 100th birthday this year with many diverse performances of his works all around the city. In this vein, we’re happy to announce a special performance of his final opera, Europera 5, at the Burchfield Penney Art Center on Friday, October 12, from 8 – 9:30 p.m., in the Peter and Elizabeth C. Tower Auditorium. John Cage was a good friend to Buffalo and served as a faculty composer at June in Buffalo during the 1970s -- friend of Cage and Buffalo native Jan Williams, who is also an Emeritus Professor at UB, veteran Creative Associate of the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts of Buffalo, and percussionist extraordinaire, will be performing on the victrola throughout Europera 5, alongside soprano Martha Herr, tenor Robert Zimmerman, pianist Amy Williams, Tom Kostusiak on Lighting, and Don Metz on Truckera tape.

John Cage and Jan Williams

Europera 5 (1991) was John Cage's last and most portable opera. It is a collage scored for two singers, each singing five arias of their own choosing from the standard opera repertoire. A pianist "accompanies" them by playing six different opera transcriptions. They are joined by a single 78-rpm victrola player, playing six historical opera recordings and a performer playing a pre-recorded tape, plus the use of a radio and a silent television.

The following is a little background on John Cage and Europera 5, written by Associate Director of the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Don Metz:

“John Cage (1912-1992) was one of the most influential and inventive composers of the second half of the 20th century. He was constantly looking for ways to find and invent new sounds and to organize them through unconventional means of notation and time, utilizing indeterminacy in music through chance operations. Cage is revered world-wide not only as a composer, but as a writer, philosopher, graphic artist, painter and lecturer, who influenced and inspired artists in many disciplines. Critics agree that his challenge to conquer our dislikes in order to revolutionized how we perceive and reshaped aesthetic thought in the second half of the 20th Century. Cage suggested we ‘use art not as self expression, but as self alteration.’

“He revolutionized music by emphasizing the use of silence within its vocabulary and proclaimed ‘all sound is music’ and ‘everything we do is music.’ In the 1990 documentary John Cage: I have Nothing to Say and I am Saying it, he states: ‘I have come to my music to enjoy the sounds wherever I am. I wouldn’t say that I understand the environment, I simply experience it. The first question I ask myself when something doesn’t seem to be beautiful is why I don’t think it is beautiful. And very shortly after, you discover there is no reason.’

John Cage

“In 1987, Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Reiner Riehm invited Cage to write an opera that was intended to be an ‘irreversible negation of the opera as such’. Cage’s response, ‘For 200 years the Europeans have sent us their operas. Now I am returning them all to them.’ In 1987 Europera 1 & Europa 2 premiered in the Frankfurt Opera. Cage chose for his musical materials in his Europeras, fragments of eighteenth and nineteenth century operas. There is no music by the composer. Instead, there is found music that is organized by the composer using chance operations, and, in the case of Europera 5, he instructs performers to select parts to perform from their repertoire.

“Cage completed Europera 5 in March, 1991, in time for its premiere in Buffalo at the North American New Musical Festival on April 12, 1991. The work was a co-commissioned with the DeIjsbreker International Music Center in Amsterdam and, appropriately, the first European performances were in Holland that May with the same personnel. There were subsequent performances in Brussels and Ghent in Belgium and Bergen, Norway, with further performances in Ferrara (Italy), Odense (Denmark) and Geneva.

“In the summer of 1992, there were five performances of Europera 5 in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art. Between the second and third performances John Cage died. Europera 5 was the last public performance of his own work that he heard. In a sense, he became part of this transcendent theatre piece which combines elements of two centuries, never-blending, to create an emulsion of time, space and music.

"Europera 5 enlists two singers, a pianist, a technician operating a tape recorder, a television and radio, a lighting technician and a person playing records on a victrola. Each performer follows a set of rules that were determined by chance operations.”

Tom Kolor showcases "Made in the U.S.A."

We at the Center are pleased to announce that UB faculty percussionist Tom Kolor will be treating us to a solo recital of contemporary pieces by American composers this week. His recital, titled “Made in the U.S.A.”, will be on Tuesday, October 9, at 7:30 p.m., in Lippes Concert Hall. Tom Kolor is a specialist in 20th and 21st century percussion music, is one of New York City’s most in demand chamber musicians, and is the Principal Percussionist with UB’s Slee Sinfonietta.

Tom Kolor performing J.T. Rinker's Frigate

As a soloist, Tom Kolor has given dozens of premieres by American composers such as Milton Babbitt, John Zorn, Wayne Peterson, Tania Leon, and Jerome Kitzke. He has recorded for Bridge, New World, Albany, Capstone, Innova, Wergo, Naxos, CRI, Koch, Tzadik, North/South Consonance, and Deutsche Grammophon labels. Tom Kolor is a member of the NYC-based percussion septet, Talujon Ensemble, whose concerts have been hailed by the New York Times as "frenzied explosions of percussion madness”. He also performs throughout the U.S. and Europe as a member of Manhattan Sinfonietta, Ensemble 21, Sospeso, American Modern Ensemble and Newband. In addition, he is a frequent guest of such ensembles as the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, New York New Music Ensemble, Speculum Musicae, Continuum, Da Capo Chamber Players, Group for Contemporary Music, and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.

