^{The composers and musicians participating in the EMCC Concerts .}

 

Conceived in 2012, with the aim of fostering strong bonds and collaborative relationships between performers and composers at the School of Music, the 24 + 24 Hour Project began by randomly assigning composers to volunteer musicians from the School of Music studios. These composers then had twenty-four hours to compose an original work for their assigned performers. Once the performers received the new work, they had up to twenty-four hours to learn, practice, and rehearse the piece until they performed it.

 

This program of compositions by Michael Eckert commemorates his retirement in July 2018 after 33 years of teaching at the University of Iowa School of Music. The CNM presents a retrospective of his music from 1978 to the present, including instrumental duos, a group of songs, a wind quintet, a sextet for mixed ensemble, and a new composition for chorus on a poem by Robert Herrick. These works span a range of idioms, from post-tonal and twelve-tone to Brazilian chôro style.

 

Dr. Lisa Bost-Sandberg is a flutist, composer, and improviser deeply committed to contemporary music as well as its rich roots in the classical repertoire. In demand as a soloist and chamber musician, she has performed across the United States and Europe, including National Flute Association conventions, new music festivals (SEAMUS, EMM, Pixilerations, Spark, and SCI), and guest appearances at universities. She is the flutist of the InterSpheres Trio, which toured Hungary in 2014, and served as principal flute of the Bismarck-Mandan Symphony Orchestra from 2013-2017. She has recorded on the Albany, GIA, and North Texas Jazz labels.

 

Katie Wolfe, violin faculty at U Iowa, and composer/pianist Ketty Nez, faculty at BU, present a concert of works for violin and piano. Their program includes Béla Bartok's Violin Sonata in E minor, an early work not often performed, written in 1903, before Bartók's discovery and life-long research of folk music. Ketty’s double images carries on this musical conversation, using Romanian flute and violin tunes recorded and transcribed by Bartók in the 1910’s. Prokofiev’s Five Melodies are his own transcriptions of Five Songs without Words, vocalises written for a singer friend. Grażyna Bacewicz was one of only two prominent 20th c. Polish woman composers, an accomplished violinist, and pianist (as all the other composers on this program), who wrote this piece after a car accident had ended her performing career.

 

The Composers’ Workshop (CW), made available to the graduate and undergraduate students in the composition program, helps to promote new works in live performance, thus encouraging dialogue between composer/composer and composer/musician regarding musical ideas, instrumental techniques and mutually understood notation. The program is made up of pieces that are in various stages of development, from early sketches to completed compositions.

 

The Midwest Composers Symposium is a consortium made up of the composition departments of four American Midwest universities: the University of Cincinnati, Indiana University, the University of Iowa, and the University of Michigan. The purpose is to allow students to have contact with other composers at nearby institutions and to foster connections and self-identity. The symposium was begun in 1948 by Anthony Donato of Northwestern University, and Michigan, Illinois, and Iowa. For a few years during the 1960s, the symposium concerts ceased due to a change in academic calendars but resumed in the early 1970s, when most schools adopted the quarter system. Oberlin College joined at that point, and a few years later, Indiana University. Northwestern dropped out in 1992, as did Illinois and Oberlin in 2007. The University of Cincinnati joined in 2008.

 

A new work by featured guest composer Zae Munn together with works by composers Laird Addis, David Gompper and John Adams are programmed. Faculty performers will be Christine Rutledge, violist, Courtney Miller, oboist, Volkan Orhon, double bassist, and David Gompper, conductor and pianist. Zae Munn is Professor of Music at Saint Mary's College in South Bend, Indiana where she teaches theory, composition, digital media in music, and orchestration/arranging. She is the Director and Resident Composer of the Summer Composition Intensive at Saint Mary’s College. Zae Munn's work Accord for oboe, viola and piano will be performed by Christine Rutledge, Courtney Miller and David Gompper. David Gompper's recent work, Double Bass Concerto, will be performed by the CNM ensemble with solo bassist Volkan Orhon to whom the work is dedicated. John Adam's Gnarley Buttons for clarinet and chamber ensemble will be performed by the ensemble with solo clarinetist Michael Norsworthy.

