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Mark Alburger (born April 2, 1957 in Upper Darby Township, Pennsylvania; died June 20, 2023 in Vacaville, California) was a San Francisco Bay area composer and conductor. He was the founder and music director of the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra, as well as the music director of Goat Hall Productions / San Francisco Cabaret Opera. [1] Alburger was also the editor-publisher of 21st-Century Music Journal, [2] which he founded in 1994 as 20th-Century Music. [3]
Alburger studied composition with Gerald Levinson and Joan Panetti at Swarthmore College; Jules Langert at the Dominican University of California; and Roland Jackson, Thomas Flaherty, and Christopher Yavelow at Claremont Graduate University, where he was awarded a Ph.D. in Musicology in 1996. He also studied privately thereafter with Terry Riley. Alburger was best known for his use of troping techniques, combining structures and musical passages from a wide variety of pre-existing works across cultures and eras. [4] He has a large opus list, including many concerti, operas, song cycles, symphonies, and a thirteen-hour theatrical setting of the Bible. [5]
As a music journalist, he has published interviews with many notable composers across the new music scene, including Henry Brant, Earle Brown, George Crumb, Anthony Davis, Paul Dresher, Philip Glass, Ali Akbar Khan, Joan La Barbara, Steve Mackey, Tod Machover, Meredith Monk, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Erling Wold, Christian Wolff, and Pamela Z, and was a contributor to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. [2]
Dr. Alburger passed away on June 20, 2023 in Vacaville, California, and is survived by his partner Harriet March Page, a mezzo-soprano and artistic director of Goat Hall Productions / San Francisco Cabaret Opera. [6]
John Coolidge Adams is an American composer and conductor whose music is rooted in minimalism. Among the most regularly performed composers of contemporary classical music, he is particularly noted for his operas, which are often centered around recent historical events. Apart from opera, his oeuvre includes orchestral, concertante, vocal, choral, chamber, electroacoustic and piano music.
Stephen Michael Reich is an American composer who is known for his contribution to the development of minimal music in the mid to late 1960s. Reich's work is marked by its use of repetitive figures, slow harmonic rhythm, and canons. Reich describes this concept in his essay, "Music as a Gradual Process", by stating, "I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music." For example, his early works experiment with phase shifting, in which one or more repeated phrases plays slower or faster than the others, causing it to go "out of phase." This creates new musical patterns in a perceptible flow.
Sir George William John Benjamin, CBE is an English composer of contemporary classical music. He is also a conductor, pianist and teacher. He is well known for operas Into the Little Hill (2006), Written on Skin (2009–2012) and Lessons in Love and Violence (2015–2017)—all with librettos by Martin Crimp. In 2019, critics at The Guardian ranked Written on Skin as the second best work of the 21st-century.
Michael Tilson Thomas is an American conductor, pianist and composer. He is Artistic Director Laureate of the New World Symphony, an American orchestral academy based in Miami Beach, Florida, Music Director Laureate of the San Francisco Symphony, and Conductor Laureate of the London Symphony Orchestra.
William Elden Bolcom is an American composer and pianist. He has received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Medal of Arts, a Grammy Award, the Detroit Music Award and was named 2007 Composer of the Year by Musical America. He taught composition at the University of Michigan from 1973 until 2008. He is married to mezzo-soprano Joan Morris.
Morton Subotnick is an American composer of electronic music, best known for his 1967 composition Silver Apples of the Moon, the first electronic work commissioned by a record company, Nonesuch. He was one of the founding members of California Institute of the Arts, where he taught for many years.
Charles Benjamin Amirkhanian is an American composer. He is a percussionist, sound poet, and radio producer of Armenian origin. He is mostly known for his electroacoustic and text-sound music. Performance artist Laurie Anderson praises his work: "The art of audio collage has been reinvented here... A brilliant sense of imaginary space."
Erling Wold is a San Francisco-based composer of opera and contemporary classical music. He is best known for his later chamber operas, and his early experiments as a microtonalist.
