| Thursday, August 30, 5 pm | back | |
|
Janacek Conservatory, Concert Hall Soloists of the Ostrava Center For New Music |
||
|
||
|
Born in England, Nic Gotham has lived most of his life in Canada and now resides in Riga, Latvia. He studied at York University, Toronto where his composition teachers included James Tenney, and David Mott. His compositions reveal a wide range of interests from improvisation to opera. At Ostrava New Music Days, he is preparing his first work for symphony orchestra, to be performed in Latvia in early 2002.
A little trio A Nocturne of Old Riga is my only piece of program music. It is a dusk-til-dawn portrait of Riga, my temporary home. After a long and peaceful dusk, people fill the narrow streets where a jazz-club operates in the basement of a Renaissance church. Dawn arrives quickly and everyone goes home to bed. The piece was composed for the Baltic Trio on the occasion of the 800th anniversary of the founding of Riga.
-N. Gotham
Anton Steinecker was born in 1971 in Bratislava, Slovak Republic. He has been studying musical composition since 1993 in private lessons with Tadeas Salva and at the Academy of Music in Bratislava. He continued his studies between 1998 and 2000 at The Jerusalem Rubin Academy of Music and Dance with Mark Kopytman. Variants for Clarinet (1998) "I don't like and I am not able to speak about my music so much. For me the music is another communication, not even a language, between me and God, and also with people. I can't verbalize it, that is another level of thinking. Music is like a true mirror of the all personality of the composer. You can't lie…that's you…And you can't escape… I see and understand my musical thinking like a living, organic, three dimensional process (something like "structure", but alive). The material is so concentrated, every note has his own substance. The musical lines and layers are coming one from another, texture is more contrapunctical - heterophonical. In solo compositions, like in Variants for Clarinet are this elements presented in the space of hidden counterpoint. The meaning of time, like we understand it (years, hours, minutes, seconds), have in this case a different substance. For me the time is not a simple horizontal line, since birth to seventy or eighty years of age, it is vertical. It has more dimensions, and the processes of live and death in the present, past and future are happening in the same "time", there are only different layers…" -A. Steinecker Bryn Harrison lives in the small Pennine town of Hebden Bridge in the North of England. Influenced by the late music of Feldman, Aldo Clementi and Karel Goeyvaerts his music explores aspects of confinement through the use of very limited musical materials. Performers of his music have included Irvine Arditti and Mieko Kanno, ensemble recherché, Ixion ensemble, London Sinfonietta and the Internationally-acclaimed accordionist Teodoro Anzellotti. His music has also been broadcast on BBC Radio 3. Bryn enjoys collaboration and has been involved in a 3 year on-going project with British painter and print-maker Mike Walker. His music has been selected for the ISCM World Music Days 2001 in Yokohama, Japan. Listenings II is part of a series of five pieces for combinations of solo and duo instruments. Each deals explicitly with notions of repetition and discreet variation. -B. Harrison Steve Lehman is a composer/saxophonist from New York who has studied with Jackie McLean, Anthony Braxton and Alvin Lucier. As a performer he has played and recorded with Eddie Henderson, Anthony Braxton, Roy Campbell, Mark Dresser, Borah Bergman and Paul Smoker among others. He has recorded two CDs as a leader on the Candence Jazz Label (Structural Fire / Camoflage) due out in the fall. His composition Lasers establishes several structures for the dynamic interaction of notated and improvised materials. Often it is impossible to make distinctions between the two. This conceptual ambiguity is intended to accentuate the aspects of improvised and notated music which are truly idiomatic. This version of Lasers will be performed with out percussion by the composer. This composition is dedicated to Freddie Hubbard and Ralph Shapey. -S. Lehman Roddy Schrock, a native of Mississippi, studied both sociology and music composition as a student. It was there, while under the tutelage of composer Mark Applebaum, that Roddy began to pursue his explorations into both acoustic and electronic music. A combination of chance and circumstance led Roddy to relocate to Tokyo in 1999, where he founded the new media duo Tog. Tog has toured extensively throughout Japan, collaborating with electronic sound artists such as Otomo Yoshihide, Billy?, and Atau Tanaka. Most recently, Schrock was a featured performer of the UGA New Media Institute's summer series of Internet broadcasts. He is now preparing to enter Mill's College this September for a Masters degree in music composition. Comprised of six movements, An Almost Human Gesture (1997) uses the prose of Louis Jenkins as text. Jenkins' prose lends itself to a sound world where that which is inexplicable and illogical is treated in an impassive, sometimes disinterested manner - much like a cartoon. In Jenkins' universe, one can learn to walk through a wall in the same methodical manner as one may learn to bake a cake, or vice versa. Tonight's performance will feature the following four movements: 1.Walking Through A Wall 2.Library 