Tom was a featured performer last summer at the Sound Res Festival in Leche, Italy, where he gave the European premiere of Marimba Variations by Charles Wuorinen, a sophisticated 15 minute-long Marimba solo he commissioned from the composer. Tom will perform Wuorinen’s Marimba Variations during the first half of his faculty recital.

Details of the complete program and ticket information below:

Made in the U.S.A.

Tom Kolor, Percussion

Tuesday, October 9, 7:30 pm in Lippes Concert Hall

Elliot Carter: Three pieces for Four Kettledrums (19500-66)

Charles Wuorinen: Marimba Variations (2008-09)

---Intermission---

Ralph Shapey: 2 for 1 (1988)

Ralph Shapey: Soli for Solo Percussion (1985)

Tickets are $10 for the general public, $5 for UB faculty/staff/alumni, seniors, and non-UB students. All UB students with a valid ID receive complimentary tickets to all faculty recitals.

Composer James Romig visits the Center

We’re excited to welcome composer James Romig to the Center for 21st Century Music at the University at Buffalo next week. Next Wednesday, October 10, he will offer a masterclass to UB graduate composers as well as give a presentation on his own music. Romig, who has been on faculty at Western Illinois University in Macomb, Illinois, since 2002, is currently overseeing a dizzying amount of performances of his pieces across the U.S., South America, and Europe. He recently had his duet for flute and piano, Leaves From Modern Trees, performed at the Iowa Composers Forum Festival, and his percussion trio, The Frame Problem, is scheduled for performances in Medellin, Columbia, Baylor University, University of Hartford, and Salle Stengel de Lorentzen, France, throughout the rest of October. The Frame Problem will then continue onto another 29 performances across the globe throughout the remainder of 2012. More information on upcoming performances of Romig’s works can be found on his website.

James Romig

According to his biography, Romig, "composes music that endeavors to reflect the intricate complexity of nature, where fundamental structures exert influence on both small-scale iteration and large-scale design, obscuring the boundaries between form and content. His work shows the influence of academic study with Charles Wuorinen and Milton Babbitt, interaction with the natural world through hiking and photography, and an interest in chaos theory, fractal geometry, and small-world networks."

Romig speaks very eloquently about his music, as in the following excerpt from a lecture he gave at the Timmons Chapel Lecture/Recital Series, in Pittsburg, Kansas, “In my own music, I try to maintain a high degree of what we might call, for lack of a better term, "self-referentiality." All aspects of a given work are related to a few fundamental principles that govern the work's composition. These principles might be new, and unique to the work in question, but my aim is to utilize these principles consistently, varying them subtly and intelligently, and applying them in multiple ways to multiple aspects of a composition in such a manner that musical gestures that may have seemed unusual at the beginning of a composition become, by the end, familiar. To make an analogy, I am introducing a new vocabulary (new "words" made from familiar "letters") in each composition. By using strict and consistent grammar, this vocabulary becomes internalized by an audience to the point where it will recognize the manner with which I am "playing" with the rules and forms of the work. This is my goal as an artist.”

Check out this amazing performance of The Frame Problem being interpretted by the Tak-Nara Percussion Trio:

Below is another outstanding percussion piece by James Romig, this time a solo work titled A Slightly Evil Machine, interpretted here by Caleb Herron:

Soundcloud up and new audio available!

We at the Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music are happy to announce a new and improved soundcloud page -- so far we've uploaded 36 tracks of audio from past concerts and festivals, and the page is proving to be a great resource to listen to pieces and excerpts of large works from a tremendous variety of contemporary composers, including Hilda Paredes, Eric Chasalow, John Cage, Reiko Futing, Morton Feldman, Sofia Gubaidulina, Roger Reynolds, David Felder, and may more. All are invited to browse our page here.

Some of the most recently uploaded audio is from June in Buffalo 2012, which was given some very thoughtful press by the The Buffalo News, as well as by our good friend Allan Kozinn at the New York Times, who offered some insightful commentary on David Felder's Rare Air, a four movement work for piano, clarinet, and electronics:

Jean Kopperud performing Felder's Rare Air
photo by Irene Haupt

"Mr. Felder was represented by three movements from Rare Air (2009), a work that explores various aspects of the clarinet or, more properly, the agility of the group’s extraordinary clarinetist, Jean Kopperud. In “Blews” Ms. Kopperud performed on a tube instrument that she and Mr. Felder built for the score. It looks like a boa constrictor; it’s hard to say how it sounds, since the score is heavily layered with electronic timbres and evokes a forest full of banshees. The other movements, “Boxmunsdottir” and “Boxmunsson,” are more conventional, if only by comparison. In both, Mr. Kopperud played a bass clarinet energetically and sometimes with a jazzy tinge, but always enmeshed in Mr. Felder’s evocative electronic scoring." You can read the rest of the review here, and listen to David Felder's "Boxmunsson" from Rare Air, on our soundcloud here.

