MICF resident composers in the news

Here’s the latest news and updates from some of the resident composers at past Mizzou International Composers Festivals:

* Jeremy Podgursky, MICF 2010, is one of six winners this year of a Charles Ives scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The $7,500 scholarships are awarded to composition students of great promise, as selected by a committee of academy members including MICF 2010 guest composer Martin Bresnick, Joan Tower, Samuel Adler, Mario Davidovsky, John Harbison, Stephen Hartke, Tania León, and Tobias Picker. The Ives scholarships and the academy’s other awards in music will be presented at a ceremony in May.

* Asha Srinivasan, MICF 2012, (pictured) is having compositions performed at three major events this month.  She was the featured composer and her works “Dviraag” and “Bapu” were played at the Western Illinois University New Music Festival, March 4 in Macomb, IL.  Srinivasan’s “Keerthanata” will be played at the Region V conference of the Society of Composers, Inc., held March 27-29 at Ball State University in Muncie, IN, and  her tuba and fixed media work “Dyadic Affinities” will be played at the national conference of SEAMUS, aka the Society of Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States which takes place the same weekend  at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT.

* A new oboe trio composed by Stephanie Berg, MICF 2012 and a Mizzou almuna who earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at MU, will be performed next year as part of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra‘s chamber music series.

* David Crowell, MICF 2012, was the subject of a recent profile in the Huffington Post. The accompanying audio samples include “Fallout,” which Crowell wrote for Alarm Will Sound and the MICF. His new percussion work “Celestial Sphere” will be performed by Ian David Rosenbaum and a consortium of percussionists on March 23 at the Philips Collection in Washington D.C., while Crowell and his band Empyrean Atlas will play March 24 at Roulette in Brooklyn.

* Speaking of Alarm Will Sound, they’ve been using David Biedenbender‘s “Schism,” composed for the 2011 MICF, as part of their work in St. Louis with students at Webster University’s Community Music School. AWS and the CMS students will perform the piece together on Friday, May 30 at the Sheldon Concert Hall. The video below shows them working side-by-side on “Schism,” while the audio player contains AWS’ recording of it from the MICF.