The Grammy winning Chestnut Brass Company is a Philadelphia brass quintet founded in 1977 to advance the skill and artistry of musical performance, as well as the knowledge and understanding of musical history with particular regard to brass instruments. By presenting performances featuring brass music of all eras, the ensemble strives to reflect the rich tradition and spirit of brass instruments. The quintet has earned international acclaim for performances on modern and historical brass instruments. Since beginning as a street band in Philadelphia in 1977, they have performed in North and South America, Europe, the Caribbean, and Asia.
The chamber ensemble is active in the performance and commissioning of contemporary music, and has introduced numerous new works to audiences around the country. Composers who have written works for the Chestnut Brass Company, or have been commissioned by the Chestnut Brass Company, include Jan Krzywicki, Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Richard Wernick, Lois V. Vierk, Peter Schickele, George Hitt, Eric Stokes, Theodore Antoniou, Lawrence Siegel, and Paul Basler. The CBC has received awards for commissioning and performance from the NEA, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Pew Charitable Trust, the Presser Foundation, Chamber Music America and Meet the Composer.
Interviews and recitals of the Chestnut Brass Company have been featured on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, Fresh Air, Radiotimes and Performance Today programs; Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Bavarian State Radio and numerous radio and television stations across the United States. The Chestnut Brass Company has been featured in performance at the Juilliard School, the Chautauqua Institute, the Ambassador Series of Los Angeles, the Boston Museum of Art, Merkin Concert Hall, Alice Tully Hall and the Yale Collection of Instruments. As curators of the sounds of ancient and antique brasses, the Chestnut Brass Company have been at the forefront of the period-instrument revival with performances on cornetti, sackbuts, keyed bugles and saxhorns. The quintet continues to collect antique brass instruments and to research the literature and performance practice of these instruments.
Their educational program Hot Air: the Story of Brass Instruments was one of three programs selected by the Kennedy Center for the Arts for a live web broadcast. The program was renewed for inclusion on the Kennedy Center website. The CBC can be heard on the Sony, Newport Classic, Crystal and Musical Heritage/Musicmasters labels. Selections from CBC recordings have been included on several documentaries ranging from A House Divided for PBS, to Pinehurst, the History of Golf.
A musical ensemble, also known as a music group or musical group, is a group of people who perform instrumental or vocal music, with the ensemble typically known by a distinct name. Some music ensembles consist solely of instrumentalists, such as the jazz quartet or the orchestra. Other music ensembles consist solely of singers, such as choirs and doo wop groups. In both popular music and classical music, there are ensembles in which both instrumentalists and singers perform, such as the rock band or the Baroque chamber group for basso continuo and one or more singers. In classical music, trios or quartets either blend the sounds of musical instrument families or group together instruments from the same instrument family, such as string ensembles or wind ensembles. Some ensembles blend the sounds of a variety of instrument families, such as the orchestra, which uses a string section, brass instruments, woodwinds and percussion instruments, or the concert band, which uses brass, woodwinds and percussion.
Shulamit Ran is an Israeli-American composer. She moved from Israel to New York City at 14, as a scholarship student at the Mannes College of Music. Her Symphony (1990) won her the Pulitzer Prize for Music. In this regard, she was the second woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, the first being Ellen Taaffe Zwilich in 1983. Ran was a professor of music composition at the University of Chicago from 1973 to 2015. She has performed as a pianist in Israel, Europe and the U.S., and her compositional works have been performed worldwide by a wide array of orchestras and chamber groups.
The Canadian Brass is a Canadian brass quintet formed in 1970 in Toronto, Ontario, by Charles Daellenbach (tuba) and Gene Watts (trombone), with horn player Graeme Page and trumpeters Stuart Laughton and Bill Phillips completing the quintet. As of 2018, Daellenbach is the sole original member in the group, with the other members being trumpeters Caleb Hudson and Brandon Ridenour, hornist Jeff Nelsen, and trombonist Achilles Liarmakopoulos.
A brass quintet is a five-piece musical ensemble composed of brass instruments. The instrumentation for a brass quintet typically includes two trumpets or cornets, one French horn, one trombone or euphonium/baritone horn, and one tuba or bass trombone. Musicians in a brass quintet may often play multiple instruments. Trumpet players for instance may double on piccolo trumpets and flugelhorns. There can be variation in instrumentation depending on the type of quintet. In some quintets, the horn is replaced by an additional trombone. Euphonium may also be substituted for the trombone part. While the tuba is considered a standard, the range and style of many pieces lend themselves to being played with bass trombone as the lowest-pitched instrument. Additionally, some pieces call for the use of percussion instruments, particularly the snare drum, tambourine, or timpani.