Brad Lubman from SIGNAL conducting Julia Wolfe's Impatience
photo by Irene Haupt

In a second review, Allan Kozinn offered some thoughts on a few of the larger ensemble pieces at the festival, including Impatience, by Julia Wolfe, "Ms. Wolfe’s Impatience (2005), an insistent, sometimes painterly accompaniment to a peculiar film of that name by the 1920s avant-garde director Charles Dekeukeleire, uses repeating figures and steady, tolling harp, percussion and piano pulses to evoke a tense emotional landscape, and odd touches like eerie accordion chords and sliding violin lines to create an otherworldly atmosphere. If those qualities seem conflicting, they capture the essence of Dekeukeleire’s primitive jump cuts and juxtapositions, and work splendidly on their own." Read the full review here and listen to Julia Wolfe's Impatience on our soundcloud here.

Our first Slee Sinfonietta concert of the 2012-2013 season was a great success as well, and we were happy to be visited by Daniel J. Kushner, who had kind words for the program, and gave a glowing review of Robert Treviño's debut conducting performance with the Slee Sinfonietta, "It felt as if the conductor were prying open the dense orchestration to illuminate the sumptuous yet terse melodies nested inside, waiting to be discovered by the listener." You can read the rest of the review at the The Buffalo News, and listen to Ligeti's Melodien on our soundcloud here.

Remembering Emmanuel Nunes...

We at the Center were sad to hear of the passing of great composer and musical thinker Emmanuel Nunes earlier this month. Emmanuel Nunes produced a vast and diverse output of instrumental and electroacoustic works that intimately link space and time, movement and metamorphosis, and numerical symbolism and organic processes. Nunes, originally born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1941, had been living primarily in Paris since 1964, where he spent twelve years as a Professor of Composition at the Conservatoire de Paris and later worked at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM). Nunes has also taught substantially at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg, and the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, as well as at the Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt, where he studied extensively throughout the ‘60s.

Emmanuel Nunes

In an interview with our friends at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Nunes remarked about his time studying with the Darmstadt gang, and how it pushed him to develop his own separate, distinct voice, “I learned quite a lot from the courses by Pousseur, Ligeti, and Boulez. At that time Stockhausen did not come to Darmstadt, and among the crowd of composers having a subscription to Darmstadt, two extremes were in: either the so-called sérialisme intégral, or the graphic scores tendency proclaiming their illusion of liberty. Quite often the acoustical result was nearly the same.

“During those years I still did not compose really, my knowledge in terms of musical technique was more than incipient, but I did have a kind of internal compass, which detained me from stepping into such paths. As I used to say to my students: It is more important for me to know what I do not want, than to know what I want.”

Nunes’ work will be featured substantially at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2012: Litanies du feu et de la mer I and Litanies du feu et de la mer II will be performed by Noriko Kawai, Improvisation IV - l'électricité de la pensée humaine will be performed by Quatuor Diotima, and Nachtmusik I will be performed by the Remix Ensemble.

Listen below to Nunes’ La Main noire (2007) for three violas, performed and recorded in the studio by Christophe Desjardins, with accompanying video art by Sol mineur 5.

UB graduate composer Nathan Heidelberger at the Aspen Music Festival and Copland House

In our last post, we took a look at our graduate composers at the University at Buffalo, who had an incredibly active summer participating in seminars, conferences, and festivals across all of Europe and the United States. We sat down with one of them, Nathan Heidelberger, a composer entering his third year at the doctoral program here, and asked him to talk about the places he went, the musicians he worked with, and the pieces he had performed.   

Nathan Heidelberger
photo by Megan Metté

“This summer I spent a month as one of six participants in the Master Class Composition Program at the Aspen Music Festival and School. The travel to the Festival was made possible by a generous grant from the Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21^st Century Music. The program was led by Christopher Rouse, currently the composer-in-residence at the New York Philharmonic, and Augusta Read Thomas, a longtime friend of the Center. In addition to working with these two distinguished composers, the Festival afforded me the opportunity to take in a number of concerts performed by world-class musicians, get some focused composing done, and, of course, climb a few mountains. I was also treated to premieres of two of my pieces.

