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." 

June in Buffalo 2011: schools of (compositional) thought

Further to our previous post announcing this year's participants in June in Buffalo 2011, here are some stats.

Some 80 composers applied to take part, from universities and colleges in Australia, Canada, Hungary, Israel, Mexico, Turkey, the UK, and of course the USA. Approximately 25 of the applications came from outside the US. Some 43 schools were represented:

Bard College
Boston Conservatory
Bowling Green
Brandeis University
Brooklyn Conservatory
Carnegie Mellon University

City University of New York
Cole Conservatory
Columbia University
Depaul University
Hartt School of Music at Hartford
Indiana University
Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes
Juilliard School
Liszt Acadmy, Budapest
NEC/ Istanbul University
New England Conservatory

New York University (NYU)

Northwestern University
Oberlin Conservatory

Princeton University
San Francisco Conservatory

Stanford University
Tel Aviv University
University of British Columbia
University at Buffalo

University of California
University of California - Berkeley

University of Carolina

University of Chicago
University of Colorado
University of Florida

University of Georgia
University of Huddersfield
University of Illinois - Urbana
University of Iowa
University of Michigan
University of Montana
University of Northern Colorado
University of Pittsburgh

University of Sydney
University of Texas - Austin

University of Wisconsin
Yale University


From this deep and wide pool of applicants, 25 talented composers were chosen. Congratulations to all!

Announcing June in Buffalo 2011 participants!

Now comes the moment you've all been waiting for: the lucky composers who will have the opportunity to take part in this year's June in Buffalo festival, June 6 - 11:

Mate Balogh             Liszt Acadmy, Budapest



Per Bloland             Stanford


David Carter            Northwestern University


Shiuan Chang            New England Conservatory



Chun Ting Pang          University at Buffalo


Paul Clift              Columbia University

Juan Colon-Hernandez    University at Buffalo



Hanna Eimermacher               


Sivan Eldar             UC Berkeley



Juan Escudero                  

Ray Evanoff          University of Huddersfield

Michael Foumai          University of Michigan

Matthew Goodheart         UC Berkeley


Ted Goldman             Juilliard School


Jacob Gotlib          University at Buffalo

Ethan Hayden            University at Buffalo



Nathan Heidelberger     University at Buffalo

Friedrich Kern          New York University


Cherise Leiter          University of Florida

Kerrith Livengood       University of Pittsburgh


Brian Mark              San Francisco Conservatory

Jeff Roberts            Brandeis University

Kenichi Saeki           University at Buffalo

Matt Sargent            Hartt School of Music at Hartford


Francisco Trigueros     University of Chicago


Each of the invited composers will have one of his/her pieces performed during the festival by one of the top-notch resident musicians or ensembles. As always, June in Buffalo offers an intensive schedule of seminars, lectures, workshops, professional presentations, participant forums and open rehearsals as well as afternoon and evening concerts open to the general public and critics. 

Kagel Nacht

Tired of dull, predictable concerts? The antidote is close at hand.

This Tuesday, April 26, the performance event known as Kagel Nacht comes to Lippes Concert Hall at Slee Hall. Described by its creators as "a performance event featuring new interpretations of works by the seminal avant-garde composer Mauricio Kagel," it interweaves a melange of inter-connected and overlapping pieces, highlighting the most absurd and engaging of Kagel's prolific output. From the disconnected political ramblings of Der Tribune, to the meticulous puppetry/theater of Repetoire, to the squealing and scratching of Acustica, Kagel Nacht connects to listeners in a way rarely found in the classical music world.  

For American listeners, Mauricio Kagel (1931 - 2008) occupies an odd place in the pantheon of contemporary composers -- too famous to be considered a cult figure, but too idiosyncratic to be an icon. Born and educated in Buenos Aires, he served as a visiting lecture at Darmstadt in the late 50s, and taught at UB in 1964-65 as the Slee Professor of Music Theory. Dramatic elements were a constant presence in his work, which often overshot the boundaries of music composition to encompass theater and film.

According to the creators of Kagel Nacht, "Despite being one of the most radical and revolutionary 20th century European avant-garde composers, Mauricio Kagel's music has remained relatively obscure, especially here in the US.  In an attempt to change this, two musicians from New York City have spent the last 3 years researching Kagel's massive body of work, seeking out rare scores, recordings, and videos of his bizarre, often hysterically theatrical compositions.  The result is the performance-event known as Kagel Nacht.  Joining them will be a stacked deck of musicians from Brooklyn's artistic multiverse, performers deeply situated in the theater, performance art, classical, and experimental music worlds.  They will be performing a very diverse selection from Kagel's grand oeuvre, including 'classical' works (Music For Rennaissance Instruments), electro-acoustic compositions (Acustica),  absurdist ballet (Kontra-Danse), radio plays (Der Tribun), and some of his most daring and hilarious works of 'instrumental theater' (Staatstheater, Con Voce). With interpretations ranging from strict to fully recontextualized, Kagel Nacht breaths new life into these important and underperformed works by joining them into one, multi-stage, panoramic, evening-length event that brings a new meaning to 'musical theater.'" 

Kagel Nacht is currently touring the Northeast, performing for universities as well as underground venues, art spaces, and other communities, giving people access to the world of classical and avant-garde music through the universal appeal of Kagel's profound and absurd compositions.  In order to limit costs and emissions, they are traveling on a school-bus-turn-tour-bus, that runs on waste vegetable oil. Kagel Nacht will feature the musical and theatrical artistry of:

• Rick Burkhardt  - orator, accordion
• Stephe Cooper - producer, glockenspiel, guitar
• Sam Kulik - trombone
• Jordan Mclean - trumpet, conductor, arranger
• Jason Mears - clarinet, saxophone
• Roberta Michel - flute, piccolo
• Geoff Nosach - lighting, set design
• Sam Sowyrda - producer, conductor, percussion
• Dennis Sullivan - percussion

Here's a video of Kagel Nacht in action.  

