Composer Roster
Composer Roster for 2004 - 2005
Please select from the names below to learn more about the composer.
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BETH ANDERSON (b. 1950) (“To make something beautiful is revolutionary!”) is a Kentucky native now based in New York. She studied primarily in California (U.C. Davis and Mills College) with Larry Austin, John Cage, Terry Riley, and Robert Ashley. In the late 1970s the style of her composing shifted from avant-garde to more lyrical and neo-Romantic, still retaining some of the cut-up qualities of the minimalists. Since 1984, when a horse named Swale won the Kentucky Derby in her home state, Anderson has appropriated that word when entitling many of her compositions. A “swale” denotes a marshy depression lush in a wide spectrum of plant life, and Anderson’s “swales” for various instrumental combinations reflect that image of diversity. Several “Swale” works were heard at New York’s Weill Recital Hall in November 2003, when Carnegie Hall presented a concert entirely devoted to Beth Anderson works. Top |
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MARILYN BLISS (b. 1954) was educated at Coe College and the University of Pennsylvania; she counts among her teachers such distinguished composers as George Crumb, George Rochberg, and Jacob Druckman. She has written many widely performed orchestral, chamber, and solo works. Her many awards include the Charles Ives Prize of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, an ASCAP Young Composers Award, fellowships from Tanglewood, the Composers Conference and the New York Foundation for the Arts as well as commissions from numerous musical associations, chamber ensembles, and performing artists. The Boston Globe called Bliss’s Huatzu Hill for soprano and chamber orchestra: “a series of rich landscapes -- the colors sharp, the feelings powerfully concentrated, the language eloquent, the expression precise.” Bliss is an active concert flutist and has served as president of the New York Women Composers. Top |
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JANE BROCKMAN (b. 1949) is the first woman to have earned a Doctorate in Music Composition in the 150-year history of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her first orchestra piece won the Sigvald Thompson Prize for orchestral composition. For nine years she taught music theory and composition at the University of Connecticut, where she founded their computer music studio. After a composer-fellowship at Robert Redford's Sundance Institute, Brockman left her Connecticut post and resettled in Santa Monica, CA, first scoring for film and television and now focusing exclusively on concert music. Brockman has served on the boards of directors of New York's Composers Concordance, as well as Women in Film, and the Society of Composers and Lyricists in Los Angeles. Keyboard magazine described one of her works thus: “With creative chops on the order of Brockman’s…you might even keep the old ghosts of Mozart’s time happy.” Top |
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CINDY COX (b. 1961) has produced a body of work widely respected for its “intelligence, complexity, fluency, and for the numinous sensibility it emanates." She holds a BM in piano performance from Texas Christian University, and her MM and DMA from Indiana University in composition. She has held Fellowships at the Tanglewood Music Center, the Aspen Music Festival, the MacDowell Colony, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy. Awards. Commissions have come from organizations such as the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fromm Foundation, ASCAP Grants to Young Composers, and the International Competition for Women Composers. Recent performances include those by the Kronos Quartet, the National Symphony, the Oakland Symphony, the Alexander String Quartet, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Paul Dresher Ensemble, Earplay, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group. Cox is an Associate Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Top |
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EMMA LOU DIEMER (b. 1927) received degrees in composition from Yale University and the Eastman School, having studied under Paul Hindemith, Howard Hanson, and Roger Sessions, among others. Her large and well-known output of neo-classical and neo-romantic choral and keyboard pieces underscores her background in church music, but her body of work encompasses many genres, with a style that Max Lifchitz called both “modern and highly accessible and rewarding.” As a professor of theory and composition at the University of California at Santa Barbara (1971-1991), Diemer founded an electronic music studio there, composing in that vein and also experimenting with the use of extended instrumental techniques. Most recently, Nathan Daughtrey and the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra recorded her Concerto in One Movement for Marimba and Orchestra (June 2002), and Marilyn Mason recorded the organ concerto Alaska (Oct. 2003). Diemer looks forward to the August 2004 world premiere of a major, six-movement work for chorus and orchestra, commissioned by the San Francisco Choral Society. Top |
