The Da Capo Chamber Players are an American contemporary music "Pierrot ensemble," founded in 1970. Winners of the Naumburg Award in 1973, its founding members included composer/pianist Joan Tower, violinist Joel Lester (former dean of Mannes College of Music), and flutist Patricia Spencer. The current members are Curtis Macomber, violin; Chris Gross, cello; Steve Beck, piano; Patricia Spencer, flute; and Meighan Stoops, clarinet.
Da Capo has been in residence at Bard College since 1982, and since 2006 have been the ensemble-in-residence with the Bard Conservatory. The ensemble has released recordings on labels such as Bridge, New World, CRI, and Innova.
Recordings
Dreamtigers: Chamber Music by Judith Shatin (2004)
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.
Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds "Pierrot lunaire", commonly known simply as Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21, is a melodrama by Arnold Schoenberg. It is a setting of 21 selected poems from Albert Giraud's cycle of the same name as translated into German by Otto Erich Hartleben. The work is written for reciter who delivers the poems in the sprechstimme style accompanied by a small instrumental ensemble. Schoenberg had previously used a combination of spoken text with instrumental accompaniment, called "melodrama", in the summer-wind narrative of the Gurre-Lieder, which was a fashionable musical style popular at the end of the nineteenth century. Though the music is atonal, it does not employ Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, which he did not use until 1921.
Joan Tower 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, including her widely performed Petroushskates.
Earle Brown 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 and generations of younger composers.
Melinda Jane Wagner is a US composer, and winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize in music. Her undergraduate degree is from Hamilton College. She received her graduates degrees from University of Chicago and University of Pennsylvania. She also served as Composer-in-Residence at the University of Texas (Austin) and at the 'Bravo!' Vail Valley Music Festival. Some of her teachers included Richard Wernick, George Crumb, Shulamit Ran, and Jay Reise.
George Tsontakis is an American composer and conductor.
Eighth Blackbird is an American contemporary music sextet based in Chicago, composed of flute, clarinet, piano, percussion, violin, and cello. Their name derives from the eighth stanza of Wallace Stevens' poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.
The Bard College Conservatory of Music is part of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Founded in 2005, the program is unique among music conservatories in the United States in that all undergraduate students are required to participate in a five-year dual-degree program, in which both a B.M. in music and a B.A. in a subject other than music are obtained. Many of the Conservatory's faculty also teach at other conservatories such as the Juilliard School and the Curtis Institute.
The UT New Music Ensemble is a contemporary chamber music group based at the University of Texas at Austin Butler School of Music. The group has been led by Professor Dan Welcher since 1979.
The University of Chicago Contemporary Chamber Players is an American ensemble dedicated to the performance of contemporary classical music. It was founded in Chicago in 1964 by the American composer Ralph Shapey. Its artistic director is the composer Shulamit Ran.
Alexander Mordukhovich, is a composer and musician from Russia.
A Pierrot ensemble is a musical ensemble comprising flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano, frequently augmented by the addition of a singer or percussionist, and/or by the performers doubling on other woodwind/stringed/keyboard instruments. This ensemble is named after 20th-century composer Arnold Schoenberg’s seminal work Pierrot Lunaire, which includes the quintet of instruments above with a narrator.
Dmitri Yuryevich Capyrin is a Russian composer of contemporary classical music. He graduated from Lviv Conservatory in 1984. He lives in Moscow and works as a freelance composer. His music "successfully combines a variety [of] techniques, often using literary sources and motifs in his works." He won the second prize in the 1994 ICONS competition in Turin and received a scholarship in 1995 from the Berlin Akademie der Künst. In 2010 he was the finalist of the YouTube Online Composers Competition. His compositions have been performed by "numerous prominent ensembles and soloists, and has also been featured in a variety of concert and festival venues, including the Moscow Autumn (1999), the Paris Presences (1993), Warsaw Autumn (2005) and the Music Biennale Zagreb ." He has become "one of the most prominent composers of the younger generation of Russians." His style combines modal scales procedures with new tonal and atonal idioms. He prefers polyphonic texture and dense stratification of flexible melodic voices. At the same time he widely uses isolated tones and brief solo phrases surrounded with silence which resembles quasi-Webernian pointillism. His work list includes pieces of various genres from opera, symphonies and one movement poems for full and chamber orchestras, concertos for harp and oboe with orchestra, pieces for various chamber ensembles, duo and solo works. Among the performers of his music there are Yvar Mikhashoff, Claude Delangle, Vladimir Jurowski, Vincent Kozlovsky, Marc Sieffert, Valery Popov, Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, State Academic Symphony Orchestra of the Russian Federation, Russian National Orchestra, Lviv National Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, National Academic Symphonic Band of Ukraine, Kyiv Sinfonietta, Da Capo Chamber Players.
The conductorless orchestra, sometimes referred to as a self-conducted orchestra or unconducted orchestra, is an instrumental ensemble that functions as an orchestra but is not led or directed by a conductor. Most conductorless orchestras are smaller in size, and generally perform chamber orchestra repertoire. Several conductorless orchestras are made up of only strings and focus primarily on string orchestra repertoire. Conductorless orchestras generally come from the classical music tradition and perform standard repertoire, but many conductorless orchestras promote or specialise in contemporary classical music repertoire. Many contemporary classical music ensembles also regularly perform without a conductor.
Dylan Mattingly is an American composer from Berkeley, California.
Roger Briggs is an American composer, conductor, pianist, and educator.
David Noon is a contemporary classical composer and educator. He has written over 200 works from opera to chamber music. Noon's composition teachers have included Karl Kohn, Darius Milhaud, Charles Jones, Yehudi Wyner, Mario Davidovsky, and Wlodzimierz Kotonski. He was a distinguished member of the faculty at the Manhattan School of Music for 30 years.
David T. Little is an American composer and drummer known for his orchestral and operatic works, most notably his opera Dog Days which was named a standout opera of recent decades by The New York Times. He is the artistic director of Newspeak, an eight-piece amplified ensemble that explores the boundaries between rock and classical music, and is a member of the composition faculty at Mannes School of Music.
Petroushskates is a chamber music composition by the American composer Joan Tower. The work was composed in 1980 for the tenth anniversary of the Da Capo Chamber Players. It is scored for a Pierrot ensemble: flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano.
Harold Rosenbaum is an American conductor and musician. He is the artistic director and conductor of the New York Virtuoso Singers and the Canticum Novum Singers. The New York Virtuoso Singers appear on 48 albums on labels including Naxos Records and Sony Classical. He has collaborated extensively with many ensembles including the New York Philharmonic, Juilliard Orchestra, American Symphony Orchestra, Bang on a Can, Mark Morris Dance Group, Orchestra of Saint Luke's, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Riverside Symphony, and Brooklyn Philharmonic.
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