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Chamber Music Conference And Composers' Forum Of The East
The Chamber Music Conference and Composers' Forum of the East (CMC) is a summer conference that brings together amateur musicians, professional faculty, and composers-in-residence to study and play chamber music. The CMC was founded in 1946, and most of its summer sessions have been held at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont. After the 2019 session, the CMC announced its relocation to the campus of Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, to begin with its 75th anniversary session in 2022. There was a limited 2021 program at Bennington College. (The 2020 in-person program was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.) History The conference was founded in 1946 as a program of Middlebury College. Alan Carter, founder and director, was a professor of music at Middlebury. He was also the founder and music director of the Vermont Symphony Orchestra (then the Vermont State Symphony Orchestra). Conference program Throughout the conference week, participants attend coaching session ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bennington College
Bennington College is a private liberal arts college in Bennington, Vermont. Founded in 1932 as a women's college, it became co-educational in 1969. It claims to be the first college to include visual and performing arts as an equal partner in the liberal arts curriculum. It is accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education. History 1920s The planning for the establishment of Bennington College began in 1924 and took nine years to be realized. While many people were involved, the four central figures in the founding of Bennington were Vincent Ravi Booth, Mr. and Mrs. Hall Park McCullough, and William Heard Kilpatrick. A Women's Committee, headed by Mrs. Hall Park McCullough, organized the Colony Club Meeting in 1924, which brought together some 500 civic leaders and educators from across the country. As a result of the Colony Club Meeting, a charter was secured and a board of trustees formed for Bennington College. One of the trustees, John Dewey, helped shape ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Otto Luening
Otto Clarence Luening (June 15, 1900 – September 2, 1996) was a German-American composer and conductor, and an early pioneer of tape music and electronic music. Luening was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to German parents, Eugene, a conductor and composer, and Emma ( nee Jacobs), an amateur singer. When he was 12, his family moved to Munich, where he studied music at the State Academy of Music. At age 17, he moved to Switzerland and attended the Municipal Conservatory of Music in Zurich and University of Zurich, where he studied with Ferruccio Busoni and Philipp Jarnach, and was also an actor and stage manager for James Joyce's English Players Company. He returned to the United States in 1924, and appeared mainly as a conductor of operas, in Chicago and the Eastman School of Music. His conducting premieres included Virgil Thomson's ''The Mother of Us All'', Gian Carlo Menotti's ''The Medium'', and his own ''Evangeline''. Luening's tape music, including ''A Poem in Cycle ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chen Yi (composer)
Chen Yi () (born April 4, 1953) is a Chinese-American violinist and composer of contemporary classical music. She was the first Chinese woman to receive a Master of Arts (M.A.) in music composition from the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. Chen was a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Music for her composition Si Ji (Four Seasons), and has received awards from the Koussevistky Music Foundation and American Academy of Arts and Letters (Lieberson Award), as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2010, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from The New School and in 2012, she was awarded the Brock Commission from the American Choral Directors Association. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2019. Early life Chen Yi and her siblings began studying classical music at age three as their parents were lovers of the genre. She began learning on piano and at age 4 was introduced to violin. Sh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Charles Wuorinen
Charles Peter Wuorinen (; June 9, 1938 – March 11, 2020) was an American composer of contemporary classical music based in New York City. He performed his works and other 20th-century music as pianist and conductor. He composed more than 270 works, including orchestral music, chamber music, solo instrumental and vocal works, and operas such as ''Brokeback Mountain''. Salman Rushdie and Annie Proulx have collaborated with him. Wuorinen's work has been called serialist, but he came to disparage that term as meaningless. His '' Time's Encomium'', his only purely electronic piece, received the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Wuorinen also taught at several institutions, including Columbia University and Manhattan School of Music. Life and career Background Wuorinen was born on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. His father, John H. Wuorinen, the chair of the history department at Columbia University, was a noted scholar of Scandinavian affairs, who also worked ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edgard Varèse
Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse (; also spelled Edgar; December 22, 1883 – November 6, 1965) was a French-born composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States. Varèse's music emphasizes timbre and rhythm; he coined the term "organized sound" in reference to his own musical aesthetic. Varèse's conception of music reflected his vision of "sound as living matter" and of "musical space as open rather than bounded". He conceived the elements of his music in terms of "Sound mass, sound-masses", likening their organization to the natural phenomenon of crystallization. Varèse thought that "to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called Noise in music, noise", and he posed the question, "what is music but organized noises?" Although his complete surviving works only last about three hours, he has been recognised as an influence by several major composers of the late 20th century. Varèse saw potential in using electronic media ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vladimir Ussachevsky