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MARTI EPSTEIN (b. 1959), cited by the Boston Globe for her “incredible ear for color,” has degrees from the University of Colorado and Boston University. She was twice a fellow in composition at the Tanglewood Music Center, where she studied with Oliver Knussen and Hans Werner Henze. As a result of her association with Henze, she was invited by the city of Munich to compose her puppet opera, Hero und Leander, for the 1992 Munich Biennale for New Music Theater. Epstein was a recipient of a 1998 Fromm Foundation Commission, and she won the 1998 Lee Ettleson Composition Prize. Also in 1998 the San Francisco Symphony, under the direction of Alisdair Neale, presented the premiere of Epstein’s orchestral work, Celestial Navigation. Epstein is currently a co-director of the Boston new music ensemble, Extension Works, and serves as an Associate Professor at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she has taught harmony, counterpoint, and composition since 1991. Top |
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MARGARET FAIRLIE-KENNEDY (b. 1925) started her compositional life as a serialist, then took an eighteen-year hiatus after finding that mode not completely satisfying. Now she has established her own voice and seeks to connect emotionally with her listeners. She is based in Ithaca, NY, and has enjoyed a long and fruitful affiliation with Cornell University, including a post as composer-in-residence. From the early 1960s, when her piano concerto and her wind quintet premiered, to the present, as she continues to fulfill commissions, her music has consistently received critical acclaim. Recent Fairlie-Kennedy chamber music pieces have included Undertow (1997) for violin and piano (featured on an ACA recording due in spring 2004), Summer Solstice (1998), and Desert Echoes (1999), which won the performance award in the Maxfield Parrish competition held by the Philadelphia Classical Symphony. Top |
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CYNTHIA FOLIO (b. 1954) is an alumna of the Eastman School of Music, having received from them her Performer’s Certificate in flute and her M.A. and Ph.D,, both in music theory. In the 1980s she taught flute and theory at Texas Christian University and played piccolo and flute in the Fort Worth Symphony, Opera, and Ballet Orchestras. Since 1990 she has been Associate Professor and chair of music theory at Temple University. As a flutist, she performs regularly as a soloist and in several groups in the Philadelphia area, including Network for New Music, Hildegard Chamber Players, and the Temple Faculty New Music Trio (with Jeffrey Solow and Charles Abramovic). Composition awards include Meet the Composer grants, a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, composer residency at the Yaddo Artist Colony and at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a winning entry in the National Flute Association Newly Published Music Competition. Top |
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TANIA GABRIELLE FRENCH (b. 1963) has had her work described as mordant, witty, instantly engaging, and “Haydnesque” in its variety. She has studied composition with Lewis Spratlan, Bernard Rands, and Oliver Knussen. In 1996, her Four Illuminations for oboe and piano trio received its New York premiere by the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble. In spring 2002, French was awarded top honors at the Oregon Bach Festival¹s "Waging Peace through Singing" for her choral work "In Paradisum," a commission from the San Francisco Solano Church in memory of those who lost their lives on September 11, 2001. In fall 2002, her String Quartet No. 2 “Communications” was taken on tour throughout North America and Europe by the Artis Quartet. Upcoming projects include a suite based on themes from the film "Vertigo" which will feature the New Hollywood String Quartet and be premiered at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in February 2004. The Artis Quartet will also be premiering her third string quartet in the 2006-2007 season. Top |
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NANCY GALBRAITH (b. 1951) teaches composition and theory at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she also serves as music director and organist for Christ Lutheran Church. Her body of work features an “exotic array of postmodern and postminimalist elements.” Six of her orchestral works have been performed by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra; these include A Festive Violet Pulse (1998), commissioned by the PSO to welcome their new music director Mariss Janssons, and De Profundis ad Lucem, which premiered in Oct. 2002. She also has become a standard-repertoire composer for wind ensemble, with pieces such as with brightness round about it (1993), Danza de los Duendes (1996), and Elfin Thunderbolt (1998). Chamber pieces include two string quartets penned for the famous Cuarteto Latinoamericano and her Atacama Sonata (2001) for flute and piano. In the field of sacred music, she has composed frequently for the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg (PA), and her epic Missa Mysteriorum for choir and wind ensemble (commissioned, premiered, and later recorded by the Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh) has received numerous performances since its unveiling in 1998. Top |
