The Mizzou New Music Initiative will welcome composer and educator James Mobberley to the Mizzou campus for a residency next week.
Mobberly (pictured) currently is a distinguished professor emeritus and adjunct professor at the Conservatory of Music and Dance at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, having retired as a full-time faculty member there in 2016.
He’ll be in Columbia next Monday, February 26 and Tuesday, February 27 for a residency that will include a presentation on his music to a seminar of composition students, giving private lessons, and coaching the Mizzou New Music Ensemble, who will play his work “Toccatas and Interludes” at their concert on Monday night at Whitmore Recital Hall.
A Rome Prize winner and Guggenheim Fellow, Mobberley has written works for a variety of media, from orchestral, chamber and electro-acoustic music for the concert stage to music for dance, film, and video.
Born in Des Moines, Iowa and raised in Pennsylvania, Mobberley earned his master’s degree at the University of North Carolina and his doctorate at the Cleveland Institute of Music. He began teaching at UMKC in 1983.
He has been a resident composer with the Kansas City Symphony (1992-1999), and a visiting composer with both the Taiwan National Symphony (1999) and the Fort Smith Symphony (2000). Past guest residencies and workshops include the Taiwan National Symphony, the Ft. Smith Symphony, the Composers Forum of the East at Bennington College, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Southern California, Oberlin College, Washington State University, the University of Arkansas, Heidelberg College, and more.
Mobberly has received commissions from the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, Koussevitzky Foundation/Library of Congress, Barlow Endowment, Meet the Composer, Chamber Music America, National Endowment for the Arts, and numerous ensembles and individual performers. He also has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, League-ISCM, Meet the Composer, the Van Cliburn Foundation, the Shanghai Spring Festival, and many other organizations.
His music has been featured on two dozen recordings, notably an all-Mobberley album by the Czech National Symphony on the Albany label, as well as on labels such as Black Canyon, Bridge, Capstone, Centaur, Everglade, and Troppa Note.
You can see performances of two of James Mobberley’s works in the embedded players below, and hear many of his other compositions on his SoundCloud page.
“In B” and “Peace Study,” performed by pianist Anthony DeMare at the 2013 Tribeca New Music Festival
“Caution to the Winds” for piano and electronic tape, performed by Kristina Sandulova on February 15, 2008 in Utrecht, The Netherlands.