Eric Sawyer | |
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Born | |
Occupation | composer |
Years active | 1985–present |
Website | http://www.ericsawyer.net/ |
Eric W. Sawyer (born June 2, 1962 in Brookhaven, New York) is an American orchestral composer, pianist and professor of music at Amherst College. He has studied as an undergraduate at Harvard College, where he was selected as a Harvard Junior Fellow. He undertook graduate studies at both Columbia University and the University of California, Davis (where he completed his doctorate in 1994). [1] Before taking up the position at Amherst, Sawyer spent four years as Chair of Composition and Theory at the Longy School of Music. [2]
Sawyer has written a number of pieces that have received multiple public performances. His debut was in 1985 with Three Pieces for Orchestra, performed by the Harvard Chamber Orchestra, and was described at the time as an "auspicious beginning". [3] Later pieces have included "String Quartet No. 2" (premiered at the Longy School of Music's "SeptemberFest" in 1999); [4] [5] "Violin Sonata" (which included Sawyer on piano); [6] "The Humble Heart", a cantata built around texts by American Shakers, which debuted in 2006; [7] and "Three for Trio". The 2001 Laurel Trio performance of Three for Trio was well received, being described as "the work of a person who is entirely at ease with traditional tonality stretched to its limits." [8] Sawyer's first CD of his work - Eric Sawyer: String Works - was released under the Albany Records label in 2005 and featured four of his compositions. [9] Sawyer's piano trio “Lincoln’s Two Americas” was one of three winners in the Ravinia Festival competition for Lincoln-themed chamber works to be performed as part of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial celebration in 2009. [10]
Along with librettist and University of California, Berkeley English lecturer John Shoptaw, Sawyer has composed an opera based upon a play set in Ford's Theatre the night United States President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. [11] The play, Our American Cousin , by playwright Tom Taylor, is a farce, while the opera Our American Cousin contains the play, imagined intrigue among the actors and actresses, and production staff of the play, and historical information about the Abraham Lincoln assassination. [12] [13]
The opera had its staged premiere in Northampton, Massachusetts in June, 2008. At this performance, reviewer David Perkins noted:
A concert version of the opera was performed in 2007, and isolated works had been performed prior to that date. "Hawk's Aria" was performed in 1997, [6] and "Laura Keene's aria" was performed in 1993. (At the 1993 performance, reviewer Robert Commanday noted that at this early performance the music was "appealing and finely written" but found the text to be "too wordy"). [15] The Boston Modern Orchestra Project has recorded the opera, Our American Cousin on the BMOP/sound label. Sawyer composed a second opera, The Garden of Martyrs , which premiered on September 20, 2013 in Northampton, Massachusetts. [16] [17] The Garden of Martyrs was a prize winner in competition for “The American Prize.” a national award in opera composition. [18]
The Scarlet Professor is Sawyer's latest opera, based upon a true story of shame and scandal from 1960: a renowned English professor, Newton Arvin, who was arrested and disgraced for possessing gay magazines and materials. [19] The opera received its premiere on September 15, 2017, at Smith College, the same campus where the events took place. Reviewer Marvin J Ward observed that: “…composer Eric Sawyer has a penchant for choosing historical events, especially local ones, as the subjects of his operas. This is the third that I have seen, each more polished and refined than its predecessor, with The Scarlet Professor scoring a 10/10 in my book." [20] The Scarlet Professor won the 2019 American Prize in opera composition. [21]
Howard Frazin is a composer based in Somerville, Massachusetts. His works are published by Edition Peters and he has served as president of Composers in Red Sneakers. He served on the faculty of the Longy School of Music and has taught at New England Conservatory, Northeastern University, and Roxbury Latin School.
Longy School of Music of Bard College is a private music school in Cambridge, Massachusetts associated with Bard College. Founded in 1915 as the Longy School of Music, it was one of the four independent degree-granting music schools in the Boston region along with the New England Conservatory, Berklee College of Music, and Boston Conservatory. In 2012, the institution merged with Bard College to become Longy School of Music of Bard College. As of the 2018–19 academic year, the conservatory has 300 students in its degree programs from 35 states and 23 countries.
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The Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) is a professional orchestra in Boston, Massachusetts, United States.
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Our American Cousin is a 2008 opera in three acts by American composer Eric Sawyer with libretto by poet John Shoptaw. The opera depicts the assassination of Abraham Lincoln from the standpoint of the actors presenting Tom Taylor's play of the same name at Ford's Theatre at the end of the American Civil War. It aims to offer something new in the realm of American contemporary opera, an American myth told in an unfamiliar way, with both poetic and musical language drawing from the past but refracted through the present.
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The Garden of Martyrs is an opera with three acts by the American composer Eric Sawyer with libretto by Harley Erdman. It is based on the novel by Michael C. White. The opera is drawn from an historical event, covering the last days of Dominic Daley and James Halligan, Irish Catholic immigrants who were tried and executed in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1806 for the murder of Marcus Lyon.
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The Scarlet Professor is an opera by the American composer Eric Sawyer with libretto by Harley Erdman, based on the biography by Barry Werth.