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SYLVIA GLICKMAN (b. 1932) was granted Bachelor's and Master's degrees in piano performance from the Juilliard School of Music. Later, as a Fulbright scholar at the Royal Academy of Music in London, she decided to take a composition course; her first piece, a suite for cello and piano, won the Hecht Prize in Composition. Glickman’s varied resume of works also includes Carvings in Courage (1997), an orchestral work commemorating the struggle of Danish Jews during the Holocaust and used as a companion piece to an exhibit at the Jewish museum of Eastern Pennsylvania. She has held several academic positions over the years, including a nineteen-year tenure as Director of Chamber Music activities and Pianist-in-Residence at Haverford College near Philadelphia, PA. Glickman is the founder of the Hildegard Publishing Company, a press devoted to furthering the music of women composers, and the president of the Hildegard Institute devoted to research on music by women. She is co-editor of Women Composers: Music Through the Ages, a twelve-volume anthology by G.K. Hall, and she also regularly edits collections of keyboard music and reviews music reference books for Choice and other publications. In the words of the Juilliard Journal, she has “found her own voice…and, in the process, has helped many other women find theirs.” Top |
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JENNIFER HIGDON (b. 1962) has had her word lauded for its “compositional ease and abundance of ideas.” David Patrick Stearns says “she pushes boundaries…but never to be avant-garde for its own sake: there’s always a purposeful expressive intent.” Higdon is the recipient of numerous awards, grants, and composer-in-residence appointments. She composed her first music while working on a B.M. in flute performance at Bowling Green University. A small output of flute pieces was her entree into the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she was mentored by Ned Rorem and where she herself is now a member of the composition faculty. Higdon has composed prolifically for flutists (Song, rapid.fire, Autumn Reflection, Legacy) and for chamber ensembles, but in the last decade has added orchestral works as well. Shine (1995) was the result of an ASCAP grant and was premiered by the Oregon Symphony. Blue cathedral (1999), a piece composed as both an homage to her late brother and a celebration of the Curtis Institute’s 75th anniversary, has been performed and recorded to great acclaim by maestro Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony. In 2002, her Concerto for Orchestra was one of the Centennial Commissions of the Philadelphia Orchestra; in 2004 the piece will be given its U.K. premiere by Leonard Slatkin and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. In 2003, Higdon became the first American woman composer to be featured as a central figure of the prestigious Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood. 2003 also saw the premiere of Higdon’s Piano Trio and Southern Harmony for string quartet. Top |
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KATHERINE HOOVER (b. 1937) studied the flute with Joseph Mariano and William Kincaid. She has a Performer’s Certificate in flute from the Eastman School of Music, and her pieces for solo flute (Kokopeli, Winter Spirits) and flute and piano (Medieval Suite) are well-known. Four of her pieces have won the National Flute Association's Newly Published Music Competition, in 1987, 1991, 1993 and 1994. In 1995 the commissioning, rehearsal, and Kennedy Center premiere of her Dances and Variations for flute and harp became the subject of an Emmy-winning documentary. She has also composed for many other chamber groupings; in May 1989, the New Jersey Chamber Music Society premiered her Quintet (Da Pacem) for piano and strings at Alice Tully Hall in New York's Lincoln Center. Her orchestral works include Eleni: A Greek Tragedy (1987), which has been performed by over a dozen orchestras, and Night Skies (1994), whose premiere with the Harrisburg Symphony Hoover conducted herself. John Corigliano has called her music “dazzlingly crafted…[with] a wide a fascinating vocabulary.” Hoover holds a Masters in Music Theory from the Manhattan School of Music, where she taught for many years. Top |
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WINIFRED HYSON (b. 1925) has been hailed for the “exquisite sensitivity” of her music. She is a graduate of Radcliffe College in physics and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She went on to study music theory and composition at American University under Esther Ballou and piano with Evelyn Swarthout. A good deal of Hyson’s output has been contributions to the song repertoire: Songs of Job’s Daughter, View from Sandburg, A Set of Songs in Japanese Manner. She is active in the Maryland State Music Teacher’s Association; in 2002, that organization’s annual convention featured the premiere of Hyson’s Somewhere in the Wild for soprano and chamber ensemble. This piece went on to take the top prize in the 2003 Mu Phi Epsilon Original Composition Competition. Hyson has also chaired a composers group within the Friday Morning Music Club of Washington, D.C., directing broadcasts of local composers on local radio. Top |
