The Mizzou New Music Ensemble will perform four new student works plus two pieces from acclaimed contemporary composers in a concert at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, December 2 at Whitmore Recital Hall, 135 Fine Arts Building on the Mizzou campus. Admission is free and open to the public.
Two of the student works were selected for the performance through the first-ever Collegiate Composition Competition co-sponsored this year by the Mizzou New Music Initiative and the Missouri Association of Departments and Schools of Music (MADSM).
Ryan Jeschke, a senior composition major at Truman State University, won the MADSM competition’s undergraduate division with “Gunkanjima.” named for an island off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan that for nearly a century was a densely populated center for coal mining, then completely abandoned in the 1970s. The Ensemble will perform the work’s first movement, “The Shamisen.”
Daniel Vega, a first-year master’s student in composition at Mizzou, was the MADSM competition winner in the graduate division for “Natales,” which draws inspiration from the music of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt.
The other two student works were written by University of Missouri undergraduates. “Starry Night” by Ben Dawson, a junior working toward a composition degree at Mizzou, depicts “a cloudy, lonely night” with teasing fragments of a melody that is fully revealed at the end, while “A Dance Through Desire” by Holden Franklin, a freshman composition major, evokes feelings of a missed connection following a brief encounter.
Completing the program will be “à propos,” a work in four parts by French composer Fabien Lévy that was inspired by Arte Povera, an Italian artistic movement of the 1960s; and “Rising Tide,” written in 2015 by Nina C. Young, who will visit the Mizzou campus on November 30 and coach the Ensemble in preparation for the performance.
The seven-member Mizzou New Music Ensemble (pictured) is made up of University of Missouri graduate students under the direction of Stefan Freund, a cellist, composer, conductor, professor of composition, and artistic director of the Mizzou New Music Initiative.
The Ensemble’s members for the 2018-19 season are Hannah Hutchins, percussion; Ann Mozina, flutes; Pedro Ramiro, violin; Elisabeth Roberts, piano; Brianna Trainor, percussion; Cameron Tubbs, cello; and Austin Wright, clarinets, augmented for this performance by guest musicians Kassandra Ormsby, bassoon; and Morgan Owen, viola. Post-doctoral fellow Yoshiaki Onishi is the Ensemble’s assistant conductor, and will conduct the performance of “à propos” at this concert.