Paul Elwood

Last updated

Paul Iserman Elwood (born 1958) is an American composer, banjo player, inventor, and improvisor.

Contents

The music of Paul Elwood often incorporates his background as a folk musician and experimentalist on the five-string banjo with his voice as a composer who loves the processes and syntax of contemporary writing. A multimedia maestro, Elwood's multimedia performances draw from world travels, paranormal experiences and a healthy sense of humor.

Elwood has been the recipient of residencies at the American Academy in Rome as Southern Regional Visiting Composer, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, MacDowell Colony, Djerassi Artists Residence Program, Ucross Foundation, Camargo Foundation (France), Fundación Valparaíso (Spain), and the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos.

In 2000 he was awarded the Sigma Alpha Iota Philanthropies Inter-American Music Award for Vigils for solo piano and was featured as a composer and performer in Moscow, Mexico City, Marseille, Wollongong, Edinburgh, Darmstadt, and across the United States.

As a composer his music has been performed by the symphonies of North Carolina, Charleston, South Carolina, and Wichita, and by the Callithumpian Consort of the New England Conservatory, Zeitgeist, pianist Stephen Drury, Tambuco (the Mexican Percussion Quartet), and pipa players Min Xiaofen and Gao Hong, among others.

As a performer he won the Kansas State Banjo Championship, worked with guitarist Eugene Chadbourne, cellist Hank Roberts, French saxophonist Raphael Imbert, Andrew Bishop's Hank Williams Project, Electric Cowboy Cacophony, and bluegrass legend John Hartford, performed live on MTV Europe, and played percussion in a number of orchestras. Elwood's teachers include J.C. Combs, percussion, and composers Donald Erb, David Felder, Walter Mays, Arthur S. Wolff, and Charles Wuorinen.

He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and of the Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France. In 2000 Elwood won the Sigma Alpha-Iota Inter-American Music Awards, a 2007 commissioning grant from the Jerome Foundation to compose for Zeitgeist, and a 2010 CAP grant of the American Music Center to present his music in Bulgaria.

Recent recordings are on Innova Recordings as composer/banjoist with percussionist Famoudou Don Moye of the Art Ensemble of Chicago (titled Nice Folks, January 2015), Misfit Toys (2013, featuring drummer Matt Wilson, percussionist Dan Moore, and reed player Robert Paredes) and his own chamber and folk music, Stanley Kubrick's Mountain Home (2011) featuring bluegrass legend John Hartford and Wichita native Matt Combs, with bassist Bertram Turetzky (2008), and Electric Cowboy Cacophony (Edinburgh, 2008). Recent projects took him to London to record with percussionist Eddie Prévost of the legendary AMM improvisational ensemble, Edinburgh to play with saxophonist Sue McKenzie, and in his own backyard to record bluegrass versions of Bee Gees songs with Spencer Gibb, son of Bee Gee Robin Gibb.

He received his B.M.E. at Wichita State University, his M.M. in composition from Southern Methodist University, and his Ph.D. in composition from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Previously he served on the faculty at Brevard College in North Carolina, where he taught composition, music theory and sight singing. In the fall of 1998, he was the Southern Regional Visiting Composer at the American Academy in Rome. He is currently an associate professor at the University of Northern Colorado, Greeley, Colorado.

List of 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">David Conte</span> American composer

David Conte is an American composer who has written over 150 works published by E.C. Schirmer, including six operas, a musical, works for chorus, solo voice, orchestra, chamber music, organ, piano, guitar, and harp. Conte has received commissions from Chanticleer, the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, Harvard University Chorus, the Men’s Glee Clubs of Cornell University and the University of Notre Dame, GALA Choruses from the cities of San Francisco, New York, Boston, Atlanta, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., the Dayton Philharmonic, the Oakland Symphony, the Stockton Symphony, the Atlantic Classical Orchestra, the American Guild of Organists, Sonoma City Opera, and the Gerbode Foundation. He was honored with the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA) Brock Commission in 2007 for his work The Nine Muses, and in 2016 he won the National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS) Art Song Composition Award for his work American Death Ballads.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Rutter</span> English composer, conductor and arranger

John Milford Rutter is an English composer, conductor, editor, arranger, and record producer, mainly of choral music.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steven Stucky</span> American composer

Steven Edward Stucky was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer.

Samuel Hans Adler is an American composer, conductor, author, and professor. During the course of a professional career which ranges over six decades he has served as a faculty member at both the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music and the Juilliard School. In addition, he is credited with founding and conducting the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra which participated in the cultural diplomacy initiatives of the United States in Germany and throughout Europe in the aftermath of World War II. Adler's musical catalogue includes over 400 published compositions. He has been honored with several awards including Germany's Order of Merit – Officer's Cross.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ron Nelson (composer)</span> American composer (1929–2023)

Ronald Jack Nelson was an American composer of classical music and popular music and a music educator.

Chen Yi is a Chinese-American composer of contemporary classical music and violinist. She was the first Chinese woman to receive a Master of Arts (M.A.) in music composition from the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. Chen was a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Music for her composition Si Ji, and has received awards from the Koussevistky Music Foundation and American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2010, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from The New School and in 2012, she was awarded the Brock Commission from the American Choral Directors Association. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2019.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Augusta Read Thomas</span> American composer (born 1964)

Augusta Read Thomas is an American composer and University Professor of Composition in the Department of Music at the University of Chicago, where she is also director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Montague</span> American musician (born 1943)

Stephen Rowley Montague is an American composer, pianist and conductor who grew up in Idaho, New Mexico, West Virginia and Florida.

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

Allan Gilliland is a contemporary Canadian composer.

Ofer Ben-Amots is an Israeli-American composer and teacher of music composition and theory at Colorado College. His music is inspired by Jewish folklore of Eastern-European Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish Ladino traditions. The interweaving of folk elements with contemporary textures creates the dynamic tension that permeates and defines Ben-Amots' musical language.

Richard Collins St. Clair is an American composer, pedagogue, poet and pianist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roger Bourland</span>

Roger Bourland is an American composer, publisher, blogger, and Professor-Emeritus of Music at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.

Carol Edith Barnett is an American composer. She was born in Dubuque, Iowa, and studied at the University of Minnesota with Dominick Argento and Paul Fetler (composition), Bernard Weiser (piano) and Emil J. Niosi (flute). She graduated with a bachelor's degree in music theory and composition in 1972 and a masters in theory and composition in 1976.

Richard Festinger is an American composer of contemporary classical music, pianist and educator.

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.

James C. Mobberley is an American composer, music teacher and guitarist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Fussell</span> American classical composer

Charles Clement Fussell is an American composer and conductor of contemporary classical music. He has composed six symphonies and three operas. His symphony Wilde for solo baritone and orchestra, based on the life of Oscar Wilde and premiered by the Newton Symphony Orchestra and the baritone Sanford Sylvan in 1990, was a finalist for the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Music. He received a citation and award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1992.

Richard Aaker Trythall was an American and Italian composer and pianist of contemporary classical music.

References

    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.