 

Directed by Asst. Professor Jean-François Charles, the Laptop Orchestra of the University of Iowa (LOUi) is an experimental new music ensemble that promotes the intersection of acoustic and electronic music, of traditional or classical instruments with laptops, guitar pedals, and other electronic devices. Students create their own repertoire and develop improvisation skills.

  

In cooperation with the UI String Quartet Residency Program, CNM presents

 

JACK operates as a nonprofit organization dedicated to the performance, commissioning, and spread of new string quartet music. Dedicated to education, the quartet spends two weeks each summer teaching at New Music on the Point, a contemporary chamber music festival in Vermont for young performers and composers. JACK has a long-standing relationships with the University of Iowa String Quartet Residency Program, where they teach and collaborate with students each fall, and the Boston University Center for New Music, where they visit each semester. Additionally, the quartet makes regular visits to schools including Columbia University, Harvard University, New York University, Princeton University, Stanford University, and the University of Washington.  

 

Instructed by Visiting Asst. Prof. Sivan Cohen Elias, the Fall Electronic Media class allows students from any field to gain the fundamental knowledge needed to create original electroacoustic music. In this concert the students will present their 8-channel electroacoustic compositions inspired by the theme of "imaginary sound machines". The concert will also feature audio-visual works by advanced composition students.

 

The Composers’ Workshop, made available to the graduate and undergraduate students in the composition program, helps to promote new works in live performance, thus encouraging dialogue between composer/composer and composer/musician regarding musical ideas, instrumental techniques and mutually understood notation.

 

 

“Evok(ing) a sense of serene mystery and infinite beauty”, “evincing an acute sonic imagination and sure command of craft.”, “darkly attractive, artful and moving…” “talent to burn…ballsy, confident music-making in both writing and execution…proves that serious contemporary music does not have to dumb down to be immediately accessible and emotional”,“...her music has at its core her own impressive point of view... … displays an acute ear for engaging melodic contours and evocative settings”, “not a single moment in her works sounds contrived, formulaic, or artificial…intensely and strongly “alive”, “This was shrewd composing, the genuine article.”

 

Finding joy in variety, Liz Pearse is a musician of many pursuits. Liz began her exploration of the endless possibilities of the voice after a childhood spent playing any instrument she could lay hands upon. As a performer, her uniquely colorful and versatile voice has led to performances of wide-ranging works from medieval to modern, and though she is known as a specialist in contemporary vocal repertoire, she also deeply enjoys a well-aged song. Liz has recently begun a long-term project commissioning and performing works for singer at the piano (though she still enjoys the collaborative process!), and looks forward to presenting her second full-length recital of such pieces, a celebration of the 100th anniversary of Poulenc’s La bestiaire featuring newly-commissioned animal portraits, in 2019.

Omaha native Stacey Barelos is a performer, composer, and educator. As a pianist, she specializes in the music of the 20th and 21st centuries and has done extensive research on the piano music of American composer Henry Cowell.

 

The University of Iowa Chapter of SCI presents the compositions of the 2019 Call for Scores award winners.

 

In the space of a few short years, Wolfgang David has ensconced himself on the international stage, both as a recitalist, and as a guest soloist with many leading orchestras such as the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra, Berne Symphony Orchestra, New York Virtuosi etc.
He has been well received by the press — the Washington Post wrote that he "scaled the heights of musicmaking” and The Strad described his playing “as emotionally wide-ranging as one could hope for”.

 

JACK operates as a nonprofit organization dedicated to the performance, commissioning, and spread of new string quartet music. Dedicated to education, the quartet spends two weeks each summer teaching at New Music on the Point, a contemporary chamber music festival in Vermont for young performers and composers. JACK has a long-standing relationships with the University of Iowa String Quartet Residency Program, where they teach and collaborate with students each fall, and the Boston University Center for New Music, where they visit each semester. Additionally, the quartet makes regular visits to schools including Columbia University, Harvard University, New York University, Princeton University, Stanford University, and the University of Washington.

