Nov. 16, 2018
Fall 2018 Student Composers Recital set for Monday, November 26 at Whitmore Recital Hall
The Fall 2018 edition of the University of Missouri School of Music’s Student Composers Recital will present new works written and performed by students at 7:30 p.m. Monday, November 26 at Whitmore Recital Hall on the Mizzou campus. Admission is free and open to the public. The program will include: “The Wooden Playground” by Nathan Andrzejewski “Numbers” by Mikkel Christensen “The Struggle of a Painter” by Zach Davis “When Icarus fell it was Spring” by Aaron Mencher “Duck Your Modernism” by Niko Schroeder “The Exquisites” by Emily Shaw “Stream of Consciousness” by…
Nov. 14, 2018
Mizzou composers’ collaboration with St. Louis Symphony featured on HEC-TV’s “State of the Arts”
The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s reading of new works by Mizzou composers is the subject of a feature story on the latest episode of HEC-TV’s program “State of the Arts.” The feature by reporter Paul Schankman includes an exclusive look at the private reading session held on Wednesday, October 31 at Powell Hall in St. Louis, as well as interviews with composers Mikkel Christensen, Ben Colagiovanni, and Libby Roberts, MNMI artistic director and Mizzou professor of composition Stefan Freund, and SLSO resident conductor Gemma New. You can watch the story in the embedded video window below. HEC-TV is…
Oct. 12, 2018
Yoshiaki Onishi to receive 2018 Fromm Commission
Mizzou New Music Initiative post-doctoral fellow Yoshiaki “Yoshi” Onishi has been named a recipient of a 2018 Fromm Commission from the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University. Founded by Paul Fromm, a major patron of contemporary music who lived from 1906 to 1987, the Fromm Music Foundation is now in its 62nd year, having been located at Harvard for the past 42. Since the 1950s, it has commissioned more than 300 new compositions and their performances, and has sponsored hundreds of new music concerts and concert series, including the annual Fromm Contemporary Music Series at Harvard. The annual…
Oct. 4, 2018
Show Me Opera to premiere Hans Bridger Heruth’s “A Certain Madness” on Friday, November 9
Show Me Opera will premiere “A Certain Madness,” a new chamber opera by Mizzou senior Hans Bridger Heruth, on Friday, November 9 at the Rhynsburger Theatre. Tickets for the performance, which also will include selected scenes from a wide range of operatic repertoire, are $5 and can be purchased online or at the door. Heruth (pictured) wrote both the score and the libretto for “A Certain Madness,” which tells a new story based on the characters of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries. “After the brutal murder of one of Watson’s dearest friends, Sherlock attempts…
Sep. 24, 2018
Carolina Heredia wins Grand Prize in Chamber Music OC’s inaugural International New Music Competition
Mizzou’s Carolina Heredia has won the John Corigliano Grand Prize in the first International New Music Competition sponsored by Chamber Music OC, a new music presenting and educational organization in Irvine, CA. Heredia, who is an assistant professor of composition at Mizzou, won the prize for “Ausencias,” a thirty-minute intermedia work for string quartet, fixed media, dance, and interactive video that also can be performed in a music-only format. The original music-only version was premiered by JACK Quartet in March 2016, and the full work was first performed in March 2017 at the Duderstadt Video Studio…
Sep. 21, 2018
Dustin Dunn wins UMSL Young Composers Competition
Dustin Dunn’s composition “In the Shadow of Shepherd Mountain” has been selected as the winner of the 2018 UMSL Young Composers Competition (Wind Ensemble, division 2). The work will be premiered by the UMSL Wind Ensemble as part of a concert at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, October 17 at the Touhill Performing Arts Center on the campus of the University of Missouri – St. Louis. Dunn (pictured), a senior from Annapolis, Missouri, is attending Mizzou on a full Sinquefield Scholarship from the Mizzou New Music Initiative. He previously has received awards for his music from the Music Teachers National…
Sep. 4, 2018
St. Louis Symphony Orchestra to read works by Mizzou composers Mikkel Christensen, Ben Colagiovanni, and Libby Roberts
From left: Colagiovanni, Roberts, Christensen Three University of Missouri student composers will have their works played this year by musicians with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra as part of a joint educational venture between the orchestra and the Mizzou New Music Initiative. Student composers Mikkel Christensen, Ben Colagiovanni, and Libby Roberts were selected by SLSO Resident Conductor Gemma New to write new works for a 40-piece chamber orchestra drawn from the musicians of the St. Louis Symphony. The three works will be read, played and critiqued in a private session on Wednesday, October 31 in St. Louis. The composers…
Aug. 20, 2018
Arrangement by Mizzou’s Stefan Freund featured on new album by Medeski Martin & Wood with Alarm Will Sound
An arrangement by Mizzou’s Stefan Freund is featured on Omnisphere, the new album by Medeski Martin & Wood with Alarm Will Sound. Freund is a professor of composition and the artistic director of the Mizzou New Music Initiative, as well as the cellist and a co-founder of Alarm Will Sound. Recorded live in February 2015 at The Newman Center in Denver, Colorado, Omnisphere represents the first collaboration between “one of the most adventurous groups to emerge in jazz and improvised music in the last three decades” and “an orchestra that counts among the boldest forces in contemporary…