Victor Vladímirovich Ewald, was a Russian engineer, architect, and composer of music, mainly for conical brass instruments.
When the American Brass Quintet gave its first public performance on December 11, 1960, brass chamber music was still relatively young to concert audiences. The New York Brass Quintet is regarded as the first brass quintet in the United States, having formed in 1954. Other groups soon followed like the Chicago Brass Quintet, formed in 1963. To delineate itself from these other two groundbreaking ensembles American Brass Quintet dedicated itself to "music originally written for brass," and substituted a bass trombone for the conventional tuba voice. That debut concert for them in 1960 marked the beginning of an international career for the ensemble that includes performances in Europe, Central and South America, the Middle East, Asia, Australia and all fifty of the United States; a discography now numbering fifty-one recordings; the premieres of over one hundred new brass works, and the inspiration to a whole new generation of brass quintets worldwide. ABQ commissions by Samuel Adler, Bruce Adolphe, Daniel Asia, Jan Bach, Robert Beaser, William Bolcom, Elliott Carter, Billy Childs, Robert Dennis, Jacob Druckman, Eric Ewazen, Anthony Plog, Huang Ruo, David Sampson, Gunther Schuller, William Schuman, Ralph Shapey, Joan Tower, Melinda Wagner, and Charles Whittenberg are considered among the most significant contributions to the brass quintet repertoire. In the past fifteen years alone, the ABQ has released recordings of over twenty-five major new brass quintets. The presentation of challenging contemporary brass music alongside earlier eras carefully edited by ABQ members for modern performance, has become a trademark of ABQ programming, and has helped establish the American Brass Quintet as the leader in the field of serious brass chamber music today.
David Sartor is an American composer and conductor of symphonic, chamber, and choral music. He is on the music faculties of Belmont University, Cumberland University and Trevecca Nazarene University, and is the founder and music director of the Parthenon Chamber Orchestra.
Eric Ewazen is an American composer and teacher.
Bernard Rands is a British-American contemporary classical music composer. He studied music and English literature at the University of Wales, Bangor, and composition with Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna in Darmstadt, Germany, and with Luigi Dallapiccola and Luciano Berio in Milan, Italy. He held residencies at Princeton University, the University of Illinois, and the University of York before emigrating to the United States in 1975; he became a U.S. citizen in 1983. In 1984, Rands's Canti del Sole, premiered by Paul Sperry, Zubin Mehta, and the New York Philharmonic, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. He has since taught at the University of California, San Diego, the Juilliard School, Yale University, and Boston University. From 1988 to 2005 he taught at Harvard University, where he is Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music Emeritus. For his notable students, See: List of music students by teacher: R to S#Bernard Rands.
Allan Gilliland is a contemporary Canadian composer.
The Schulich School of Music is one of the constituent faculties of McGill University in Montréal, Canada. The faculty was named after benefactor Seymour Schulich.
James Michael "Jim" Parker is a BAFTA-winning British composer.
Robert Charles Suderburg was an American composer, conductor, and pianist.
Šarūnas Nakas is a Lithuanian composer, essayist, curator, filmmaker and broadcaster.
Marcel Wengler is a Luxembourg composer and conductor. From 1972–1997, he headed the Conservatoire de Luxembourg. Since 2000, he has been director of the Luxembourg Music Information Centre. His compositions include symphonies, concertos, chamber music and musicals.
The Chamber Wind Music of Jack Cooper is the first classical/new music studio recording featuring numerous performing artists recording chamber wind music of the composer on the Centaur Records label.
Valerie Coleman is an American composer and flutist as well as the creator of the wind quintet, Imani Winds. Coleman is a distinguished artist of the century who was named Performance Today's 2020 Classical Woman of the year and was listed as “one of the Top 35 Women Composers” in the Washington Post. In the year 2019, Valerie Coleman composed a piece titled Umoja, Anthem for Unity which was performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra. This achievement was a very special one because it was the first time that a living African-American woman composer was commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Joseph Francis Petric is a Canadian concert accordionist, historian, author, and teacher.
Michael Kibbe is an American contemporary classical music composer born in San Diego, California. He has composed over 240 concert works and created numerous arrangements. His writing covers many musical styles, encompassing tonal, modal and non-diatonic languages. His style often incorporates modern structures but is still accessible to the popular classical listener. Some of his works come right of the Romantic Era yet his style in some writings has been compared to Prokofiev. There are influences of American composer Gershwin in the Serenade Number 2 for two clarinets that seem at once blues, jazz and classical. His music can often reflect themes that bring to mind different cultures.
Jerzy Sapieyevski, is a Polish-born pianist, composer and conductor who settled in the United States in 1967.
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