Music
Choral music makes up the core of Alexander's works and performances, noted for her "accessible style that is well tailored to the requirements of both semi-pro and amateur choruses." [2] Her style combines the regional influences from her childhood with classical form. These melodic sensibilities include spirituals, jazz and blues from the American South, and Celtic-American folk music of Northern Appalachia, styles prevalent in her most performed octavos, "When the Song of the Angels Is Stilled," "Where There Is Light in the Soul," "Faith Is the Bird That Feels the Light," and "If You Can Walk You Can Dance." [3]
In 1992, Alexander's "Being Who You Are," written for Waunakee Elementary School in Waunakee, Wisconsin, won the KidSing Composer's Competition and was honorable mention in the John Lennon Songwriting Contest. [4]
Alexander's "Reasons for the Perpetuation of Slavery" (2011) was performed at the Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall in March, 2012, hailed as “brilliantly innovative” by the New York Concert Review. [5] This work was instrumental in Alexander being named a Fellow to Minneapolis' McKnight Foundation in 2012. [3]
Other awards and fellowships include the Jerome Foundation, New York Council on the Arts, Wisconsin Arts Board, National School Orchestral Association, International League of Women Composers, American Composers Forum, Meet the Composer and ASCAP. [1] She was one of several composers interviewed and featured in Debra Spurgeon's Conducting Women’s Choirs: Strategies for Success. [6]
Alice Mary Smith was an English composer. Her compositions included two symphonies and a large collection of choral works, both sacred and secular.
Dominick Argento was an American composer known for his lyric operatic and choral music. Among his best known pieces are the operas Postcard from Morocco, Miss Havisham's Fire, The Masque of Angels, and The Aspern Papers. He also is known for the song cycles Six Elizabethan Songs and From the Diary of Virginia Woolf; the latter earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1975. In a predominantly tonal context, his music freely combines tonality, atonality and a lyrical use of twelve-tone writing. None of Argento's music approaches the experimental, stringent avant-garde fashions of the post-World War II era.
Julian Anderson is a British composer and teacher of composition.
Hilary Tann was a Welsh composer based in the United States.
Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate is a Chickasaw classical composer and pianist. His compositions are inspired by North American Indian history, culture and ethos.
Jean Coulthard, was a Canadian composer and music educator. She was one of a trio of women composers who dominated Western Canadian music in the twentieth century: Coulthard, Barbara Pentland, and Violet Archer. All three died within weeks of each other in 2000. Her works might be loosely termed "prematurely neo-Romantic", as the orthodox serialists who dominated academic musical life in North America during the 1950s and 1960s had little use for her.
Augusta Read Thomas is an American composer and professor.
The Schicksalslied, Op. 54, is an orchestrally accompanied choral setting of a poem written by Friedrich Hölderlin and is one of several major choral works written by Johannes Brahms. Brahms began the work in the summer of 1868 at Wilhelmshaven, but it was not completed until May 1871. The delay was primarily due to Brahms's hesitation over how the piece should end. Hesitant to make a decision, he began work on the Alto Rhapsody, Op. 53, which was completed in 1869 and first performed in 1870.
René Clausen is an American composer, conductor emeritus of The Concordia Choir, and professor of music at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. His works are widely performed by high school and church choirs while his more technically demanding pieces have been performed and recorded by college and professional choirs. Among his many accolades, his recent recording, "Life & Breath: Choral Works by René Clausen," received three Grammy Awards at the 55th Grammy Awards in 2013.
Elizabeth Brown Larsen is a contemporary American classical composer. Along with composer Stephen Paulus, she is a co-founder of the Minnesota Composers Forum, now the American Composers Forum.
Max Reger's 1915 Requiem, Op. 144b, is a late Romantic setting of Friedrich Hebbel's poem "Requiem" for alto or baritone solo, chorus and orchestra. It is Reger's last completed work for chorus and orchestra, dedicated in the autograph as Dem Andenken der im Kriege 1914/15 gefallenen deutschen Helden.
Ina Boyle was an Irish composer. Her compositions encompass a broad spectrum of genres and include choral, chamber and orchestral works as well as opera, ballet and vocal music. While a number of her works, including The Magic Harp (1919), Colin Clout (1921), Gaelic Hymns (1923–24), Glencree (1924-27) and Wildgeese (1942), received acknowledgement and first performances, the majority of her compositions remained unpublished and unperformed during her lifetime.
Rosephanye Powell, pronounced ro-SEH-fuh-nee, is an American choral composer, singer, professor, and researcher.
Abbie Betinis is an American composer. She has composed music for a variety of musical ensembles, and is best known for her choral music and other vocal works.
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.
Steven Sametz is active as both conductor and composer. He has been hailed as "one of the most respected choral composers in America." Since 1979, he has been on the faculty of Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he holds the Ronald J. Ulrich Chair in Music and is Director of Choral Activities and is founding director of the Lehigh University Choral Union. Since 1998, he has served as Artistic Director of the professional a cappella ensemble, The Princeton Singers. He is also the founding director of the Lehigh University Summer Choral Composers’ Forum. In 2012, he was named Chair of the American Choral Directors Association Composition Advisory Committee.
Jake Runestad is an American composer and conductor of classical music based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has composed music for a wide variety of musical genres and ensembles, but has achieved greatest acclaim for his work in the genres of opera, orchestral music, choral music, and wind ensemble. One of his principal collaborators for musical texts has been Todd Boss.
Jocelyn Hagen is an American composer. She composes primarily for voice: solo, chamber and choral, but also has composed for chamber, wind, and orchestral ensembles. She has explored large-scale multimedia works, electro-acoustic music, dance, and opera.
Yuri Alexandrovich Falik was a Russian composer, orchestral conductor, cellist, a board member of the Leningrad (Saint-Petersburg) branch of the Composers' Union, and People's Artist of Russia.