Recent grad Leah Muir on UB: "a rare mix of performance, intellect, and experiment"

Leah Muir completed her doctoral studies in composition at UB in 2008, and is now living in Berlin. She reports:

"My doctoral study at Buffalo was a huge enrichment to my musical life and experience, and continues to be so -- in fact I think it is one of the few organizations in the US that could prepare me for the European musical life I found myself suddenly in. Right now, in fact, I am preparing for a Morton Feldman concert for the Crescendo concert series on June 10, of which I am in charge of musical direction and conducting. Morton Feldman seems to be around every turn I take.

"It was Amy Williams who first introduced me to the University at Buffalo at 19; she brought a group of composers from Bennington College to June in Buffalo. There I met David Felder, and never forgot him or my amazing musical experience during the program. I applied later to Buffalo for my Doctoral degree and was accepted on a Presidential fellowship, where I was able to gain four years of teaching experience. There I made extremely close musical relationships with musicians and composers in the program, and had many compositional breakthroughs with David as my teacher. David Felder demands excellence from his students, and I was pushed very hard to go as far as I possibly could with my own talents, and then maybe even farther. For that I am very grateful.

"Beyond my work at the Institut für Neue Musik, I have also some commissions to write this year. The first is my Doppelkonzert für E. Gitarre und Akkordeon, dedicated to Krassimir Sterev, Yaron Deutsch, Ajtony Csaba and the Mitteleuropäisches Kammerorchester to be premiered in Vienna, Austria in 2011. The second for the Münchener Biennale, is a 25 minute music theater piece to be premiered in May of 2012. Last year, I had a couple of important premieres, on Märzmusik and Wien Modern, and a slight foray into video brought on a sudden premiere at Soundtrack Cologne.

"Buffalo, where American experimentalism is still cherished, was instrumental to my development in these musical directions. David Felder, Cort Lippe and Jeff Stadelman provided an excellent scope of what is out there that is most intellectually stimulating in music, and also what reality is and could be for a composer in our current musical landscape. Beyond this, an idealistic and utopian approach to music is also coveted at the university, where experiment is fully encouraged and when followed, given free reign of the imagination. I find this mixture to be quite unique. Charles Smith and Michael Long are also an extremely important part of the program for me, because the sort of analysis they teach is rare and hard to find. In other departments, with Tony Conrad and Elliot Caplan also in the wings of the greats teaching there, I had the possibility to participate in some transmedial collaborations. Hallwalls, Soundlab and the Burchfield-Penney, beyond the University, provided yet another platform to branch out into a wider community, together with self-organized group of composers, we were able to play music and have a public." Here's Leah's unsettling and inventive Sound Bandage, scored for the offbeat combination of soprano and bass saxophones, cello, and "tape."

A student looks back

Moshe Shulman, PhD candidate in composition at UB, recently shared some observations about his music.

"2011 is my last year in Buffalo, NY. Since 2007 I was studying music composition mainly with David Felder but also with Cort Lippe and Jeffrey Stadelman one semester each. During these years I wrote for brass, woodwind, and percussion ensembles, two string quartets, mixed ensembles including voice, a little piece for piano and a couple of solo pieces. Some of these were successful, some came to be tryouts, one of these even received third prize in a Composition contest in Russia in 2009.


"When the time for writing dissertation piece came, writing for a larger ensemble with a soloist was an obvious choice, mainly because I don’t have anything like that in my portfolio. Another reason for writing a piece for solo violin with orchestra was personal. I started to play violin at the age of five and writing a dissertation piece 28 years later seems like a circle that has been completed. Thanks to David Felder, this project was approved, well-advised and will be realized on April 18th, 2011 in a recording with the Slee Sinfonietta and most talented musician and a friend, violinist Yuki Numata.

"Before getting to what I wanted to achieve in the dissertation work I will try to remember what aspects of music concerned me during these years. One of the first pieces I wrote within the walls of Buffalo University was Frozen Moments for flute, violin, cello and piano. Here are the program notes of that piece:

Frozen Moments is a piece about different states of motion and motionlessness. The piece introduces different musical moments of those states as well as arrivals and departures from them. First movement deals with the sound as motion and silence as static process. Second movement is concerned with repetitions as motionlessness and the motion between the repetitions. The third movement can be actually called anything but Frozen Moment. This movement is full of energy and motion however the static quality is present on a new level. The motionlessness is present within the motion as if one runs down the street and suddenly stops for a second. Beyond that, the motion-motionlessness states are in counterpoint in that movement which gives the listener an option to hear both actions at the same time.

"Another musical aspect that concerned me was writing for a certain instrument as if it were another instrument - for example, treating brass instruments like strings. “Subito” for Brass Quintet is the outcome of that idea. My Second String Quartet was written for the Copland House Project during November 2009. My thought was to create a set of short movements that would exist within a margin of extremes (whatever those extremes might be: speed, dynamics, motion, etc.). Some movements contrast in their extremes with other movements, while others contain their diversities within.

There were many other issues during the years, of course, but these made their way into the dissertation piece that, for now, is titled Kivunim.

"Kivunim is a Hebrew word and it can have multiple meanings. But the ones I am referring to can be translated as directions, movements, goal-oriented processes. Here, in some sense, I come back to the issue I was resolving in Frozen Moments. The soloist and the ensemble arrangement distribute naturally the roles of motion and motionlessness.

"The dissertation defense will take place on May 3^rd and everyone is welcome to attend, to listen and hopefully to enjoy."