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MARY ANN JOYCE (b. 1937) received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis, MO. She is currently on the faculty of Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY. She is known for her choral music and her songs. Her song settings of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins have garnered particular notice; The Caged Skylark has been performed at the United Nations and Binsey Poplars was featured at the Gerard Manley Hopkins conference in County Kildare, Ireland, in 1999. I am Ireland, a song cycle on 20th century Irish texts for soprano and harp, was recently premiered through the auspices of New York Women Composers. Her works stands unique for threads of “humor, irony, and suffering” amid tonal beauty. Top |
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LAURA KAMINSKY (b. 1956) is a graduate of the City College of New York (MA in composition, under Mario Davidovsky), where she was a Tuch Foundation Fellow. She is the founding director of the acclaimed new music ensemble Musicians Accord, in residence at CCNY since 1984. Kaminsky was Director of the Humanities and Film Programs at the 92nd Street Y from 1984-88, the artistic director of the Town Hall, and Director of Music and Theater Programs at The New School from 1993-96. In 1996-97, she served as head of the European Mozart Academy in Poland. Currently, she is chair of the music department at the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, where the Post-Intelligencer has called her music “beautifully crafted, with substance.” Her music has been performed by a diverse list of soloists and chamber groups. Recent commissions include River Music for the Seattle-based flute-percussion-piano trio Taneko, The Full Range of Blue for the Seattle Chamber Players, and new works for the Odeon String Quartet and the German Ahlert Schwab Guitar-Mandolin Duo. Top |
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LIBBY LARSEN (b. 1950) has compiled a catalog of over 200 works spanning a wide range of compositional styles. She has held composer-in-residence posts with the Minnesota Orchestra, the Charlotte Symphony, and the Colorado Symphony, as well as with many arts institutes and universities. In 1973, Larsen and Stephen Paulus founded what is now the American Composer’s Forum, an advocacy organization for composers. In 1990, Larsen’s opera Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus, was named one of the eight best classical music events of the year by USA Today. Larsen also won a Grammy award in 1994 as producer of an Arleen Auger recital album that featured Larsen’s own song cycle Sonnets of the Portuguese. USA Today says, "She's the only English-speaking composer since Benjamin Britten who matches great verse with fine music so intelligently and expressively." In 2003, her Piano Trio no. 2 received its New York premiere by the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble. Top |
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BINNETTE LIPPER (b. 1939) received her music education at Hunter College and the Juilliard School. She has also studied composition privately with Louise Talma and Meyer Kupferman, among others. For many years, she was on the faculty of the Hoff-Barthelson Music School in Scarsdale, NY, and she now serves on their board of trustees. She is an active member of the New York Women Composers and the International Alliance for Women in Music. Lipper is the recipient of multiple ASCAP grants and American Music Center grants. Most recently, two piano works were “finalist” pieces in the Renee B. Fischer Piano Composition Competition. Top |
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RUTH LOMON (b. 1930) is known for “exploration of the subtle timbral possibilities of the individual instrument.” She attended McGill University, the Conservatoire in Montreal, and New England Conservatory. She also studied with Witold Lutoslawski at Dartington College in England. Since 1998 she has been a Composer and Resident Scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA. Lomon divides her time between Massachusetts and New Mexico; her interest in Native American ceremonials has been a catalyst for much of her music. Another major influence has been the poetry of the Holocaust; in 1995-96, as a fellow of the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe, Lomon composed Songs of Remembrance, a song cycle based on poetry of Holocaust victims. This multi-lingual concert-length work had its premiere at the John Knowles Paine Concert Hall, Harvard University, and the songs have since been performed in Weill Hall, New York, the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum at Washington, D.C., and at the 11th Congress of the International Alliance of Women in Music (IAWM) in London, where she received the Miriam Gideon Composition award for this work. A grant from the Hadassah International Research Institute allowed her to continue work in this vein, on an oratorio called Witnesses. Lomon has also recently finished a trumpet concerto, Odyssey, and has recently been commissioned by the Rebecca Clarke Society to orchestrate Clarke’s well-known viola sonata. Top |