Rodney Gilfry is a leading American operatic baritone. After launching his career at Frankfurt Opera in 1987, Gilfry quickly established a reputation for stylish singing and acting. A renowned Mozart specialist, he has given acclaimed performances as Don Giovanni, Count Almaviva, Guglielmo, and Papageno, and is also known for his work in roles from the standard baritone repertoire.
Donato Cabrera is an American conductor with an active international career. He is the Music Director of the California Symphony and the Las Vegas Philharmonic, and was the Resident Conductor of the San Francisco Symphony and Wattis Foundation Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra from 2009-2016.
The San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra (SFCCO) is a chamber orchestra based in San Francisco, California, United States. It was established in 2002 and is dedicated to the performance of contemporary classical music, most often works by the orchestra's members. The group has also performed music by other California composers, including John Cage, Henry Cowell, Bernard Herrmann, Darius Milhaud, Terry Riley, Gerhard Samuel, and Igor Stravinsky.
Mark Grey is an American classical music composer, sound designer and sound engineer.
The New Century Chamber Orchestra was founded in 1992 by cellist, Miriam Perkoff, and violist, Wieslaw Pogorzelski. The goal of the founders was to present classical music in a fresh and unique way in the San Francisco Bay Area. The music director chooses the programs and guides the artistic vision and leads the seventeen members of the orchestra as part of a conductorless orchestra. Musical decisions are made collaboratively, in the goal of enhancing the level of commitment on the part of the musicians and increasing the precision, passion and power of their playing.
Mason Wesley Bates is a Grammy award-winning American composer of symphonic music and DJ of electronic dance music. He is the first composer-in-residence of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and he has also been in residence with Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, the Pittsburgh Symphony, and the California Symphony. In addition to his notable works Mothership, Anthology of Fantastic Zoology, and The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, he composed the score to Gus Van Sant's film The Sea of Trees. In a 2018 survey of American orchestras, he was rated the second-most performed living composer.
Mona Lyn Reese is an American composer, best known for her operas and choral music. Her work is melodic and accessible with an emphasis on driving or complex rhythms, movement, and contrasting textures. Her music communicates and expresses emotions traditionally or experimentally without allowing a prevailing fashion to dictate style, form, or harmony.
Ensemble Mik Nawooj is a San Francisco Bay Area-based musical group that merges classical, jazz, and hip hop styles. They are best known for The Great Integration, their "chamber hip hop opera."
Goat Hall Productions (GHP) is an opera company and musical theatre company based in Potrero Hill in San Francisco, California, United States. Presenting programs under the names San Francisco Cabaret Opera, Fresh Voices Festival of New Works, and The Kurt Weill Project, it was co-founded in 1997 by Harriet March Page and Dave Hurlbert, and is dedicated to the performance of opera and song, with a special interest in contemporary music.
Dr. Kathleen Alison McGuire is a choral and orchestral conductor, arranger, composer, music educator, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist. Known also for her work with social justice and human rights organizations, from 2000 to 2010 she served as the first female artistic director and conductor of the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus – the world's first openly gay choral organization – and in 2010 she established Singers of the Street: a choir of people affected by homelessness in San Francisco. She became a US citizen in 2011 and, in 2013, returned to Australia to serve as director of music at Queen's College and co-artistic director of the School of Hard Knocks. In 2006, she was a grand marshal in the San Francisco LGBT Pride Parade. Her contributions have officially been recognized by the California Senate and State Assembly, and "Kathleen McGuire Day" was designated twice in her honor by San Francisco mayors Gavin Newsom and Edwin Lee.
Claudia Stevens is an American musician, performance artist and librettist. Initially a pianist specializing in contemporary music, she is recognized for creating and performing widely an array of interdisciplinary solo performance works, and for her collaborations with composer Allen Shearer as librettist of twelve operas.
The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs is an opera with music by American composer Mason Bates and an English-language libretto by Mark Campbell. It was commissioned by Santa Fe Opera, Seattle Opera, San Francisco Opera, the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, with support from Cal Performances. The opera is about Steve Jobs, one of the most influential people in recent history; it is set at a time when he must confront his own mortality and circle back on the events that shaped his personal and professional life.
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