June in Buffalo 2024: Jonathan Golove

 Jonathan Golove

University at Buffalo website

In addition to directing this year’s festival, Jonathan Golove will act as a senior composer in the upcoming 2024 June in Buffalo. Golove is an associate professor of music, composition and cello, at the University at Buffalo and directs the Center for 21st Century Music. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of California at Berkeley, graduate studies in cello performance at the University of Southern California, and PhD in composition at the University at Buffalo.  

An accomplished cellist, Golove has performed with ensembles across Europe and North America. He has performed on traditional, electric, and theremin versions of the instrument and recorded with several world-renowned ensembles, including Michael Vlatkovich Quartet, Ubudis Trio, and Vinny Golia’s Large Ensemble. He has been featured as soloist with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Slee Sinfonietta, New York Virtuoso Singers, and, as a baroque cellist, with the USC Early Music Ensemble.  

Read more about Golove in this Edge of the Center post from last year:

Jonathan is by no means a newcomer to JiB! His first year as a performer and participant composer was 1994, and he has been active at the festival in various capacities nearly every June since then. In 2001, he served as senior composer, and in 2013 and 2015, as artist faculty for the June in Buffalo Performance Institute, which ran concurrently with the main festival. He has appeared as a soloist with the Buffalo Philharmonic (Morton Feldman’s Cello and Orchestra), as a member of the Slee Sinfonietta and Baird Trio, among other ensembles, and as a solo performer. Among his original works heard at June in Buffalo are E.Q. for electric string quartet, Closely Related Fungi for saxophone quartet, and (Max’s 24 Hours) Pray-O-Mat for two cellos and IRCAM Signal Processing Workstation.

Mr. Golove’s original compositions have been performed at venues including the Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C., Venice Biennale, Festival of Aix-en-Provence, Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society II, Encuentro Internacional de Jazz y Música Viva (Monterrey, Mexico), Centre Court Festival (Cologne, Germany) and the Kitchen. He has received awards and grants for his work from organizations including ASCAP, the Yvar Mikhashoff Trust for New Music, and Meet the Composer.

One of only a handful of players of the theremin cello, Golove has appeared as soloist with the Asko/Schoenberg Ensemble, London Sinfonietta, and International Contemporary Ensemble, and he is a member of the 1. Deutsche Stromorchester. As an electric cellist, he is particularly active in the fields of creative improvised music and avant-garde jazz. He has performed and recorded with jazz groups including the Michael Vlatkovich Tryyo and Quartet, Ubudis Quartet, and Vinny Golia’s Large Ensemble, and made appearances at the Vancouver Jazz Festival, the Eddie Moore Jazz Festival (Oakland), and the International Meeting of Jazz and New Music (Monterrey, Mexico). He has recorded for the Albany, Centaur, FMR, pfMENTUM, and Nine Winds labels, and his performances and interviews have been heard in broadcasts by numerous National Public Radio stations, as well as on Radio Nuevo León, West German Radio, CBC, and Radio France. Jonathan is an Associate Professor in UB’s Department of Music and served as department chair for the past six years. He looks forward to welcoming an inspiring group of participant composers to June in Buffalo 2023! He is also excited to work with performer colleagues from JiB’s resident ensembles to present a trio of his original works spanning several decades. Golove is honored to be joined by Arditti Quartet cellist (and founding member of Ensemble Recherche) Lucas Fels in Some Road Signs in Southern France (1988/89) for cello duo, a set of miniatures he composed during a year studying in Cologne. Talujon will partner with soprano Tiffany DuMouchelle to perform Here and There (1993) for soprano and percussion ensemble, with text by the award-winning poet Susan Lewis. Tiffany will also sing Imaginary Songs II (2004), a second collaboration between Golove and Lewis, in the company of flutist Nicole Murray and cellist Katie Weissman of the Slee Sinfonietta

Mental Radio

Jonathan Golove

June in Buffalo 2024: Nicholas Isherwood

This June in Buffalo, we look forward to welcoming bass-baritone Nicholas Isherwood back to to the University at Buffalo.

Nicholas Isherwood

June in Buffalo

Nicholas Isherwood is a highly sought after vocalist, director, composer, and pedagogue. He completed his undergraduate and gradate studies at the Oberlin Conservatory before earning his DEA at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes. 