3. Intermission and 4.Violence on Television. -R. Schrock Surfer kid born in Florida, 1976. Nathan Fuhr discovered music by chance via high school band department, and soon thereafter left at age 17 to attend the North Carolina School of the Arts, and developed there a robust appetite for discourse and collaboration with other artistic media, especially modern dance. While earning a BM at the Cincinnati Conservatory, discovered propensity toward rejection of academic dogma in favor of a plurality of musical influences, and thus instigated and directed the highly successful COBRA Ensemble - Cincinnati. Apprentice Conductor of the Colorado Symphony during '99-'00, a position created for him by Music Director Marin Alsop, whom he also assisted at the Cabrillo Music Festival of Contemporary Music during the summers of '98-'00. Not particularly keen on the ultra-conservative ways of the American orchestral establishment, moved to New York for '00-'01 to conduct some premieres, do some exploring, and play in some concerts with John Zorn. Looking forward to commencing studies at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague next month. Happy to be at the Ostrava New Music Days. -N. Fuhr Lenka Zupkova studied in Ostrava, Brno and Hannover and works as violinist playing classical, contemporary, improvisations and jazz music throughout Europe. -L. Zupkova Dance Dance Dance for string quartet by Peter Flint had its start in some research I was doing into music of the Baroque era. I noted that much of that music was based on elements from popular dances of the time. However, they mostly were not "danceable" works and the dance rythms were just a starting place for the composition. I thought that this would be a good beginning as well for a piece of my own. I, however, looked to the dance and popular music of my time, and thus found my inspiration in the music of artists such as James Brown , Brazilian song writers, and contemporary hip-hop rappers. Each movement focuses on musical and rhytmic ideas from one of the three sources mentioned. Listeners may not immediately hear the connection when they listen to my piece. However, my goals was not to imitate or to pay homage to those musicians, but to use some of that rhythmic inspiration for my own creativity. Dance Dance Dance Mvt 1 - It's Got To Be... Mvt 2 - Deflection Mvt 3 - Hip Hip Hip -P. Flint Eniko Ginzery is a virtuoso dulcimerist. She graduated the Musical Conservatory in Bratislava and at the Academy of Ferenc Liszt in Budapest, Hungary, with Prof. Ludmila Dadakova, and Ilona Gerencser Szeverenyi. In 1995 she obtained award as the best participant of the International Youth Festival in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Three consecutive years she participated in interpretation courses given by Gyorgy Kurtag in Szombathely, Hungary. In 1997 Eniko Ginzery became the absolute winner/laureate of International Dulcimer Competition in Valasske Mezirici. Since 1995 Eniko has performed regularly in Europe as a soloist or with orchestra. She plays chamber music with various musical instruments (harpsichord, clarinet, flute, harp, piano, string instruments, shakuhatchi) and her singer. repertoire includes pieces/compositions of medieval, renaissance, baroque, classical, romantic and contemporary composers. She became universal interpreter of old and contemporary music. Surprising sound and expression possibilities of dulcimer and Eniko's astonishing virtuosity inspired many contemporary composers to create original pieces for this instrument. Eniko's Ginzery regularly participates in introduction of new compositions of domestic and foreign composers as I.Zeljenka, J.Benes,J.Pospisil, Ch.Meijering and D. Biro. -E. Ginzery Adam Kondor was born in 1964, Budapest. He completed his studies at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music where he graduated in composition in 1994. His most influential teachers include Albert Simon and György Kurtág. In 1999 with the recommendation of Péter Eötvös, he studied with the Herrenhaus Scholarship in Edenkoben (Rheinland-Platz). He received the composition award of the Soros Foundation the same year. Hastieres - Chansons is based on the following fictional story. Dominique Hastieres was born in Kairouan in 1951. His mother was a Tunisian Berber by birth, his father was a French Jew. He lost his parents early on and, from 1957, wandered about in Tunis's harbour district, looked after by dock workers. At the age of thirteen he fled to France. He lived by begging and stealing on the streets but was soon caught and-bearing in mind his French citizenship-was shut away in a community home. At the age of seventeen he ran away from the institute. He was taken to hospital with serious symptoms of psychosis, having been found under the bridge just as he was about to set fire to a pigeon. He received treatment several times over the remaining twelve years of his life, during which he still obtained a degree in Italian from the Sorbonne, also studying composition under Olivier Messiaen. When, in 1980, he got an editorial job with an important Parisian publishing house, his friends thought that his life had settled down. Not long after, he committed suicide. His collected writings and poems (Together with letters and documents) were published in small numbers by a private publisher. They have not come into commercial circulation-the volumes pass from hand to hand. -A. Kondor |