The Mizzou New Music Ensemble’s first concert of 2018 will feature works by three guest composers who will be visiting the University of Missouri campus this year, plus a piece by a new faculty composer.
The Ensemble will perform at 7:30 p.m. Monday, February 26 at Whitmore Recital Hall, 135 Fine Arts Building on the Mizzou campus. Admission is $5 for the general public, free for Mizzou faculty, students and staff with ID.
Composer James Mobberley will coach the Ensemble and be present for the performance of his piece “Toccatas and Interludes” as part of a two-day residency at Mizzou. A winner of the prestigious Rome Prize and a Guggenheim Fellow, Mobberley officially retired from the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Conservatory of Music and Dance in 2016 and now is a distinguished professor emeritus and adjunct professor at UMKC.
The concert also will include the Ensemble’s first performances of works by the two distinguished guest composers for this year’s Mizzou International Composers Festival, each featuring an MU student as guest conductor.
“Near Distance” is by Chen Yi, who is a distinguished professor of composition at the Conservatory of Music and Dance at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Chen also is a Guggenheim fellow, a recipient of the Ives Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a former finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music. Her work will be conducted by Hans Heruth, a junior composition major at Mizzou.
“Portraits and Repetitions” was composed by Alex Mincek, who is an assistant professor of composition and music technology at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music and a co-founder and artistic director of the Wet Ink Ensemble. Mincek also is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as an Alpert Award and multiple honors from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The Mizzou New Music Ensemble’s performance of his piece will include guest saxophonist (and School of Music admissions coordinator) Ben Harting, and will be conducted by Jesus Gomez, who’s in his first year of studies at MU for a master’s degree in music.
Completing the program will be “Spiral,” a composition by Mizzou adjunct faculty member Bret Bohman that originally was commissioned in 2015 by the Khemia Ensemble, a new music group based in Ann Arbor, MI who will be visiting the Mizzou campus in March. Bohman, who earned his doctorate in music at the University of Michigan, joined the Mizzou faculty in the fall of 2017 and teaches courses in electronic music composition and music theory.
The seven-member Mizzou New Music Ensemble is made up of University of Missouri graduate students under the direction of Stefan Freund, a cellist, composer, professor of composition, and artistic director of the Mizzou New Music Initiative. The Ensemble’s members for the 2017-18 season are Victoria Hargrove, clarinet; Hannah Hutchins, percussion; Daniel Keeler, cello; Kelariz Keshavarz, flute; Pedro Ramiro, violin; Libby Roberts, piano; and Brianna Trainor, percussion.