Guest composer James Romig

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

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