“I wrote in flux / in flecks / influx / inflects, a trio for alto flute, viola, and metallic percussion, specifically for the Aspen Festival. It was premiered by the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, an elite group of student performers under the direction of Sydney Hodkinson. The piece is an exploration of fluctuating sounds. There are rarely any steady pitches – rather, notes are constantly being destabilized through trills, tremoli, detuning, singing while playing, and so on. My goal was to create an iridescent and constantly shifting texture, one befitting the elusive charm of the “alto” instruments I was writing for. A revised version of this piece will be performed in Buffalo by the Norrbotten Neo Ensemble when they visit the Center in December.

             

“My second performance at Aspen was the long-overdue premiere of an old orchestral piece, …moves through a space… I wrote the piece in 2009 at the end of my undergraduate studies at Oberlin Conservatory, but I was never able to hear it. The piece is mostly very sparse, with the full orchestra only coming together once or twice. A rocking, footstep-like figure is present almost the entire time, passed between different instruments, creating a sense of foreground behind which various other sounds drift in and out. The piece was performed in a reading session by the American Academy of Conducting at Aspen Orchestra, under the baton of Alexandra Arrieche, one of the Festival’s conducting fellows. Robert Spano, the conductor of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and the artistic director of the Festival, was also there to help guide us through the reading.

“After my time at the Aspen Festival I also had the privilege to join four other composers in the first ever Cultivate workshop  Cultivate Workshop at the Copland House in my hometown of Cortlandt Manor, New York. The program, organized by artistic director Michael Boriskin and composer Derek Bermel, consisted of a week of intensive rehearsals and discussions, culminating in a concert of premieres by the Music from Copland House Copland House ensemble. My piece, a quartet for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano called Halve Time, began as a series of rough sketches read by the Antares Quartet when the Center brought them to Buffalo last April, which were fleshed out while I was in Aspen. The piece consists of five movements; the longest lasts about three minutes, with the other movements repeatedly halving each others’ durations until the shortest one lasts only ten seconds. These durational restraints elicit radically different behaviors from the same basic musical materials from movement to movement. The form is a nod to Zeno, the ancient Greek philosopher who suggested a series of paradoxes in which one can never really travel from point A to point B, since one must first travel half the distance, and then half the remaining distance, and then half the remaining distance again, and so on, ad infinitum. Local ensemble Wooden Cities will be presenting the Buffalo premiere of this piece on December 14^th, at Hallwalls.”

Last Spring, Nathan participated in a concert with our friends at the A Musical Feast concert series at the Burchfield Penney Art Center. His song cycle, Descriptions of the Moon, which uses text from a diverse array of writers including Dante Algheri, e.e. cummings, Galileo Galilei, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, and others, was performed by mezzo-soprano Julia Bentley and UB’s own faculty pianist Eric Huebner. Check out their stellar performance in the video below:

Busy summer for UB graduate composers!

Our composers had a very active summer participating at seminars, institutes, conferences, and festivals in the U.S. and all across Europe:

Jacob Gotlib was a selected as a participant composer for a two-week residency at the Wellesley Composers Conference in Wellesley, Massachusettes, where he studied closely with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Melinda Wagner and June in Buffalo veteran composer Eric Chasalow. His piece, Year Without Summer (Daumenkino), was performed by some of today’s expert musicians, including conductor and friend of the Center James Baker, as well as UB faculty clarinettist Jean Kopperud. You can listen to Year Without Summer (Daumenkino) here.

UB graduate composer Jacob Gotlib
photo by Megan Metté

Juan Colón-Hernández spent two weeks at the soundScape Festival in Maccagno, Italy, just south of the French/Swiss Alps, where his piece Hazy Transmutations for violin and piano was performed, coached by pianist and conductor Thomas Rosenkranz.

Dimitar Pentchev participated in this year’s June in Buffalo where his piece, 1:05, for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano was performed.

Robert Phillips was selected to be one of twelve composers to spend two weeks at the Harvard University Summer Composition Institute, where his piece Shindō no su for flute, bass clarinet, glockenspiel, keyboard with laptop, violin, viola, and cello, was performed by the Talea Ensemble under the baton of Eduardo Leandro in Paine Hall at Harvard University. He was also invited be a panelist at the Harvard Colloquia during the final days of the Institute, where he discussed the topic, (Un)Original(ity), curated by Aaron Einbond, from the University of Huddersfield.

Nathan Heidelberger had perhaps the most active summer of all – he was chosen to be one of only six composers to spend a month at the Aspen Music Festival led by New York Philharmonic composer-in-residence Christopher Rouse and joined by longtime friend of the Center Augusta Read Thomas and visiting Pulitzer Prize winning composer Jennifer Higdon. Nathan’s piece, in flux / in flecks /influx / inflects, for alto flute, viola, and percussion, was performed by the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, an elite group of student performers directed by Sydney Hodkinson. The festival also chose to workshop an orchestra piece of Nathan’s, titled Moves Through a Space, under guidance from conductor and Academy director Robert Spano. Nathan then continued on to the Cultivate Workshop at the Copland House, where his piece, Halve Time, for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano was performed.