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TERRY WINTER OWENS is a New York-based pianist and composer. Her work draws from such diverse influences as the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, astronomy and physics, the piano repertoire of the Romantics and the Impressions, and the mentorship of Ralph Shapey. She did graduate work in musicology at NYU, and while still in school, she began performing with various orchestras and chamber ensembles, as violinist, pianist and later as harpsichordist. She had the dual role of musical director and harpsichordist for the Staten Island Baroque Ensemble. She has also played piano and violin for professional opera companies. Owens has worked extensively as a music editor and as a pioneer in the regular use of computer notation software. After having served on the faculty of the Neighborhood Music School and the Music Institute of Staten Island, Owens now focuses on private instruction. Top |
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MAGGI PAYNE (b. 1945) is the co-director of the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in Oakland, CA, where she teaches recording engineering, composition, and electronic music. She has received two Composer's Grants and an Interdisciplinary Arts Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and video grants from the Mellon Foundation and the Western States Regional Media Arts Fellowships Program. Her works have been performed throughout the United States and Europe, including the New Music Across America Festival 1992 (Los Angeles), New Music America 1990, 1987 and 1981 Festivals, Composers' Forum, SEAMUS, Siggraph, CADRE, the New York Museum of Modern Art, Paris Autumn Festival, the Bourges Festival, and the Autunno Musical at Como, Italy. Reviewer Tom Grove said of her work: “[Payne] seems interested in the surreal, the inward, the micro and the accumulation of physical and psychological tension. The compositions and sounds have incredible depth, a profound logic and, though not 'pretty,' an irresistible beauty." Top |
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SHULAMIT RAN born in Tel Aviv, Israel, where she received her early training, came to the U.S. at the age of fourteen to study, having received scholarships from The Mannes College of Music in New York and the America Israel Cultural Foundation. Her composition teachers in Israel and in the U.S. have included A.U. Boskovich, Paul Ben-Haim, Norman Dello Joio and Ralph Shapey. Her principal piano teachers were Nadia Reisenberg and Dorothy Taubman. Among her numerous awards, fellowships and commissions are those from the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fromm Music Foundation, WFMT, Chamber Music America, Eastman School of Music, the American Composers Orchestra (Concerto for Orchestra), the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (Concerto da Camera II), the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Philadelphia Orchestra (Symphony, first performed in 1990, Pulitzer Prize 1991, first place Kennedy Center Friedheim Award, 1992), the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Legends), the Baltimore Symphony (Vessels of Courage and Hope), the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, and many more. Top |
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RUTH SCHONTHAL (b. 1924) began her musical training at age five, as the youngest student ever accepted to the Stern Conservatory in Berlin. As the Nazi persecution of the Jews forced her family into exile, she went on to the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm, and later to Mexico City, where she studied with Manuel M. Ponce and where, at the age of nineteen, she premiered her own Piano Concerto at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. In Mexico she met Paul Hindemith, who was in town on a concert tour. Hindemith secured her a scholarship to study with him at Yale. Schonthal’s work is inspired by thorny issues like culture clash and the roles of women, and it also melds her deeply rooted European tradition, Mexican folk music, and aleatoric and minimalist elements; her work has been praised for its “mastery of contemporary techniques.” In 1979, Schonthal joined the faculty of the Westchester Conservatory. In 1994, she received the International Heidelberger Kunstlerinnen Prize and was honored with an exhibition of her life and works at the Heidelberg Museum. She is also the recipient of many prizes in the U.S., among them the Certificate of Merit for outstanding service to music from the Yale University School of Music Alumni Association and Outstanding Musician Award from New York University. Top |
