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Byron Adams (born 1955) is an American composer, conductor, and musicologist.
Adams received his Bachelor of Music degree from Jacksonville University, his Master of Music degree from the University of Southern California, and his Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Cornell University.[ citation needed ]
Adams is a composer of tonal music who employs individual adaptations of traditional techniques. His music has been performed at the 26th Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, [1] Bargemusic, [2] the Da Camera Society of Los Angeles, [3] and the Conservatoire Américain in Fontainebleau, France (where he taught in the summer of 1992), [4] as well as by such ensembles as Cantus, [5] the West Virginia Symphony Orchestra, [6] and the Philharmonia Orchestra. [7]
As a musicologist, Adams specializes in British and French music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. [8] [4] His essays have appeared in multiple journals such as The Musical Quarterly for which he has also served on the editorial board as an associate editor since 2009, [9] and Music & Letters . [10]
In 2007, he was appointed scholar-in-residence and a member of the program committee for the Bard Music Festival, for which he was the editor of Edward Elgar and His World (Princeton, 2007), in addition to giving pre-concert lectures and contributing program notes. [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] Other notable organizations for which he has written programs notes include the Philadelphia Orchestra and the American Symphony Orchestra, among others. [16] [17] [18] In 2013, Adams was appointed one of the series editors for Music in Britain 1600–2000, published by the Boydell Press. [19]
Adams holds the rank of Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Riverside, Department of Music, where he served as department chair from 2002 to 2005. [20] [21] Adams was a guest lecturer at Gresham College, London, in December 2007, while he was a visiting fellow for the Institute of Musical Research, School of Advanced Studies of the University of London. [22]
Recognition of Adams's compositions began early in his career. In 1977, he won the Grand Prize of the Delius Festival Composition Competition. [23] In 1984, he was awarded an ASCAP Raymond Hubbell Award for his compositions, and in 1985 he was the recipient of the inaugural Ralph Vaughan Williams Fellowship. [24] Equally appreciated for his work as a musicologist, Adams was the recipient of the American Musicological Society's Philip Brett Award in 2000 for his essay "The 'Dark Saying' of the Enigma: Homoeroticism and the Elgarian Paradox", published in Nineteenth-Century Music and the book chapter "'No Armpits, Please, We're British': Whitman and English Music, 1884–1936", in Walt Whitman and Modern Music: War, Desire and the Trials of Nationhood, both published that same year. [25]
From 2006-2009 Adams served first as vice president (2006–07) and then as president of the North American British Music Studies Association, where he was later inducted as a lifetime honorary member in 2020. [26] In 2008, the association instituted the Byron Adams Student Travel Grant, a fellowship offering assistance to conference presenters. [27]
In 2010 Adams was named one of Jacksonville University's "Distinguished Dolphins" (a distinguished alumnus award for excellence), one of only 75 to receive this honor since the founding of the university up to that year. [28]
Concerto pour trompette et cordes (1981)
Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet, was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, concertos for violin and cello, and two symphonies. He also composed choral works, including The Dream of Gerontius, chamber music and songs. He was appointed Master of the King's Musick in 1924.
Ralph Vaughan Williams was an English composer. His works include operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces and orchestral compositions including nine symphonies, written over sixty years. Strongly influenced by Tudor music and English folk-song, his output marked a decisive break in British music from its German-dominated style of the 19th century.
David Conte is an American composer who has written over 150 works published by E.C. Schirmer, including six operas, a musical, works for chorus, solo voice, orchestra, chamber music, organ, piano, guitar, and harp. Conte has received commissions from Chanticleer, the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, Harvard University Chorus, the Men’s Glee Clubs of Cornell University and the University of Notre Dame, GALA Choruses from the cities of San Francisco, New York, Boston, Atlanta, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., the Dayton Philharmonic, the Oakland Symphony, the Stockton Symphony, the Atlantic Classical Orchestra, the American Guild of Organists, Sonoma City Opera, and the Gerbode Foundation. He was honored with the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA) Brock Commission in 2007 for his work The Nine Muses, and in 2016 he won the National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS) Art Song Composition Award for his work American Death Ballads.
Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote his Symphony No. 5 in D major between 1938 and 1943. In style it represents a shift away from the violent dissonance of his Fourth Symphony, and a return to the gentler style of the earlier Pastoral Symphony.
Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, also known as the Tallis Fantasia, is a one-movement work for string orchestra by Ralph Vaughan Williams. The theme is by the 16th-century English composer Thomas Tallis. The Fantasia was first performed at Gloucester Cathedral as part of the 1910 Three Choirs Festival, and has entered the orchestral repertoire, with frequent concert performances and recordings by conductors and orchestras of various countries.
A Sea Symphony is an hour-long work for soprano, baritone, chorus and large orchestra written by Ralph Vaughan Williams between 1903 and 1909. The first and longest of his nine symphonies, it was first performed at the Leeds Festival in 1910 with the composer conducting, and its maturity belies the relatively young age – 30 – when he began sketching it. Moreover it is one of the first symphonies in which a chorus is used throughout as an integral part of the texture and it helped set the stage for a new era of symphonic and choral music in Britain during the first half of the 20th century. It was never numbered.
Crown Imperial is an orchestral march by William Walton, commissioned for the coronation of King George VI in Westminster Abbey in 1937. It is in the Pomp and Circumstance tradition, with a brisk opening contrasting with a broad middle section, leading to a resounding conclusion. The work has been heard at subsequent state occasions in the Abbey: the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, the wedding of Prince William in 2011 and the coronation of King Charles III in 2023. It has been recorded in its original orchestral form and in arrangements for organ, military band and brass band.
Ralph Vaughan Williams's Symphony No. 8 in D minor was composed between 1953 and 1955. Sir John Barbirolli, its dedicatee, conducted the Hallé Orchestra in the premiere at the Kings Hall in Manchester, on 2 May 1956. It is the shortest of the composer's nine symphonies, and is mostly buoyant and optimistic in tone.
The Symphony No. 9 in E minor was the last symphony written by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. He composed it during 1956 and 1957, and it was given its premiere performance in London by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent on 2 April 1958, in the composer's eighty-sixth year. The work was received respectfully but, at first, without great enthusiasm. Its reputation has subsequently grown, and the symphony has entered the repertoire, in the concert hall and on record, with the majority of recordings from the 1990s and the 21st century.
Anthony Edward Payne was an English composer, music critic and musicologist. He is best known for his acclaimed completion of Edward Elgar's third symphony, which subsequently gained wide acceptance into Elgar's oeuvre. Apart from opera, his own works include representatives of most traditional genres, and although he made substantial contributions to orchestral and choral repertoire, he is particularly noted for his chamber music. Many of these chamber works were written for his wife, the soprano Jane Manning, and the new music ensemble Jane's Minstrels, which he founded with Manning in 1988. Initially an unrelenting proponent of modernist music, by the 1980s his compositions had embraced aspects of the late romanticism of England, described by his colleague Susan Bradshaw as "modernized nostalgia". His mature style is thus characterised by a highly individualised combination of modernism and English romanticism, as well as numerology, wide-spaced harmonies, specific intervallic characterisations, and the frequent alternation between strict and fluid rhythmic frameworks.
Roderick Gregory Coleman Williams OBE is a British baritone and composer.
Elegiac Ode, Op. 21, is a musical composition by British composer Charles Villiers Stanford (1852–1924) written and first performed in 1884. It is a four-movement work scored for baritone and soprano soloists, chorus and orchestra, Stanford's composition is a setting of Walt Whitman's 1865 elegy, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", mourning the death of American president Abraham Lincoln. According to musicologist Jack Sullivan, Stanford's Elegiac Ode likely had reached a wider audience during Whitman's lifetime than his poems.
This is a summary of 1948 in music in the United Kingdom.
Ralph Vaughan Williams composed his setting of the Magnificat or Song of Mary, one of the three New Testament canticles, in 1932. It is scored for contralto soloist, women's chorus, and an orchestra consisting of two flutes, two oboes, cor anglais, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, triangle, cymbals, bass drum, tambourine, Indian drum, glockenspiel, celesta, harp, organ, and strings.
This is a summary of 1907 in music in the United Kingdom.
This is a summary of 1905 in music in the United Kingdom.
This is a summary of 1904 in music in the United Kingdom.
This is a summary of 1901 in music in the United Kingdom.
The Lark Ascending is a short, single-movement work by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, inspired by the 1881 poem of the same name by the English writer George Meredith. It was originally for violin and piano, completed in 1914, but not performed until 1920. The composer reworked it for solo violin and orchestra after the First World War. This version, in which the work is chiefly known, was first performed in 1921. It is subtitled "A Romance", a term that Vaughan Williams favoured for contemplative slow music.