And the summer is not quite over yet! At the moment, Chun Ting Pang is currently in France participating as a selected composer at Fondation Royaumont with June in Buffalo veteran composer Brian Ferneyhough, and Diana Soh is just beginning her second year as an invited composer for the Cursus II at IRCAM.

Several other University at Buffalo musicians and performers were active this summer as well. UB graduate clarinetist, philosopher, and musicologist Christopher Culp attended the fresh inc. festival in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he worked with some of today’s top new music composers and musicians, and performed Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time and Francis Poulenc’s Sextet. UB undergraduate flutist Jamie Sweringa spent two and a half weeks at the Orfeo Music Festival in Vipiteno, Italy, where she studied with flutist Elizabeth Goode and performed in several solo, chamber ensemble, and orchestra performances, and UB undergraduate trombonist Matt Stewart was able to attend both the Atlantic Brass Quintet Summer Seminar and the Summer Brass Institute. 

Robert Treviño conducts the Slee Sinfonietta to kick off the 2012-2013 season with Berg, Ligeti, and Adams!

The Center is pleased to announce the first Slee Sinfonietta concert of the 2012-2013 season, on Monday, September 24th, at 7:30 p.m. in Lippes Concert Hall. We’ll be welcoming a handful of exciting guests, including conductor Robert Treviño, violinist Yuki Numata, and pianist Daniel Pesca, for a concert of pieces by Alban Berg, György Ligeti, and John Adams.

Robert Treviño

Our guest conductor Robert Treviño has an impressively long resumé for someone who his only 28 years old, and is currently serving his second season as the Associate Conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, as well as debuting this year with the California Symphony Orchestra and the Shippensburg Music Festival. He has worked with a long list of ensembles, symphonies, and orchestras, including the Orchestras of Cleveland and Philadelphia, the Symphonies of Cincinnati, Baltimore, Charlotte, Memphis, Napa Valley, New World, the Philharmonics of Chicago, Louisiana, Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, Aspen Music Festival Orchestra, Suwon Philharmonic of South Korea, Wuppertal Symphony of Germany, Montpellier National Orchestra of France, Universidad Nacional Autonoma De Mexico Philharmonic of Mexico, the Millennium Chamber Players, and the Jusqu’aux Oreilles Festival of Canada. Treviño also served a month-long residency with the Helsinki Philharmonic, where he assisted Music Director Leif Segerstam through a season of the complete symphonies of Sibelius.

Alban Berg

The first half of the program will include Alban Berg's op. 5, Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, featuring UB faculty pianist Eric Huebner and UB faculty clarinetist Jean Kopperud, and Berg’s Chamber Concerto for Violin and Piano with 13 wind instruments, which will feature guest soloist violinist Yuki Numata, whose playing has been described by the New York Times as possessing “virtuosic flair and dexterous bravery,” and guest pianist Daniel Pesca, who was recently in residence at the Aspen Music Festival. The second half of the program will feature some exciting and rarely performed works from the late 20th century: György Ligeti's Melodien, and John Adams' Chamber Symphony.

For information about tickets, contact the UB Department of Music Concert Series.

Working in Time: A Celebration of the Arts in Honor of Bruce Jackson

The Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music and Lippes Concert Hall is proud to host Working in Time: A Celebration of the Arts in Honor of Bruce Jackson, presented by SUNY Distinguished Professors Bruce Jackson and David Felder, on Friday, September 21, 1:00 – 5:00 p.m., in Lippes Hall. 

The event, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the University at Buffalo Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development, and will celebrate the art of James Agee Professor of American Culture in the Department of English, Bruce Jackson, a Guggenheim Fellow whose interdisciplinary career as an artist and scholar integrates literature, music, ethnography, folklore, sociology, photography, and documentary film-making. He has written or edited 32 books, one of which is the recently published In This Timeless Time: Living and Dying on Death Row in America, in which he collaborated with UB English Professor Diane Christian, who will act as moderator throughout the day. Jackson has had 20 solo photography exhibits, including Death Row, on view this fall at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Next Spring, the Burchfield Penney Art Center will present an exhibition of more than 350 of his photographs.

Bruce Jackson

The day will open with greetings from UB President Satish K. Tripathi, who speaks with great respect about Jackson’s work, “UB has a long history of leadership in scholarly and creative excellence at the vanguard of the arts, and as we launch a new annual tradition that celebrates that tradition of cutting-edge work, Bruce really emerged as an ideal figure to spotlight in this inaugural event.