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JEANNE SHAFFER (b. 1925) began her musical life as a child star, singing with Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra and co-starring in the Jeannette MacDonald film Girl of the Golden West. As an adult, she has continued singing, and has been an organist and choirmaster for various churches around her home base of Montgomery, Alabama, where she chaired the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Huntingdon College from 1976-1989. She was an associate composer at the Atlantic Center for the Arts with Joan Tower in 1989 and with Lukas Foss in 1991. She has also won NEH, Aspen Music Festival and Alabama Arts Council grants. Shaffer’s Ph.D. is from Vanderbilt University. Her body of work encompasses such diverse pieces as cantatas, song cycles, brass quintets, a chamber opera on Susan B. Anthony, and sonatas for cello and clarinet. Currently she has a weekly radio program on women composers, “Eine kleine Frauenmusik,” broadcast over Southeastern Public Radio. Top |
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ALEX SHAPIRO (b. 1962) was educated at The Juilliard School and Manhattan School of Music, where she was a composition student of Ursula Mamlok and John Corigliano. Earlier composition studies from age fifteen were with Leo Edwards at Mannes College of Music and with Michael Czajkowski and George Tsontakis at the Aspen Music School. An accomplished pianist as well as composer, Ms. Shapiro was a student of New York recitalist Marshall Kreisler. Ms. Shapiro is the recipient of national honors and awards from The American Music Center, ASCAP, the American Composers Forum and Mu Phi Epsilon, and she has been awarded artist fellowships from The California Arts Council and The MacDowell Colony. An enthusiastic leader in the Southern California music community, Alex is President of the Board of Directors of The American Composers Forum of Los Angeles, Chairperson of ACF/LA’s Advisory Council, and the moderator of ACF/LA’s Composer’s Salon series in Hollywood. She has also served as an officer on the boards of NACUSA, The College Music Society, and The Society of Composers & Lyricists. Alex has been a featured speaker at many music events, including the NARAS program "Grammy® in the Schools" and IAWM's International Congress of Women in Music, and guest lectures at numerous universities. She resides in Malibu and Santa Barbara, California. Top |
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FAYE-ELLEN SILVERMAN (b. 1947) produces work that displays “a sureness of touch, feeling for chamber music, and care of expression that are the privilege of artists who really have something to say." She holds a B.A. (cum laude and honors in music) from Barnard College, an M.A. from Harvard, and a D.M.A. from Columbia, both in music composition. Her teachers have included Otto Luening, William Sydeman, Leon Kirchner, Lukas Foss, Vladimir Ussachevsky, and Jack Beeson. Silverman’s work has been performed by the Baltimore Symphony (Sergiu Comissiona, cond.), the Brooklyn Philharmonic (Lukas Foss, cond.), the Greater Bridgeport Symphony (Gustav Meier, cond.), the New Orleans Philharmonic (Maxim Shostakovich, cond.), and the Aspen Music Festival. She has been a resident scholar at the Villa Serbelloni of the Rockefeller Foundation (1987), a Composers' Conference Fellow (1985), a Yaddo Fellow (1984), and a MacDowell Fellow (1982). Silverman has been a member of the Mannes College graduate studies faculty since 1991. Since September 2000 she has also been teaching at the Eugene Lang College of the New School University. Top |
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JOYCE HOPE SUSKIND (b. 1928) was educated at New York City’s High School of Music and Art and the Juilliard School, with extensive training in piano, oboe, and voice. As a pianist for the Martha Graham School and the Jose Limon wing at Juilliard, she discovered her talent for composing. Suskind has dedicated most of her composing life to setting poems of William Butler Yeats, with two of them even scored for orchestra. In addition to Yeats, she has set Aiken, Stevenson, Auden, Hopkins and others. Her Yeats-based songs have prompted shining reviews: “….beautifully classical in approach, painting the poet’s words in an embellished tonal context.” Suskind resides in New York City, where she teaches singing and the Alexander Technique. Top |
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AUGUSTA READ THOMAS (b. 1964) has built a reputation for music whose “inventiveness [and] lyric turns seem almost magically sustained; and, unfailingly, result in a beautiful immediacy.” Thomas studied with Jacob Druckman at Yale University, and with Alan Stout and Bill Karlins at Northwestern University. She also graduated from the Royal Academy of Music, where she eventually was elected an Associate. In the mid-1990s, her Poe-based chamber opera, Ligeia, won the prestigious International Orpheus Prize and was performed at the Evian Festival, the Spoleto Festival, and the Aspen Music Festival. Thomas has spent several years as composer-in-residence for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (a position she retains until 2006). The CSO has premiered her Words of the Sea (1996), Orbital Beacons: Concerto for Orchestra (1998), Ceremonial (2000), and In My Sky at Twilight (2002). She has produced three major works for cello and orchestra: Vigil (1990), premiered by Norman Fischer, Chanson (1997), commissioned by Mstislav Rostopovich, and Ritual Incantations (1999), for David Finckel. She also has two trombone concertos to her credit, the second of which was just premiered in 2003 by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen. Her piano concerto, Aurora (2000), has been performed in Berlin and London by Daniel Barenboim. Many of Thomas’s most recent works have also featured chorus: Song in Sorrow (2000), Ring Out, Wild Bells, to the Wild Sky (2000), Daylight Divine (2001), and Chanting to Paradise (2002). Thomas is currently on the faculty at Northwestern after several years of teaching at the Eastman School of Music. Top |
