Evan Hause

Last updated

Evan Hause (born 1967) is an American composer, percussionist and conductor. Hause has composed over one hundred works ranging from rock music to opera.

Contents

Biography and career

After growing up in Greenville, North Carolina, he earned the Doctor of Music Arts and Master of Music degrees in composition from the University of Michigan, and the Bachelor of Music degree from the Oberlin Conservatory in composition and percussion, where he was awarded the Herbert Elwell Award. He attended the North Carolina School of the Arts as a percussionist. He studied composition with Sherwood Shaffer, Randolph Coleman, Richard Hoffmann (at the Schoenberg Haus in Moedling, Austria, in an Oberlin abroad program), William Albright, William Bolcom and Leslie Bassett, among others. He has been commissioned by the Albany Symphony Orchestra, Riverside Symphony Orchestra, Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, Tales & Scales, Alarm Will Sound, and the Carolina Chamber Music Festival. He has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Aspen Music Festival, June in Buffalo and the Edward Albee "Barn" at Montauk, NY. [1]

Hause has composed over eighty compositions for standard instrumentations, including solo instruments, chamber groups, orchestra, band, chorus, rock band, big band, and opera. He has set to music the poetry of D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Hugh Ogden, Adrienne Rich, and himself. He created three chamber operas with the librettist Gary Heidt called "The Defenestration Trilogy" and four "mini-operas" for the Dogs of Desire (a satellite ensemble from the Albany Symphony). He has a catalog of some 80 rock songs, 13 of which were released nationally on the 1998 CD "Adventures of Freddy," an album on which Hause plays and sings all parts. He made two arrangements for the New York-based ensemble, Alarm Will Sound. The first, Aphex Twin's "Omgyjya Switch 7" was performed at the Lincoln Center Festival on July 24, 2005, and was released on Cantaloupe Records on the CD Acoustica . The second, of Edgard Varèse's Poème Électronique, was premiered at Columbia University's Miller Theater on January 20, 2007. [2] As a freelance arranger he has created scores and arrangements for composers George Tsontakis and Paquito D'Rivera.

Hause studied percussion with James Massie Johnson, Jr., Michael Rosen, Michael Udow, and Salvatore Rabbio. After youthful accolades such as being named timpanist of the North Carolina All-State Band and Orchestra, and an award from the Brevard Music Center, he earned the Terry Sanford Scholarship to the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. He has played in the North Carolina, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, Charleston (SC), Flint (MI), Ann Arbor, and Long Island (NY) Symphonies, among others. As a contemporary music percussionist he has played with the Locrian Chamber Players and the S.E.M. Ensemble.

As an electric guitarist he appeared on the Alarm Will Sound CD Acoustica, in performances of his own Concerto for Electric Guitar and Symphony Band with the bands of the Universities of Michigan and Florida, and on the Cadence jazz CD, Tony's Blues with poet Barry Wallenstein and pianist John Hicks. As a pianist he accompanied the off-off-Broadway revival of Mae West's Sex for the Hourglass Group at the Gershwin Theater in New York City (1999–2000).

As an educator, Hause taught percussion at the North Carolina Governor's School West in 1991; theory, composition and percussion at Pittsburg State University in Kansas in from 1996 to 1999; electronic music composition at Drew University; and theory at Concordia College in Bronxville, New York, from 2003 to 2005.

Hause was the general manager for the Edward B. Marks Music Company from 2005 to 2018. In this capacity he oversaw publications by composers William Bolcom, Kenneth Fuchs, and Curtis Curtis-Smith, Roger Sessions, Mario Davidovsky, the Cuban composers Ernesto Lecuona and Gonzalo Roig, and others.

The Defenestration Trilogy

The trilogy consists of : On The Air (2001), originally premiered as The Birth and Theft of Television on March 26–27, 2001 at the Theater for the New City, Nightingale: The Last Days of James Forrestal (2002), premiered May 19-June 4, 2002 at the Present Company Theatorium, and Man: Biology of a Fall (2007), premiered October 4–7, 2007 at Kumble Theater of Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus. Each work sets a libretto by Gary Heidt, employs a cast of approximately 10 singers, and employs an orchestra of 7-15 players. [3]

The Birth and Theft of Television is a fictional interweave of the travails of the two great American inventors, Philo T. Farnsworth (inventor of television) and Edwin H. Armstrong (inventor of F.M.), and their battles against corporate America, consolidated into the personage of David Sarnoff (CEO of RCA), leading up to Armstrong's suicide by self-defenestration in 1954.

Nightingale: The Last Days of James Forrestal is an imagined glimpse into the mind of the first U.S. Secretary of Defense in his final six weeks of life (1949) as he underwent treatment for nervous exhaustion in the 16th floor of the Bethesda Naval Hospital. Among the characters who visit him are Harry Truman, Sidney Souers, his wife Josephine, and Lyndon B. Johnson before Forrestal dies by falling from his window.