“Like much of the very best work in the arts and humanities, Bruce’s work defies easy definition. His films, photographs, social commentary and scholarship all cut across multiple fields and have tremendously broad relevance, from the academy to popular culture, to international social policy. The incredible scope and reach of those achievements embody the complex, interdisciplinary contributions of the arts—and of the research university itself.”

The celebration will feature a world premiere by UB Professor and Birge-Cary Chair in Composition David Felder, titled A Garland for Bruce, starring UB faculty cellist Jonathan Golove. Jackson describes Felder as “one of the people who makes UB a viable intellectual and artistic community.”

The day will also showcase images from Jackson’s forthcoming book Inside the Wire: Photographs from Texas and Arkansas Prisons, as well as music from Jackson’s Grammy-nominated album Wake Up Dead Man. American filmmaker and documentarian Frederick Wiseman will also participate, and screen his most recent film, Crazy Horse.

After the event, at 5:00 p.m., there will be a reception at the nearby UB Center for the Arts Atrium, where all will be invited to participate in an open discussion with Bruce Jackson, David Felder, and Frederick Wiseman. 

Announcing the Fall 2012 Season at the Center!

We at The Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music are excited to announce our Fall 2012 Season! June in Buffalo 2012 was a great success and a stimulating week of fresh new compositions and performances, as well as, in the words of the great New York Times music writer Allan Kozinn, “an intensive weeklong boot camp for budding young composers.” Allan Kozinn wrote up two great reviews of June in Buffalo 2012 in the New York Times, which you can read here and here.

UB alumn Judith Sherman

Our Fall season already began on August 25, when UB graduate composer Matt Sargent served as the music director for American Grain, a multimedia performance event for the Marine A grain elevator of Silo City, in Buffalo, NY. The event featured, amidst dance performances, an array of art on the walls, and tours throughout the silo, a cello quartet written by Matt and headed by UB faculty cellist Jonathan Golove. Read more about the event at the Buffalo News.

Our next event will be Working in Time: A Celebration of the Arts in Honor of Bruce Jackson on September 21. The event will celebrate the life and works of documentary filmmaker Bruce Jackson, who is the James Agee Professor of American Culture at the University at Buffalo. Working in Time will feature music by UB Birge-Cary Chair in music composition David Felder, and also feature projects by filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, and UB poet and documentarian Diane Christian. Working in Time will take place on Friday, September 21, 1:00-5:00 p.m., in Lippes Hall.  

Our first Slee Sinfonietta concert will be on Monday, Sep. 24, and will showcase two pieces by Alban Berg on the program: his op. 5, Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, and his Chamber Concerto for Violin and Piano with 13 wind instruments, featuring violinist Yuki Numata and pianist Daniel Pesca, under the baton of Robert Treviño. The program will also include Gyorgy Ligeti’s Melodien, and John Adams’ Chamber Symphony.

On Wednesday, October 10, we will be hosting composer Jake Romig from Western Illinois University for a day of composer master classes and workshops, as well as a presentation on his own music.

Our second Slee Sinfonietta concert will be on Tuesday, October 30, and will offer an exciting and dynamic program of late 20th century works, under the baton of Maestro Daniel Bassin, including: Karlheinz Stockshausen’s Kreuzspiel, Gyorgy Ligeti’s Horn Trio, Morton Feldman’s De Kooning, Tristan Murial’s Vues Aériennes, and Witold Lutoslawski’s Dance Preludes. Our concert will again include violinst Yuki Numata, alongside horn player Adam Unsworth, and UB faculty pianist and New York Philharmonic pianist-in-residence Eric Huebner.

From November 26th to 28th, violinist Curtis Macomber, from the Manhattan School of Music, will visit the Center, alongside UB alumn and two-time Grammy winner of the award for Classical Producer of the Year, Judith Sherman. For three days they will run a workshop on recording, editing, and producing Classical music.

Norrbotten Neo

On Tuesday, Dec. 4, the expert contemporary music ensemble from Sweden, and longtime friend of the Center, Norrbotten Neo, will join us for a composer workshop. The next day, on Wed., Dec. 5, they will give an evening concert. 

Spring at the Center will be even more active than the Fall. April's Slee Sinfonietta concert will feature bass singer Ethan Herschenfeld, soprano Laura Aikin, and about 30 musicians from SIGNAL Ensemble, for the premiere of David Felder’s Les Quatre Temps Cardinaux (The Four Cardinal Seasons), a commission from the Koussevitzky Foundation. Also on the program will be Felder’s Tweener, featuring UB percussionist Tom Kolor. Spring will also include visits from composer Phillipe Hurel, French ensemble Court-Circuit, and Oberlin composer Josh Levine.

New York City’s Talea Ensemble, who were originally scheduled to come in October, will now come for June in Buffalo 2013, stay tuned for details on the upcoming June in Buffalo!