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ELIZABETH VERCOE (b. 1941), a native of Washington, D.C., has spent most of her adult life in Concord, Massachusetts. She graduated from Wellesley College, and later earned her MM degree at the University of Michigan and her DMA at Boston University, where she studied with Gardner Read. Read has praised Vercoe’s music for its “power and strength as well as great warmth and imagination.” She won composition awards from both Wellesley and B.U., and was commissioned to write a fanfare for the inauguration of Wellesley’s 11th president. Vercoe is particularly known for a series of "Herstory" works for voice and various instruments, which have been widely performed and recorded. Vercoe was one of the first composers to be published by Arsis Press (founded in 1974), a music publishing concern devoted to chamber and choral works of living female composers, and now serves as their associate editor. Top |
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MELINDA WAGNER (b. 1957) received graduate degrees in Music Composition from the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania. Her teachers have included Richard Wernick, George Crumb, and Shulamit Ran. She has taught at several universities in the Northeast, and her compositional resume boasts numerous commissions and award, most prominently the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for her Concerto for Flute, Strings, and Percussion (“There is a rich, seductive lushness in the sheer sound of Wagner's concerto… At the same time, the work is charged with a coiled tension that keeps a listener's mind alert; we are always interested in what is coming next.”—Tim Page). In May 2003, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and soloist Emanuel Ax premiered Wagner’s piano concerto Extremity of Sky, about which John Van Rhein said: “The concerto all but explodes with bold, confident gestures and richly expressive piano writing ranging from rhapsodic to percussive. Wagner makes canny use of the seismic energy and vast coloristic palette of the twenty-first century orchestra. Top |
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JOELLE WALLACH (b. 1946) was awarded the first-ever doctorate in composition from the Manhattan School of Music, where she studied under John Corigliano. Her choral work On the Beach at Night Alone (1980) won first prize in the Inter-American Music Awards. The New York Philharmonic Ensembles commissioned her octet From the Forest of Chimneys to celebrate their 10th anniversary in 1992, and the New York Choral Society commemorated their 35th anniversary season at Carnegie Hall by premiering Wallach’s secular oratorio Toward a Time of Renewal (1994). Her String Quartet 1995, a reflection on widowhood, was the American Composers Alliance nominee for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in Music: “Wallach's ability to abstract from experience and distill it into such a brilliantly wrought work is miraculous.” One of her most recent projects has been While Hope Remains, a work for chorus, tenor solo, chamber orchestra and speaker which was written in response to 9/11 and which incorporates words from the traditional “Firefighter’s Prayer.” Top |
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BETTY WISHART (b. 1947) is an adjunct faculty member in piano at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she did a degree of her own in piano performance. She has presented workshops on contemporary piano music and has adjudicated numerous competitions, including the National Guild Auditions. As a composer, she has seen her works performed at diverse venues all around the world and has received awards from the National League of American Pen Women, Composer's Guild, and the American College of Musicians. Top |
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LAUREL ZUCKER (b. 1955) graduated from the Juilliard School after flute studies with Samuel Baron, and also studied with Paula Robison at the New England Conservatory. She later received her MA in composition from New York University. Zucker is currently Professor of Music at California State University, Sacramento, where she teaches flute and coaches the Liberace Woodwind Quintet. She has been invited to give master classes at the Moscow and Tchaikovsky Conservatories of Music in Russia, the Victoria Conservatory in Canada and the North Carolina School for the Arts. An active concert performer and recording artist, Zucker has more than 20 CD releases to her credit on her own label Cantilena Records; one of them is a survey of the flute works of Alec Wilder subsidized by the prestigious Aaron Copland Fund for Music Award from the American Music Center, and one of the latest, Inflorescence, features some of Zucker’s own solo flute pieces. Top |