Michael Carnes

Last updated

Michael Page Carnes (1950) is an American composer of contemporary classical music.

Contents

Life and career

Carnes was born in North Carolina. The son of a piano teacher, he received his first formal musical training on trumpet in the public schools. He formed and played in several rock bands beginning in the late 1960s. While originally a performer of popular music and jazz, Carnes became interested in classical music and resumed his education.

He studied composition under John Bavicchi at Berklee College of Music where he received his BA in 1977, John Thow and Theodore Antoniou at Boston University where he received his Masters in Music in 1980 and later with Rudi Martinus van Dijk and Gunther Schuller. His early works were largely tonal and reflective of jazz. These include a number of guitar etudes. In the years that followed, his music became more strongly chromatic, without an obvious tonal center. Principal works from this period include Fantasy Music 1 (for flute and taped electronic sounds), Fantasy Music 2 (for harpsichord and taped electronic sounds), and Marimba Concerto.

An intermediate period included Brass Quintet #2, War Songs (for voice and taped electronic sounds), and Variations (computer). More recently, his style has moved into a more flexible variant of the 12-tone technique.[ citation needed ] Recent works include Brass Quintet #3, Symphony: Challenger and Proper Motion (trio for flute, clarinet, piano) which had its world premiere at the Park City and Salt Lake City International Music Festival in 2005. [1]

During his years in Boston, Carnes was a member of the "Composers in Red Sneakers" collective. [2] In 1985, the group inaugurated the 8th season of contemporary music at New York's Symphony Space. [3] Amongst the pieces on the program were two songs for mezzo-soprano and marimba by Carnes set to texts by e.e. cummings with Nancy Zeltsman on the marimba. [4]

Recordings

Fantasy Music 1 is included on the 1984 Northeastern Records LP, Composers in Red Sneakers. [5]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Milton Babbitt</span> American composer

Milton Byron Babbitt was an American composer, music theorist, mathematician, and teacher. He is particularly noted for his serial and electronic music.

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.

George Rochberg was an American composer of contemporary classical music. Long a serial composer, Rochberg abandoned the practice following the death of his teenage son in 1964; he claimed this compositional technique had proved inadequate to express his grief and had found it empty of expressive intent. By the 1970s, Rochberg's use of tonal passages in his music had provoked controversy among critics and fellow composers. A professor at the University of Pennsylvania until 1983, Rochberg also served as chairman of its music department until 1968. He became the first Annenberg Professor of the Humanities in 1978.

Alfred Whitford (Fred) Lerdahl is the Fritz Reiner Professor Emeritus of Musical Composition at Columbia University, and a composer and music theorist best known for his work on musical grammar and cognition, rhythmic theory, pitch space, and cognitive constraints on compositional systems. He has written many orchestral and chamber works, three of which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Music: Time after Time in 2001, String Quartet No. 3 in 2010, and Arches in 2011.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Toshi Ichiyanagi</span> Japanese composer and pianist (1933–2022)

Toshi Ichiyanagi was a Japanese avant-garde composer and pianist. One of the leading composers in Japan during the postwar era, Ichiyanagi worked in a range of genres, composing Western-style operas and orchestral and chamber works, as well as compositions using traditional Japanese instruments. Ichiyanagi is known for incorporating avant-garde techniques into his works, such as chance music, extended technique, and nontraditional scoring. Ichiyanagi was married to artist Yoko Ono from 1956 to 1962.

Barbara Kolb is an American composer. Her music uses sound masses and often creates vertical structures through simultaneous rhythmic or melodic units. Kolb's musical style can be identified by her use of colorful textures, impressionistic touch, and atonal vocabulary, with influences stemming from literary and visual arts. She was the first American woman composer to win the Rome Prize.

Joseph Clyde Schwantner is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer, educator and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 2002. He was awarded the 1970 Charles Ives Prize.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eric Ewazen</span> American composer and teacher

Eric Ewazen is an American composer and teacher.

Karl Richard Korte was an American composer of contemporary classical music.


Michael Blake is a South African contemporary classical music composer and performer. He studied in Johannesburg in the 1970s and was associated with conceptual art and the emergence of an indigenous experimental music aesthetic. In 1976 he embarked on 'African Journal', a series of pieces for Western instruments that drew on his studies of traditional African music and aesthetics, which continued to expand during two decades in London until he returned to South Africa in 1998. From around 2000 African music becomes less explicit on the surface of his compositions, but elements of rhythm and repetition remain as part of a more postcolonial engagement with material and form. He works in a range of styles including minimalism and collage, and now also forages for source material from the entire musical canon.

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

Robert Paterson is an American composer of contemporary classical music, as well as a conductor and percussionist. His catalog includes over 100 compositions. He has been called a "modern day master" and is primarily known for his colorful orchestral works, large body of chamber music and clear vocal writing in his operas, choral works, vocal chamber works and song cycles.

David Frederick Stock was an American composer and conductor.

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.

Marti Epstein is an American composer. She is Professor of Composition at Berklee College of Music and the Boston Conservatory at Berklee.

Benjamin Yusupov is a classical composer, conductor and pianist.

Composers in Red Sneakers was a Boston-based composers collective founded in 1981 by Thomas Oboe Lee, Christopher Stowens, Robert Aldridge, Roger Bourland, Amy Reich, and Gary Philo. Concerts were given in the Old Cambridge Baptist Church and in Harvard University's Sanders Theatre. One of their early advocates was Richard Dyer, the music critic of The Boston Globe. The group appeared at Symphony Space in New York City in 1985 and produced an eponymous LP that same year. Their concerts were marked by an irreverent attitude including humorous, pre-recorded introductions and skits.

Roger John Goeb was an American composer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Raymond Luedeke</span> American and Canadian composer of classical music

Raymond Luedeke is an American / Canadian composer of contemporary classical music. Praised for his idiosyncratic instrumental writing and for his orchestration, Luedeke has more recently concentrated on works for music theatre. Although born in New York City, he spent 29 years as Associate Principal Clarinet with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, a position he left in 2010. A dual citizen of the United States and Canada, Ray Luedeke is artistic director of Voice Afire Opera-Cabaret in New York City.

References

  1. ↑ Reichel (21 August 2005)
  2. ↑ Cleary (June 2000) p. 13
  3. ↑ Page (6 October 1985)
  4. ↑ Holland (13 October 1985)
  5. ↑ Philadelphia Inquirer (23 June 1985)

Sources

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.