Vladimir Alexeevich Ussachevsky (November 3, 1911 in Hailar, China – January 2, 1990 in New York, New York) was a composer, particularly known for his work in electronic music. Biography Vladimir Ussachevsky was born in the Hailar District of China, in modern-day Inner Mongolia to an Imperial Russian Army officer assigned to protect Trans-Siberian Railway interests. He emigrated to the United States in 1930 and studied music at Pomona College in Claremont, California (B.A., 1935), as well as at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York (M.M., 1936, Ph.D., 1939). Ussachevsky's early, neo-Romantic works were composed for traditional instruments, but in 1951 he began composing electronic music.Salzman, Eric"Vladimir Ussachevsky: Electronic And Acoustic Works 1957-1972" Liner notes. New World Records. He served as president of the American Composers Alliance from 1968 to 1970 and was an advisory member of the CRI record label, which released recordings of a number of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joan Tower
Joan Tower (born September 6, 1938)http://www.schirmer.com/default.aspx?TabId=2419&State_2872=2&ComposerId_2872=1605 Biography on Schirmer is a Grammy-winning contemporary American composer, concert pianist and conductor. Lauded by ''The New Yorker'' as "one of the most successful woman composers of all time", her bold and energetic compositions have been performed in concert halls around the world. After gaining recognition for her first orchestral composition, '' Sequoia'' (1981), a tone poem which structurally depicts a giant tree from trunk to needles, she has gone on to compose a variety of instrumental works including '' Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman'', which is something of a response to Aaron Copland's '' Fanfare for the Common Man'', the ''Island Prelude'', five string quartets, and an assortment of other tone poems. Tower was pianist and founding member of the Naumburg Award-winning Da Capo Chamber Players, which commissioned and premiered many of her early works ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Virgil Thomson
Virgil Thomson (November 25, 1896 – September 30, 1989) was an American composer and critic. He was instrumental in the development of the "American Sound" in classical music. He has been described as a modernist, a neoromantic, a neoclassicist, and a composer of "an Olympian blend of humanity and detachment" whose "expressive voice was always carefully muted" until his late opera ''Lord Byron'' which, in contrast to all his previous work, exhibited an emotional content that rises to "moments of real passion". Biography Early years Thomson was born in Kansas City, Missouri. As a child he befriended Alice Smith, great-granddaughter of Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter-day Saint movement. During his youth he often played the organ in Grace Church, (now Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral), as his piano teacher was the church's organist. After World War I, he entered Harvard University thanks to a loan from Dr. Fred M. Smith, the president of the Reorganized Church of Jesus ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Theodore Strongin
Theodore Strongin (December 10, 1918 – November 24, 1998) was an American music critic, composer, flautist, and entomologist. Life and career Born in New York City, Strongin grew up in Darien, Connecticut. He studied both music and biology at Harvard University and Bard College. He specialized in the field of entomology and after graduating from college worked for the American Museum of Natural History where he identified multiple species of rare beetles. From 1942 to 1946 he served in the United States Army. After the end of World War II he pursued studies in the flute and music composition at the Juilliard School and the Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. During his time at Columbia in the 1950s, several of his compositions were premiered in New York, including his ''Suite for Unaccompanied Cello'' and an ''Oboe Quintet''. From 1963 to 1972 he wrote music criticism for '' The New York Times'' where he was a champion of new music. He died of leukemia at St. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Halsey Stevens
Halsey Stevens (December 3, 1908 – January 20, 1989) was a music professor, biographer, and composer of American music. Life Halsey Stevens was born in Scott, New York and educated at Syracuse University and the University of California, Berkeley. He studied with William Berwald at Syracuse and with the composer Ernest Bloch at Berkeley. Stevens served as a faculty member at Syracuse University (1935–1937), Dakota Wesleyan University (1937–1941), Bradley University (1941–1946), the University of Redlands (1946), and then at the University of Southern California from 1946 until his retirement in 1976. His notable students there included Charles Lloyd, Houston Bright, Benjamin Lees, Morten Lauridsen, and Williametta Spencer. He died in a Long Beach, California, medical facility on January 20, 1989, after a long battle with Parkinson's disease. Music His recorded music includes, in chronological order of composition: * "Go, Lovely Rose," for mixed chorus (S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Allen Shawn
Allen Evan Shawn (born August 27, 1948)''Vermont, Marriage Records, 1909-2008'' is an American composer, pianist, educator, and author who lives in Vermont. His music Shawn began composing at the age of ten, but dates his mature work from 1977. He has written a dozen orchestral works, including a symphony, two piano concertos, a cello concerto, and a violin concerto; three chamber operas; five piano sonatas and many additional works for piano; and a large catalogue of chamber music, songs and choral music. Among Shawn's available recordings are several of chamber music, four CDs of piano music, including a CD devoted to his piano work by German pianist Julia Bartha, a ''Piano Concerto'' performed by Ursula Oppens with the Albany Symphony Orchestra under the direction of David Alan Miller, and the chamber opera ''The Music Teacher'', with a libretto by his brother, Wallace Shawn. As author Shawn is the author of a book about Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, ''Arnold Schoenber ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frederic Rzewski
Frederic Anthony Rzewski ( ; April 13, 1938 – June 26, 2021) was an American composer and pianist, considered to be one of the most important American composer-pianists of his time. His major compositions, which often incorporate social and political themes, include the minimalist ''Coming Together'' and the variation set ''The People United Will Never Be Defeated!'', which has been called "a modern classic". Early life and education Rzewski was born on April 13, 1938, in Westfield, Massachusetts, to parents of Polish and Jewish descent, and raised Catholic. He began playing piano at age 5 and attended Phillips Academy, Harvard, and Princeton, where his teachers included Randall Thompson, Roger Sessions, Walter Piston, and Milton Babbitt. In 1960, he went to Italy on a Fulbright grant, a trip which was formative in his future musical development. In addition to studying with Luigi Dallapiccola in Florence on a Fulbright scholarship he began a career as a performer of n ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