  

Ensemble Signal comes to June in Buffalo 2012!

We’re all set to welcome Ensemble Signal to June in Buffalo 2012! Described by the New York Times as, “one of the most vital groups of its kind,” and TimeOutNY as a “new music dream team,” Ensemble Signal plays a crucial role in today’s world of music by performing, commissioning, and promoting works by a diverse range of visionary composers in the U.S. and all around the world. We’re beyond excited to have them at June in Buffalo this year. On Tuesday, June 5, at 4:00 p.m., in B1 Slee, they will interpret works by June in Buffalo participants Capp, Diaz Infante, Meurant, Naeff, Popeney, and White, and on Saturday, June 9, in Slee Hall, at 7:30 p.m., they will perform La Passione by Louis Andriessen and Impatience by Julia Wolfe.

Brad Lubman and Ensemble Signal with Helmut Lachenmann

Signal made its debut in Spring 2008 at the Bang On A Can Marathon in NYC and the Ojai Music Festival in California, earning praise for “deeply committed performances” (Musical America) of “gripping vehemence” (LA Times). They’ve been busy touring and performing ever since, and are having an especially active season this year: they played the music of Brian Ferneyhough at Tanglewood, collaborated with Philip Glass Ensemble Music Director Michael Riesman at (le) Poisson Rouge, gave the NY premiere of a new cantata by Charles Wuorinen at The Guggenheim Museum, and premiered a new work by Hilda Paredes written for Signal and Irvine Arditti at the Miller Theatre composer portrait series. Upcoming projects include the commission of a 30 minute work for 20 players by Steve Reich.

Signal’s recordings include Philip Glass’ Glassworks and Music in Similar Motion (Glass’ Orange Mountain label); and Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Penelope (New Amsterdam Records). Upcoming releases include a CD/surround-sound DVD of music by Lachenmann, with the composer as soloist in Zwei Gefühle (Mode); Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe’s Shelter (Cantaloupe); and Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and pulitzer-prize winning Double Sextet (Cantaloupe).

Check out the gripping performance below of Ensemble Signal interpretting Michael Gordon’s Trance:

June in Buffalo 2012 welcomes Ensemble Interface!

Today we take a look at Ensemble Interface, one of our resident ensembles here at June in Buffalo 2012. On Wednesday, June 6, in Slee Hall, at 7:30 p.m., Ensemble Interface will perform works by Louis Andriessen, Morton Feldman, Beat Furrer, and Fred Lerdahl, and on Thursday, June 7, they will perform works by June in Buffalo participants Chandler, Huffman, Kang, Kelly, Schaul, and Yildrim, in Slee Hall, at 4:00 p.m.

Ensemble Interface

Ensemble Interface is having a very busy year which includes appearances at the Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik Bern, the Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik Basel, our own June in Buffalo 2012 , and afterward will continue on with, among many others, some featured performances at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt.

Ensemble Interface describe themselves as an international collective of young musicians devoted to the virtuosic performance and innovative dissemination of contemporary classical music. Founded in 2009, they have been quickly recognized as one of the leading young ensembles in Europe dedicated to interfacing contemporary music and culture in Germany and abroad through performance, educational activities, and research. The musicians of Ensemble Interface have worked with some of the world’s foremost composers and conductors including Georges Aperghis, Stefan Asbury, Pierluigi Billone, Pierre Boulez, Martyn Brabbins, Peter Eötvös, Brian Ferneyhough, Heinz Holliger, Helmut Lachenmann, Franck Ollu, Enno Poppe, Wolfgang Rihm, Lucas Vis, Joji Yuasa and Hans Zender, and have enjoyed a close working relationship with German composer and director Heiner Goebbels. They have appeared in some of Europe’s most innovative music festivals including the 45. Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt, Hamburger Klangwerktage, Berlin Ultraschall and Young Euro Classic, Kasseler Musiktage, ROTOR Festival, Klangspuren Schwaz, Transart Bolzano and the Centro para la Difusión de la Música Contemporánea (CDMC) in Madrid and are former soloists of the Lucerne Festival Akademie, among others. Interface began performing together as members of the 2008/09 International Ensemble Modern Academy (IEMA) in Frankfurt am Main, where they were mentored by the Ensemble Modern.

Below is a brief video excerpt of Jagoda Szmytka’s just before after, interpretted by Ensemble Interface:

Congratulations to UB graduate composers for a remarkably productive year!

This year has been a very active and productive one for all of the members of the PhD program in music composition at the University at Buffalo. Our graduate composers have been racking up prestigious fellowships, residencies, commissions, and performances all across the globe and winning awards and receiving accolades from some of contemporary music’s most respected programs and institutions. Below is a very brief and selected summary of what some of our graduate composers have been up to this year:

Joe Lake, currently studying in Germany through a Fulbright Scholarship, has received a D.A.A.D. award for residency in Berlin for 2012-13.