Man: Biology of a Fall is a similar glimpse into unknowable events surrounding the last week of life of Frank Olson, a biochemist who is believed to have been murdered in 1953 by defenestration. The backdrop of this opera is Fort Detrick, the CIA's MK-ULTRA mind control program, Greenwich Village, and the Statler Hotel in New York City. Other characters drawn from real persons include Sidney Gottlieb, William Sargant, and George Hunter White.

Major works

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Ward (composer)</span> Musical artist

Robert Eugene Ward was an American composer who is best remembered for his opera The Crucible (1961) after the 1953 play of the same name by Arthur Miller. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music for that opera in 1962.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Evan Ziporyn</span> American composer

Evan Ziporyn is an American composer of post-minimalist music with a cross-cultural orientation, drawing equally from classical music, avant-garde, various world music traditions, and jazz. Ziporyn has composed for a wide range of ensembles, including symphony orchestras, wind ensembles, many types of chamber groups, and solo works, sometimes involving electronics. Balinese gamelan, for which he has composed numerous works, has compositions. He is known for his solo performances on clarinet and bass clarinet; additionally, Ziporyn plays gender wayang and other Balinese instruments, saxophones, piano & keyboards, EWI, and Shona mbira.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Adès</span> British composer, pianist and conductor

Thomas Joseph Edmund Adès is a British composer, pianist and conductor. Five compositions by Adès received votes in the 2017 Classic Voice poll of the greatest works of art music since 2000: The Tempest (2004), Violin Concerto (2005), Tevot (2007), In Seven Days (2008), and Polaris (2010).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Theo Loevendie</span> Dutch composer and clarinet player (born 1930)

Johan Theodorus Loevendie is a Dutch composer and clarinet player.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Gordon (composer)</span> American composer

Michael Gordon is an American composer and co-founder of the "Bang on a Can" music collective and festival. He grew up in Nicaragua.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Augusta Read Thomas</span> American composer

Augusta Read Thomas is an American composer and professor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tod Machover</span> American classical composer

Tod Machover, is a composer and an innovator in the application of technology in music. He is the son of Wilma Machover, a pianist and Carl Machover, a computer scientist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Allan Gilliland</span> Canadian composer

Allan Gilliland is a contemporary Canadian composer.

Dan Welcher is an American composer, conductor, and music educator.

Matthew John Hindson AM is an Australian composer.

Margaret Brouwer is an American composer and composition teacher. She founded the Blue Streak Ensemble chamber music group.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Matthew King (composer)</span> British composer, pianist and educator

Matthew King is a British composer, pianist and educator. His works include opera, piano and chamber music, and choral and orchestral pieces. He has been described by Judith Weir, Master of the Queen’s Music, as “one of Britain's most adventurous composers, utterly skilled, imaginative and resourceful."

David Horne is a Scottish composer, pianist, and teacher.

Hanna Kulenty is a Polish composer of contemporary classical music. Since 1992, she has worked and lived both in Warsaw (Poland) and in Arnhem (Netherlands).

Gary Kulesha is a Canadian composer, pianist, conductor, and educator. Since 1995, he has been Composer Advisor to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He has been Composer-in-Residence with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony (1988–1992) and the Canadian Opera Company (1993–1995). He was awarded the National Arts Centre Orchestra Composer Award in 2002. He currently teaches on the music faculty at the University of Toronto.

Alexander Mikhailovich Raskatov is a Russian composer.

Michael Schelle, born January 22, 1950, in Philadelphia, is a composer of contemporary concert music. He is also a performer, conductor, author, and teacher.

Eric Guinivan is a composer, percussionist, founding member of the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet, and was principal timpanist of the YMF Debut Orchestra. He has received commissions from Chamber Music America, the Fromm Foundation, New York Youth Symphony, the International Horn Society, Lake Union Civic Orchestra, the Firebird Ensemble, Staunton Music Festival, the Lotte Lehmann Foundation, and the Society of Composers, Inc., among others. His output includes works for orchestra, wind ensemble, percussion, brass band, chamber orchestra, film, and a wide variety of chamber ensembles and solo instruments. He currently serves as Associate Professor of Composition at James Madison University, and was previously a graduate teaching fellow at the University of Southern California.

Emmanuel Séjourné is a French composer and percussionist, and head of percussion at the Conservatoire de Strasbourg. His music is influenced by Western classical music and by popular music.

References

  1. Biography on the official web site of Evan Hause
  2. Midgette (January 27, 2007)
  3. Lockwood (October, 2007)

Sources