The Mizzou New Music Initiative (MNMI) has selected eight resident composers to participate in the 2016 Mizzou International Composers Festival (MICF).
Presented annually since 2010 by MNMI and the University of Missouri School of Music, the MICF in just six years has become the Midwest’s top summer showcase for intriguing new music by composers from around the world.
The seventh edition of the festival, scheduled for Monday, July 25 through Saturday, July 30 in Columbia, will feature world premieres of eight new works written by this year’s selected composers. Listed with their current places of residence, they are:
* Matthew Browne, Ann Arbor, MI
* Takuma Itoh, Honolulu, HI
* Mary Kouyoumdjian, Brooklyn, NY
* Ryan Lindveit, Los Angeles, CA
* Trey Makler, Columbia, MO
* Daniel Silliman, Princeton, NJ
* Wang A Mao, Kansas City, MO
* Wang Lu, Providence, RI
The eight resident composers are chosen through a portfolio application process that this year attracted 229 entries from 18 different countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The resident composers bringing international perspectives to Mizzou this year will include Takuma Itoh, who’s originally from Japan, grew up in California, and now is assistant professor of music at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.
The 2016 group also includes two natives of China now living in the US: Wang Lu, who did her graduate studies at Columbia University and now is an assistant professor of music at Brown University in Rhode Island; and Wang A Mao, who earned her master’s degree and currently is working on a doctorate at the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Conservatory of Music and Dance.
Trey Makler, a native of Farmington, MO now in his senior year of work toward a bachelor’s degree in composition at Mizzou, will represent the University of Missouri. Makler was the winner of the 2015 Sinquefield Composition Prize, the university’s highest honor for a student composer, and also has served as a production coordinator for the past two years of the MICF.
The 2016 Mizzou International Composers Festival will include a series of public concerts featuring music from the resident composers and other contemporary creators, as well as workshops, master classes, and other events.
The Festival’s distinguished guest composers for 2016 will be Oscar Bettison, a British/American composer who has served on the composition faculty of Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute since 2009; and Erin Gee, an assistant professor of music at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who is known for her compositions using non-traditional vocal techniques.
The acclaimed new music group Alarm Will Sound, conducted by artistic director Alan Pierson, once again will serve as resident ensemble, as they have since the MICF began in 2010.
During the festival, the eight resident composers will receive composition lessons from Bettison and Gee; take part in rehearsals with Alarm Will Sound; give public presentations on their music; and receive a premiere performance and professional live recording of a new work created specifically for the MICF and Alarm Will Sound.
A complete schedule of events, times, dates and venues for the 2016 Mizzou International Composers Festival will be announced at a later date. For more information, please visit http://composersfestival.missouri.edu/.