Ben Johnston (composer)
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Ben Johnston (composer)
Benjamin Burwell Johnston Jr. (March 15, 1926 – July 21, 2019) was an American contemporary music composer, known for his use of just intonation. He was called "one of the foremost composers of microtonal music" by Philip Bush and "one of the best non-famous composers this country has to offer" by John Rockwell. Biography Johnston was born in Macon, Georgia, and taught composition and theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign from 1951 to 1986, before retiring to North Carolina. During his time teaching, he was in contact with avant-garde figures such as John Cage, La Monte Young, and Iannis Xenakis. Johnston's students have included Stuart Saunders Smith, Neely Bruce, Thomas Albert, Michael Pisaro, Manfred Stahnke, and Kyle Gann. He also considered his practice of just intonation to have influenced other composers, including James Tenney and Larry Polansky. In 1946 he married dance band singer Dorothy Haines, but they soon divorced. In 1950 he married artis ...
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Contemporary Music
Contemporary classical music is classical music composed close to the present day. At the beginning of the 21st century, it commonly referred to the post-1945 modern forms of post-tonal music after the death of Anton Webern, and included serial music, electronic music, experimental music, and minimalist music. Newer forms of music include spectral music, and post-minimalism. History Background At the beginning of the twentieth century, composers of classical music were experimenting with an increasingly dissonant pitch language, which sometimes yielded atonal pieces. Following World War I, as a backlash against what they saw as the increasingly exaggerated gestures and formlessness of late Romanticism, certain composers adopted a neoclassic style, which sought to recapture the balanced forms and clearly perceptible thematic processes of earlier styles (see also New Objectivity and Social Realism). After World War II, modernist composers sought to achieve greater levels o ...
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Larry Polansky
Larry Polansky (born 1954) is a composer, guitarist, mandolinist, and professor emeritus at Dartmouth College and the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is a founding member and co-director of Frog Peak Music (a composers' collective) He co-wrote HMSL (Hierarchical Music Specification Language) with Phil Burk and David Rosenboom. There are several recordings of his work, including an album of mensuration canons, ''Four-Voice Canons''. He also served as co-producer of ''Asmat Dream: New Music Indonesia, Vol. I''. He is the brother of novelist Steven Polansky. Discography * freeHorn (2017, Cold Blue Music) * Three Pieces for Two Pianos (2016, New World Records) * The World's Longest Melody (2010, New World Records, featuring Zwerm guitar quartet) * The Theory of Impossible Melody (1990, Artifact Recordings; 2008 Reissue on New World Records) * Trios (2004, Pogus CDs, with Douglas Repetto, Tom Erbe, Chris Mann, Christian Wolff) * Four Voice Canons (2002, Cold Blue R ...
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East Village, Manhattan
The East Village is a neighborhood on the East Side of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It is roughly defined as the area east of the Bowery and Third Avenue, between 14th Street on the north and Houston Street on the south. The East Village contains three subsections: Alphabet City, in reference to the single-letter-named avenues that are located to the east of First Avenue; Little Ukraine, near Second Avenue and 6th and 7th Streets; and the Bowery, located around the street of the same name. Initially the location of the present-day East Village was occupied by the Lenape Native Americans, and was then divided into plantations by Dutch settlers. During the early 19th century, the East Village contained many of the city's most opulent estates. By the middle of the century, it grew to include a large immigrant populationincluding what was once referred to as Manhattan's Little Germanyand was considered part of the nearby Lower East Side. By the late 1960s, many artists, ...
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La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club (La MaMa E.T.C.) is an Off-Off-Broadway theatre founded in 1961 by Ellen Stewart, African-American theatre director, producer, and fashion designer. Located in Manhattan's East Village, the theatre began in the basement boutique where Stewart sold her fashion designs. Stewart turned the space into a theatre at night, focusing on the work of young playwrights. La MaMa has evolved during its fifty-year history into a world-renowned cultural institution. Background Stewart started La MaMa as a theatre dedicated to the playwright and primarily producing new plays, including works by Paul Foster, Jean-Claude van Itallie, Lanford Wilson, Sam Shepard, Adrienne Kennedy, Harvey Fierstein, and Rochelle Owens. La MaMa also became an international ambassador for Off-Off-Broadway theatre by touring downtown theatre abroad during the 1960s.Bottoms, Steven J. ''Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement''. Ann Arbor: Univers ...
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In Residence
Artist-in-residence, or artist residencies, encompass a wide spectrum of artistic programs which involve a collaboration between artists and hosting organisations, institutions, or communities. They are programs which provide artists with space and resources to support their artistic practice. Contemporary artist residencies are becoming increasingly thematic, with artists working together with their host in pursuit of a specific outcome related to a particular theme. Definitions History Artist groups resembling artist residencies can be traced back to at least 16th century Europe, when art academies began to emerge. In 1563 Duke of Florence Cosimo Medici and Tuscan painter Giorgio Vasari co-founded the Accademia del Disegno, which may be considered the first academy of arts. As the first iteration of an art academy, the Accademia del Disegno was the first institution to promote the idea that artists may benefit from a localised site dedicated to the advancement of their pract ...