A leading interpreter of early modern and contemporary singing roles, such Don Bartolo in W.A. Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, Hotel Manager in Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face, and Truffaldino in Richard Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos, Isherwood has performed in acclaimed venues across Europe and North America. He has collaborated with regarded composers such as Elliott Carter, George Crumb, Hans Werner Henze, Mauricio Kagel, György Kurtág, and Olivier Messiaen. Isherwood’s recent projects include collaborations with visual artists, such as Massimo Bartolini. He is scheduled to take part in the U.S. premier of Elliott Sharpe's Die Grösste Fuge on June 13 of this year at Roulette's Intermedium in Brooklyn, NY. (Read more by David Salazar at Opera Wire)

Nothing to Declare

Warsaw Autumn Festival, 2013

Isherwood’s compositions reflect the composers with whom he has worked and interpreted. His music has been performed at venues such as the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, the Goethe Institut in Paris, the CNRS, Yehudi Menuhin’s Flâneries Musicales in Reims, the Perpignan Festival, the SMIO in Orléans, the Théatre Dunois, Dôme IMAX and Bibliothèque Historique  in Paris, Freiburg, the MDR in Halle, the SWR, Vanderbilt University, the University of Oregon, Kaoshung, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Togamura, Japan. He has received commissions from the DRAC du centre, Art Zoyd and the CNAT in Reims. Isherwood’s music has been performed by VOXNOVA, Stefano Cardi, Michel Amoric, Magnus Andersson, Isabel Soccoja, Christophe De Villeneuve and the soloists of the MDR children’s choir. His music has been broadcast by France Musique, the MDR and the SWR. He is a member of the SACD.  His piece "Ave Praeclara" will be sung by Voxnova Italia at the CODES festival in Lublin, Poland on May 15, 2021. (From www.nicholasisherwood.com) 

Massimo Bartolini's work

www.nicholasisherwood.com

June in Buffalo 2024: Hilda Paredes

 

Hilda Paredes

Photo by Graciela Iturbide

The Center for 21st Century Music is honored to welcome back composer Hilda Paredes as a senior composer for the upcoming June in Buffalo Festival. She was a member of the June in Buffalo composition faculty in 2021, 2014, and 2011.  

Bitácora Capilar

Arditti Quartet

Paredes received her early education in composition from the Conservatoire in Mexico City, the Guildhall School of Music, the City University in London (MA), and Manchester University (PhD). She has held teaching guest lecturing appointments at the University at Buffalo, University of California San Diego, Dartmouth College, and was the Darius Milhaud Professor at Mills College, as well as internationally.  

To learn more about Paredes’s work, read earlier Edge of the Center posts, linked to the corresponding dates.  

June in Buffalo 2024: Amy Willaims

Amy Williams

Composer and pianist Amy William returns to Buffalo for her first appointment as senior composer for this upcoming June in Buffalo. Williams has performed many times at the University, including an April 2023 recital in collaboration with soprano Tiffany Du Mouchelle. Williams is a member of the acclaimed ensemble, the Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo, and is a professor of composition at the University of Pittsburgh. Williams earned her PhD in composition at the University at Buffalo and was herself a Buffalo local.  

Below is a re-blog from her visit in 2023: 

Amy Williams was born in Buffalo, NY in 1969, the daughter of Diane, now retired violist with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, and Jan, percussionist and Professor Emeritus at the University at Buffalo. She started playing the piano at the age of four and took up the flute a few years later (her first teacher was the legendary Robert Dick, so she could soon play “Chopsticks” in multiphonics…). She grew up in the heyday of the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts, hearing all the latest contemporary music and meeting composers who would later become influential to her: John Cage, Morton Feldman, Lukas Foss, Elliott Carter, Julius Eastman and many others. She went to Bennington College and, while there, decided to devote her life to performing and composing contemporary music. After a fellowship year in Denmark, she returned to Buffalo to complete her Master’s degree in piano performance at the University at Buffalo with pianist-composer Yvar Mikhashoff and her Ph.D. in composition, working with David Felder, Charles Wuorinen and Nils Vigeland. She returned to Bennington in 1998 as a member of the music faculty and she then moved on to a faculty position at Northwestern University in 2000. Since 2005, she has been teaching composition and theory at the University of Pittsburgh, where she is a Full Professor. She was a 2017-2018 Fulbright Scholar at the University College Cork, Ireland and a Visiting Professor of Composition at the University of Pennsylvania in spring 2019.  

