July 20, 2012
Summer Festival Spotlight: Stylianos Dimou
A native of Greece, resident composer Stylianos Dimou is helping to bring a bit of international perspective to the 2012 Mizzou New Music Summer Festival. Dimou (pictured) has been studying music in the USA since last year, working toward an MA in composition with Professor Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY. He also was the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship for the 2011-12 academic year. Born in Thessaloniki, Greece, Dimou started his music studies at the Municipal Conservatory of Thessaloniki, where he earned degrees in music harmony in May,…
July 19, 2012
Summer Festival Spotlight: Ted Goldman
Coming from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, Ted Goldman should see at least a few familiar faces when he arrives in Columbia to serve as one of the resident composers for the 2012 Mizzou New Music Summer Festival. That’s because a number of participants in this year’s Festival have connections to Eastman, starting with MU’s Stefan Freund and most of the other members of Alarm Will Sound, who originally met while studying music at the famed conservatory in upstate New York. Goldman (pictured), who’s an assistant professor of music theory at Eastman, also…
July 19, 2012
Summer Festival Spotlight: Asha Srinivasan
Born in Utah and brought up in India and the USA, Asha Srinivasan creates music that combines elements from two different cultures. An assistant professor of music at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, Srinivasan (pictured) is one of eight resident composers for the 2012 Mizzou New Music Summer Festival. She is part of an musical extended family – her mother Lalitha is a professional singer of Indian film songs – and began taking voice lessons at age 6, learning the classical music of Southern India. As a adult composer blending Indian Carnatic ragas with…
July 18, 2012
Summer Festival Spotlight: Patrick Harlin
Resident composer Patrick Harlin comes to the 2012 Mizzou New Music Summer Festival from Ann Arbor, where he currently is working toward a doctoral degree in music composition from the University of Michigan. Born in Salt Lake City and raised in Seattle, Harlin (pictured) has been composing and playing piano since age 8. He earned his undergraduate degree at Western Washington University, where he received the Ford Hill Piano Scholarship, the Western Washington Piano Department scholarship, and many other awards. Harlin then moved to Ann Arbor to study for his Master’s degree, which he completed last year. Though…
July 18, 2012
Summer Festival Spotlight: Brian Ciach
A skilled pianist as well as a composer, Brian Ciach has created a wide variety of original music, from solo piano pieces to orchestral works to electronic music. As one of the resident composers for the 2102 Mizzou New Music Summer Festival, Ciach (pronounced “SIGH-ack”) has written a new piece for Alarm Will Sound called The Einstein Slide. Inspired by a slice of Albert Einstein’s brain displayed in the Mütter Museum in Ciach’s home town of Philadelphia, the new work is puckishly termed “an appendix” to Collective Uncommon: Seven Orchestral Studies on Medical Oddities, which Ciach…
July 17, 2012
Summer Festival Spotlight: Anne-Carolyn Bird
The guest artist at this year’s Mizzou New Music Summer Festival will be the talented soprano Anne-Carolyn Bird. Bird (pictured) will perform with Alarm Will Sound as part of the concert on Thursday, July 26, helping to bring to life the first part of Donnacha Dennehy’s new work-in-progress, The Hunger. Known primarily as an operatic singer, Bird got her undergraduate degree at the University of Georgia, then earned a Masters Degree cum laude from New England Conservatory, where she was a student of acclaimed mezzo-soprano D’Anna Fortunato. She has been a recipient of grants and awards from many…
July 17, 2012
Patrick Clark on the YES Academy Concerts: 11 July 2012–Composers; Duhok, Iraq
Assuming the reaction of an audience is a barometer of the success of a concert, the closing concerts for the YES Academy 2012 in Duhok hit their intended marks quite well. As the inaugural composition teacher for the Academy I had a vested interest in the concert of works by the student composers and so it will be my main focus here. One might have done well to bring earplugs to this concert, but not because the music was so loud. Rather because the applause was overwhelming. Of course the whistles of support by students are the most deadly of…
July 16, 2012
Mizzou New Music Summer Festival to include free events
In addition to the ticketed concerts at the Missouri Theatre, the 2012 Mizzou New Music Summer Festival includes a number of events that are free of charge and open to the public. At 4:00 p.m. on Monday, July 23, guest composer Steven Stucky will present a master class with the vocal ensemble Voices of Prometheus at McKee Auditorium on the MU Campus. Presentations by the Festival’s guest resident and faculty composers also will be open to the public. All the composer presentations will take place in the Fine Arts Building’s Room 145.