Nathan Heidelberger has been named a Fellow at the Aspen Music Festival Summer Composition Program, one of the most prestigious composition programs in the U.S.

Diana Soh is in residence at IRCAM, in Paris, France, as a recipient of a rare year-long residency program, and has been selected as one of 5 composers from around the globe to be commissioned for a new work by IRCAM and to have a full year residency at IRCAM to prepare her new work. Diana also received artist-in-residence awards from Royaumont, Aix-en-Provence, and the Recontres Festival among many others.

Robert Phillips has been selected to be a participant in Harvard University’s Summer Composition Institute, and has been commissioned by Ensemble SurPlus to write a new work for their upcoming 20^th anniversary concert in Freiburg, Germany.

Jacob Gotlib has been selected as one of 10 international composers to be in residence at the prestigious Wellesley's Composers Conference. His percussion quartet, Scape After Louise, won the Act Percussion First Prize and received a performance in Koln, Germany.

Megan Beugger was selected as a resident composer in the Akademie Schloss Solitude Summer Program  in August, 2011, and had her Expanse – String Quartet No. 2, performed several times in Germany throughout 2011 and 2012.

Chun Ting Pang has had a work selected for performance at the Hong Kong Contemporary Music Festival and at Musicarama. Additionally, he was selected to be the national representative for the Asian Composer's League in Tel Aviv, Israel. Chun Ting was also named as a composer participant at Royaumont, in France, for the 2012 Fall Season.

Juan Colón-Hernández, Dimitar Pentchev, Clint Haycraft, Zane Merrit, and David Rappenecker have been selected to be participants in June in Buffalo 2012, among 25 selected participants from over 80 international applications.

Matt Sargent was commissioned for an installation work, no where I’m bound, by the Hemphill Gallery, which ran March-May 2012, and went on to receive additional performances throughout the U.S.

Welcome Julia Wolfe to June in Buffalo 2012!

We at the Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21^st Century Music are thrilled to welcome Julia Wolfe to the faculty of June in Buffalo 2012. Julia Wolfe is a prolific composer who, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, has "long inhabited a terrain of [her] own, a place where classical forms are recharged by the repetitive patterns of minimalism and the driving energy of rock." She is an original co-founder of Bang on a Can, an ambitious NYC-based music organization that plays, according to the New York Times, “a central role in fostering a new kind of audience that doesn’t concern itself with boundaries. If music is made with originality and integrity, these listeners will come.” Julia Wofe was recently nominated to be a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for her work Steel Hammer, which was commissioned by Carnegie Hall and written for the Bang On A Can All-Stars and Trio Mediaeval, and recently received its Boston premiere at the Massachusettes Institute of Technology.

Julia Wolfe

Julia Wolfe has written a major body of work for strings, from quartets to full orchestra. Her quartets, as described by the New Yorker magazine "combine the violent forward drive of rock music with an aura of minimalist serenity [using] the four instruments as a big guitar, whipping psychedelic states of mind into frenzied and ecstatic climaxes." Wolfe's Cruel Sister for string orchestra, inspired by a traditional English ballad of a love rivalry between sisters, was commissioned by the Munich Chamber Orchestra and received its US premiere at the Spoleto Festival, and was recently released (along with her other string orchestra piece, Fuel) on Cantaloupe Records. Written shortly after September 11, 2001, her string quartet concerto My Beautiful Scream, written for Kronos Quartet and the Orchestre National de France (premiered in the US at the Cabrillo Festival under the direction of Marin Alsop), was inspired by the idea of a slow motion scream.

The influence of pop culture can be heard in many of Wolfe's works, including Lick and Believing for the Bang on a Can All-Stars. Lick, based on fragments of funk, has become a manifesto for the new generation of pop-influenced composers. The raucous My Lips From Speaking for six pianos was inspired by the opening riff of the Aretha Franklin tune Think. Wolfe's Dark Full Ride is an obsessive and relentless exploration of the drum set, beginning with an extended hi-hat spotlight. In LAD, Wolfe creates a kaleidoscopic landscape for nine bagpipes.

Her most recent works include Combat Du Boxe for the Asko-Schoenberg Ensemble (using another film by De Keukeleire), a solo (with 8 pre-recorded parts) called With A Blue Dress On for violinist Monica Germino, and a new solo for percussionist Evelyn Glennie called Iron Maiden. Upcoming works include an evening-length piece for Celtic singer and the string quartet Ethel, a concerto with orchestra and the percussionist Colin Currie, and a chamber concerto for German-Canadian cellist Johannes Moser.

Check out the great performance below of Julia Wolfe’s Dark Full Ride, as interpreted by longtime friends of the Center for 21^st Century Music, the Talujon Percussion Ensemble.