 

The Composers’ Workshop (CW), made available to the graduate and undergraduate students in the composition program, helps to promote new works in live performance, thus encouraging dialogue between composer/composer and composer/musician regarding musical ideas, instrumental techniques and mutually understood notation. The program is made up of pieces that are in various stages of development, from early sketches to completed compositions. Works for specialized performers, such as the JACK quartet, are adjudicated and considered for a performance. The CNM currently schedules four CW concerts with student performers annually, and one concert with the JACK Quartet each fall.

 

The final ensemble concert of the 53rd season features four works with an emphasis on a solo instrument accompanied by mixed ensembles. The premiere of Zack Stanton’s Mourning Vignettes will feature Benjamin Coelho on bassoon, and Boulez’s Memoriale with Nicole Esposito on flute. The ensemble will present for the first time a work by the British composer Rebecca Saunders that features Will Yager on double bass in a solo role. The final work is a work for sinfonietta by UI graduate Jonah Elrod that reflects in some measure the yearly change of snow and ice in the Northern Hemisphere from 1967 to 2015.

 

Directed by Asst. Professor Jean-François Charles, the Laptop Orchestra of the University of Iowa (LOUi) is an experimental new music ensemble that promotes the intersection of acoustic and electronic music, of traditional or classical instruments with laptops, guitar pedals, and other electronic devices. Students create their own repertoire and develop improvisation skills.

  

Accroche Note is an ensemble of soloists formed around the soprano Françoise Kubler and clarinettist Armand Angster. Their aim is to lead in the promotion of today's music through a variety of mediums and genres. The programme of each concert dictates the number of musicians who constitute the ensemble. The flexibility of the group, from solo musician to large chamber ensemble, allows them to tackle varying projects; from the historical pages of the classical repertoire to instrumental and vocal literature of the 20th and 21st century. Other projects centre around improvisation through jazz and other improvised traditions. For several years now, the ensemble have developed a policy of commissioning music and working in direct collaboration with composers. Recent premieres given by Accroche Note include works by Pascal Dusapin, Pierre Joldowski, Luis Naon, Alberto Posadas, Philippe Manoury, Marco-Antonio Perez-Ramirez, Ivan Fedele, Zad Moultaka et Bruno Mantovani.

Absorbed by the music of Dusapin and Debussy, the Ensemble Accroche Note intend to convey their seduction of both composers by the elegance and originality of the writing, the attraction for the vocal line and for orchestration, the energy of the gesture and the weight of the silence, the exact attention to the development of the musical phrase in time. The music of the contemporary French composer Pascal Dusapin, influenced by the sound masses of Varese and Xenakis, the rigorous approach advocated by Donatoni as well as the music of jazz and folk music, is marked by microtonality, tension and energy.

 

Directed by composer and Visiting Asst. Prof. Sivan Cohen Elias, the spring Electronic Media class, titled Living Objects, has focused on learning Max/MSP and Jitter - a visual programming language for music and multimedia - in a multidisciplinary, creative and collaborative environment. In this EMS concert the students will present four collaborative and individual multimedia projects created during the course, and one collaborative final project of the class as a whole. As usual, the program will include a few additional electroacoustic compositions by composers from the School of Music.

 

The Composers’ Workshop (CW), made available to the graduate and undergraduate students in the composition program, helps to promote new works in live performance, thus encouraging dialogue between composer/composer and composer/musician regarding musical ideas, instrumental techniques and mutually understood notation. The program is made up of pieces that are in various stages of development, from early sketches to completed compositions. Works for specialized performers, such as the JACK quartet, are adjudicated and considered for a performance. The CNM currently schedules four CW concerts with student performers annually, and one concert with the JACK Quartet each fall.