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Wilford Leach
Carson Wilford Leach (August 26, 1929 – June 18, 1988) was a Tony Award-winning American theatre director, set designer, film director, screenwriter, and professor. Biography Leach was born in Petersburg, Virginia,Credits
FilmReference.com, accessed May 19, 2009.
on August 26, 1929. A performance of '' Pygmalion'' he saw as a teenager inspired him to work in theatre. After graduating from the in 1953, Leach went on to earn both a master's degree and a doctorate from the



Robert Moffat Palmer
Robert Moffat (variously "Moffatt" and "Moffett") Palmer (b. June 2, 1915, Syracuse, New York; d. July 3, 2010, Ithaca, New York) was an American composer, pianist and educator. He composed more than 90 works,''Ithaca Journal'' obituary, July 5–7, 2010 including two symphonies, ''Nabuchodonosor'' (an oratorio), a piano concerto, four string quartets, three piano sonatas and numerous works for chamber ensembles.Austin, 1986, p. 465 Biography Education Born in Syracuse, New York, Palmer began, at age 12, piano studies with his mother.Ewen, p. 488 He attended Syracuse's Central High School, undertaking pre-college studies in piano and additional study of violin and music theory at the Syracuse Music School Settlement. Awarded a piano scholarship to the Eastman School of Music, he soon became a composition major. At Eastman, he studied with Howard Hanson and Bernard Rogers, earning bachelor's (1938) and master's (1940) degrees in composition. He undertook additional studies with ...
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Burrill Phillips
Leroy Burrill Phillips (November 9, 1907 – June 22, 1988) was an American composer, teacher, and pianist. Biography Phillips was born in Omaha, Nebraska. He studied at the College of Music at the University of Denver with Edwin Stringham and at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, with Howard Hanson and Bernard Rogers. On September 17, 1928, he married Alberta Corinne Mayfield (1907–1979) who wrote many of his librettos. In 1931 the couple had a daughter who, under the stage name Ann Todd, became a child actress in films. She continued acting into her early twenties, but left the entertainment industry in 1954 and died in 2020. A second child, son Stephen, was born in 1937. He died in 1986, two years before his father. Phillips's first important work was ''Selections from McGuffey's Reader'', for orchestra, based on poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Immediately successful, the work established his reputation as a composer with ...
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Musical Notation
Music notation or musical notation is any system used to visually represent aurally perceived music played with instruments or sung by the human voice through the use of written, printed, or otherwise-produced symbols, including notation for durations of absence of sound such as rests. The types and methods of notation have varied between cultures and throughout history, and much information about ancient music notation is fragmentary. Even in the same time period, such as in the 2010s, different styles of music and different cultures use different music notation methods; for example, for professional classical music performers, sheet music using staves and noteheads is the most common way of notating music, but for professional country music session musicians, the Nashville Number System is the main method. The symbols used include ancient symbols and modern symbols made upon any media such as symbols cut into stone, made in clay tablets, made using a pen on papyrus or ...
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Williams Mix
''Williams Mix'' (1951–1953) is a 4'15" musique concrete composition by John Cage for eight simultaneously played independent quarter-inch magnetic tapes. The first octophonic music, the piece was created by Cage with the assistance of Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, and David Tudor, using many tape sound sources and a paper score he created for the construction. "Presignifying the development of algorithmic composition, granular synthesis and sound diffusion," it was the third of five pieces completed in the ''Project for Music for Magnetic Tape'' (1951–1954), funded by dedicatee architect Paul Williams Jr.Hall, Patricia and Sallis, Friedemann (2004). ''A Handbook to Twentieth-Century Musical Sketches'', p. 189. . The material, recorded by Louis and Bebe Barron, was organized in six categories: city, country, electronic, manually produced, wind, and "small" sounds; "subjected...to '' I Ching'' manipulations, producing constant jumps from one sound to another or buzzing, scramb ...
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Earle Brown
Earle Brown (December 26, 1926 – July 2, 2002) was an American composer who established his own formal and notational systems. Brown was the creator of "open form," a style of musical construction that has influenced many composers since—notably the downtown New York scene of the 1980s (see John Zorn) and generations of younger composers. Among his most famous works are ''December 1952'', an entirely graphic score, and the open form pieces ''Available Forms I & II'', ''Centering'', and ''Cross Sections and Color Fields''. He was awarded a Foundation for Contemporary Arts John Cage Award (1998). Life Brown was born in Lunenburg, Massachusetts, and first devoted himself to playing jazz. He initially considered a career in engineering, and enrolled for engineering and mathematics at Northeastern University (1944–45). He enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1945. However, the war ended while he was still in basic training, and he was assigned to the base band at Randolph Fi ...
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Mills College
Mills College at Northeastern University is a private college in Oakland, California and part of Northeastern University's global university system. Mills College was founded as the Young Ladies Seminary in 1852 in Benicia, California; it was relocated to Oakland in 1871 and became the first women's college west of the Rockies. In 2022, it merged with Northeastern University following several years of severe financial difficulties. History Mills College was initially founded as the Young Ladies Seminary in the city of Benicia in 1852 under the leadership of Mary Atkins, a graduate of Oberlin College. In 1865, Susan Tolman Mills, a graduate of Mount Holyoke College (then Mount Holyoke Female Seminary), and her husband, Cyrus Mills, bought the Young Ladies Seminary renaming it Mills Seminary. In 1871, the school was moved to its current location in Oakland, California. The school was incorporated in 1877 and was officially renamed Mills College in 1885. In 1890, after se ...
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