Amy Williams, Cineshape 4 (2015)

Amy’s compositions have been presented at renowned contemporary music venues in the United States, Asia, Australia, and Europe, including Ars Musica (Belgium), Gaudeamus Music Week (Netherlands), Dresden New Music Days (Germany), Festival Aspekte (Austria), Festival Musica Nova (Brazil), Lucerne Festival (Switzerland), Thailand International Composition Festival, Music Gallery (Canada), LA County Museum of Art, Piano Spheres (Los Angeles), Lincoln Center, Roulette, Bargemusic (NYC) and Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music. Her works have been performed by leading soloists and ensembles, including the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Orpheus, JACK Quartet, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Ensemble Surplus, Dal Niente, Wet Ink, Talujon, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), H2 Saxophone Quartet, Bent Frequency, Grossman Ensemble, pianist Ursula Oppens and bassist Robert Black. Amy’s pieces appear on the Parma, VDM (Italy), Centaur, Blue Griffin, New Focus and New Ariel labels, in addition to two portrait CDs of solo and chamber works on Albany Records: “Crossings: Music for Piano and Strings” (2013) and “Cineshape and Duos” (2017).  

Amy Williams, Richter Textures (JACK Quartet)

Amy formed the Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo with Helena Bugallo, while both were graduate students at the University at Buffalo. The Duo has been featured at important contemporary music festivals and series throughout Europe and the Americas, including the Ojai Festival, CAL Performances (California), Miller Theatre (New York), Ciclo de Música Contemporánea (Buenos Aires), Festival Attacca (Stuttgart), Palacio de Bellas Artes (Mexico City), Warsaw Autumn Festival, Cologne Triennale, and Wittener Täge für Neue Kammermusik. The Duo’s debut CD of Conlon Nancarrow’s complete music for solo piano and piano duet (Wergo, 2004) garnered much critical acclaim. Subsequent Duo CDs on Wergo include, Stravinsky transcriptions (2007), Morton Feldman/Edgard Varèse (2009), György Kurtág (2015) and a second volume of Stravinsky transcriptions (2018), as well as the original version of Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion in a recently published facsimile. Amy has performed John Cage’s masterpiece, The Sonatas and Interludes, all over the country and often includes new interludes written for her by over a dozen composers.  

Amy Williams, Telephone (The Grossman Ensemble)

Amy has received fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (Goddard Lieberson Fellowship), American-Scandinavian Foundation, Howard Foundation, John S. Guggenheim Foundation and MacDowell. She received a Fromm Music Foundation Commission to write Richter Textures for the JACK Quartet and a Koussevitsky Foundation commission for soprano Tony Arnold and the JACK Quartet. An avid proponent of contemporary music, she served as Assistant Director of June In Buffalo, Director of New Music Northwestern, and is currently on the artistic boards of the Pittsburgh-based concert series, Music on the Edge, the Amphion Foundation and the  Yvar Mikhashoff Trust for New Music. She has been the Artistic Director of the New Music On The Point festival in Vermont since 2015. 

She recently completed a piano trio for the Junction Trio, a co-commission from the Denver Friends of Chamber Music, the Celebrity Series (Boston) and Chamber Music | OC (Orange County), as well as a commission for the Pennsylvania Music Teachers Association. 

 

 

June in Buffalo 2024: Karola Obermueller

We're excited to welcome composer senior composer Karola Obermueller to her first June in Buffalo! Below is Obermueller's biography, written by her.

Karola Obermueller’s composing, described by the New York Times as "hyperkinetic music”, is

constantly in search of the unknown, often with layers and layers of obscured material buried

deep underneath a surface, which is at times sumptuous and other times bristling with rhythmic

energy. Her unique voice began forming in collages of sound made with tape recorders as a

child and evolved later with composition degrees from the Meistersinger-Konservatorium

Nürnberg, the Hochschule für Musik Saar, and the University Mozarteum Salzburg. Her sense

of rhythm and form was forever changed by studying Carnatic and Hindustani classical music in

Chennai and Delhi, India.

A Ph.D. at Harvard University brought her to the US where she taught at Wellesley College and

at the University of New Mexico, co-directing the composition area and the annual John Donald

Robb Composers’ Symposium music festival, before joining the Department of Music at UC San

Diego. She also lives and works part of the year in Europe and has been a visiting artist at ZKM,

Deutsche Akademie Rom, Centro Tedesco di studi Veneziani, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Eisler

House (International Hanns Eisler Scholarship), and IRCAM.

Her music, often political, always dramatic, includes operas for Staatstheater Nürnberg, Theater

Bielefeld, Theater Bonn, Theater Heidelberg, Theater Aachen, and Stuttgart’s Musik der

Jahrhunderte. The emotional juxtapositions of story suspended in a tableau architecture that one

finds in her operas can be heard in her concert works as well. These include commissions from

the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fromm

Music Foundation, New Music USA, Bayerischer Rundfunk, Saarländischer Rundfunk, and

numerous renowned soloists and ensembles.

Her music can be heard on CD (WERGO, New Focus Recordings, Brilliant Classics) and online

at karolaobermueller.net. 

Coiling and Swaying