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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.
When the American Brass Quintet gave its first public performance on December 11, 1960, brass chamber music was still relatively young to concert audiences. The New York Brass Quintet is regarded as the first brass quintet in the United States, having formed in 1954. Other groups soon followed like the Chicago Brass Quintet, formed in 1963. To delineate itself from these other two groundbreaking ensembles American Brass Quintet dedicated itself to "music originally written for brass," and substituted a bass trombone for the conventional tuba voice. That debut concert for them in 1960 marked the beginning of an international career for the ensemble that includes performances in Europe, Central and South America, the Middle East, Asia, Australia and all fifty of the United States; a discography now numbering fifty-one recordings; the premieres of over one hundred new brass works, and the inspiration to a whole new generation of brass quintets worldwide. ABQ commissions by Samuel Adler, Bruce Adolphe, Daniel Asia, Jan Bach, Robert Beaser, William Bolcom, Elliott Carter, Billy Childs, Robert Dennis, Jacob Druckman, Eric Ewazen, Anthony Plog, Huang Ruo, David Sampson, Gunther Schuller, William Schuman, Ralph Shapey, Joan Tower, Melinda Wagner, and Charles Whittenberg are considered among the most significant contributions to the brass quintet repertoire. In the past fifteen years alone, the ABQ has released recordings of over twenty-five major new brass quintets. The presentation of challenging contemporary brass music alongside earlier eras carefully edited by ABQ members for modern performance, has become a trademark of ABQ programming, and has helped establish the American Brass Quintet as the leader in the field of serious brass chamber music today.
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.
Joel Krosnick is an American cellist who has performed as a soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician throughout the world for over thirty-five years. As a member of the Juilliard String Quartet from 1974 to 2016, he performed the great quartet literature throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
Augusta Read Thomas is an American composer and professor.
Ralph Shapey was an American composer and conductor.
Carmen-Helena Téllez was a Venezuelan-American music conductor, producer, and composer. Reviewed as "a quiet force behind contemporary music in the United States today” (www.Sequenza21.com), she was a pioneer of new modes of classical music presentation, through the exploration of the relationship of music with other arts and technology as well as through the discovery of underrepresented composers with multiple performances of contemporary works for chorus, orchestra and new opera. She advocated for the reconsideration of the concept of art music and proposed the co-creative role of the listener in the value of music as art. Outside of current professional conventions, Carmen-Helena Téllez composed new music as her inter-artistic projects required it. She conducted in the United States, Europe, Israel, and Latin America. After her tenure as Music Director of the National Chorus of Spain, she joined the music faculty at Indiana University in 1992, as Director of the Latin American Music Center and the Contemporary Vocal Ensemble. For these organizations, she commissioned and recorded several new works, produced 14 CDs of Latin American music, and organized several Inter-American Composition Workshops. During the 2001-2002 period, she was the Resident Conductor of the pioneering Contemporary Chamber Players of Chicago and became the Music Director of the Pocket Opera Players in New York City. In 2012, she became Professor of Conducting at the University of Notre Dame, where she founded the doctoral Choral Conducting program and led a series of musical works with new modes of interdisciplinary presentation.
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, and flutist Patricia Spencer. The current members are Curtis Macomber, violin; Chris Gross, cello; Steve Beck, piano; Patricia Spencer, flute; and Meighan Stoops, clarinet.
The Pacifica Quartet is a professional string quartet based in Bloomington, Indiana. Its members are: Simin Ganatra, first violin; Austin Hartman, second violin; Mark Holloway, viola; and Brandon Vamos, cello. Formed in 1994 by Ganatra and Vamos with violinist Sibbi Bernhardsson and violist Kathryn Lockwood, the group won prizes in competitions such as the 1996 Coleman Chamber Music Competition, the 1997 Concert Artists Guild Competition, and the 1998 Naumburg Chamber Music Competition. In 2001, violist Masumi Per Rostad replaced Lockwood. The group subsequently received Chamber Music America's prestigious Cleveland Quartet Award in 2002, the Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2006, and was named "Ensemble of the Year" by Musical America in 2009. In 2017, violinist Austin Hartman replaced Bernhardsson and violist Guy Ben-Ziony replaced Rostad.
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 Group for Contemporary Music is an American chamber ensemble dedicated to the performance of contemporary classical music. It was founded in New York City in 1962 by Joel Krosnick, Harvey Sollberger and Charles Wuorinen and gave its first concert on October 22, 1962 in Columbia University's MacMillin Theatre. Krosnik left the ensemble in 1963. It was the first contemporary music ensemble based at a university and run by composers.
Jeffrey Milarsky is a conductor of contemporary music in New York City.
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.
Kenneth Slowik is an American cellist, viol player, and conductor, Curator of Musical Instrument Collection at the National Museum of American History and Artistic Director of the Smithsonian Chamber Music Society. He took an interest in music and organology from an early age. He studied at the University of Chicago, the Chicago Musical College, the Peabody Conservatory, the Salzburg Mozarteum and, as a Fulbright Scholar, the Vienna Hochschule für Musik, guided by Howard Mayer Brown, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Antonio Janigro, Edward Lowinsky, and Frederik Prausnitz.
Gilbert Kalish is an American pianist.
NOTUS, formerly the Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, is the only university-based vocal group in the United States exclusively dedicated to the study and performance of vocal and choral repertoire written after 1900. It includes singers, composers, young scholars and instrumentalists chosen for their special interest in the music of our time. Depending on the repertoire, the ensemble adjusts its size to perform solo vocal, chamber choral and large oratorio-like compositions.
The Aeolian Chamber Players is an American musical ensemble that is dedicated to the performance of chamber music. Founded in 1961 by violinist Lewis Kaplan, the group has been the resident ensemble at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine since 1964. The ensemble is particularly known for performing new works and has produced several commercial recordings. The ensemble's recording of George Crumb's Night of the Four Moons for Columbia Records was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Classical Album. Approximately 150 works, many by noted composers, were written for the Aeolians including Luciano Berio"O King", George Crumb "Eleven Echoes of Autumn, 1965" and "Dream Sequence", Ralph Shapey "Discourse for Four Instruments" and "Discourse 2", Mario Davidovsky "Junctures", Milton Babbitt "Four Play". Several notable musicians have been members of the ensemble during its history, including pianists Walter Ponce and Gilbert Kalish, flutists Erich Graf and Thomas Nyfenger, cellists Jerry Grossman and Ronald Thomas, and clarinetist Thomas Hill, among others. The ensemble held extended residencies at Sarah Lawrence College and C.W.Post College. The Aeolians recorded for BBC and Swiss Radio and by invitation participated in the NEA's pilot project in chamber music.
Mark Gustavson is an American composer of contemporary classical music.
Concerto Fantastique is an orchestral composition in four movements by the American composer Ralph Shapey. The work was commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, who first performed the work under the composer on November 21, 1991. It was a finalist for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Music.
Jonathan Elliott is an American composer and teacher. Born in 1962, Elliott grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, studying piano from the age of six. He would go on to study composition at Vassar College, where his teachers included Annea Lockwood and the pianist Todd Crow; Elliott subsequently received his PhD from the University of Chicago, where he studied with Ralph Shapey and Shulamit Ran.
References
- ↑ Carnig, Jennifer (October 21, 2004). "Contemporary Chamber Players begin next 40 years as Contempo". chronicle.uchicago.edu. Retrieved August 11, 2018.
