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Anthony Gatto Photo courtesy of the composer

Composer Anthony Gatto was born and raised in Brooklyn. In May of 2001, he received his D.M.A. in composition from the Yale School of Music, where his teachers were Jacob Druckman, Martin Bresnick, and Ezra Laderman. Dr. Gatto has also studied with Lukas Foss and Ornette Coleman. He has received support from the McKnight and Jerome Foundations, ASCAP, and Meet the Composer. Gatto was also the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Berlin to work on his opera Ceaucescu‘s Prosecutor, based on the Romanian Revolution of 1989.

Gatto will use his Bush Foundation Fellowship to finish work on a new sextet for two percussionists, piano, bass clarinet, violin, and cello. Gatto describes the piece, which is based on some “compressed” melodies from the Radiohead album Kid A, as “very Downtown.'” It will be premiered as part of the second annual Festival Dancing in Your Head this coming September in Minneapolis.

The Festival Dancing in Your Head is the brainchild of Gatto, who runs a non-profit organization called Headwaters Music. The Festival will showcase musicians from around the country playing new music from around the world. Performers at the Festival will include the Bang On A Can All-Stars, the Pro Arte Quartet, Minnesota Orchestra concertmaster Jorja Fleezanis; monks from the Gyuto Wheel of Dharma Monastery; pipa player Gao Hong; and jazz bass player Anthony Cox.

Gatto has obtained Jerome Foundation money to commission four new works for the Festival. Annie Gosfield will write a new work for the Minneapolis-based new music ensemble Zeitgeist, Happy Apple will compose and perform a new work for jazz ensemble, the Meng Vang Ensemble will compose and perform a new work for Hmong mouth organs, and D.D. Jackson will write and perform a new work for solo jazz piano. In addition, the Festival’s “house orchestra,” Orchestra Dancing In Your Head, will perform Gatto’s new sextet and Steve Reich‘s Music for 18 Musicians.

The event will be held on September 6, 7, and 8 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. It will culminate in a “marathon” performance on Saturday, highly reminiscent of Bang On A Can’s yearly events. This is no small coincidence, as Gatto hopes to work with the New York-based ensemble in turning Minneapolis into a mecca for new music. “With Bang On A Can, I want to have people thinking New York, Amsterdam, Minneapolis!” Gatto enthused.

Gatto has lived in Minneapolis for the past four years, and has taught at the University of Minnesota and the Perpich Center for Arts Education. He has been throwing his energy into new music in the Twin Cities, and so far is pleased with the results. “People in Minnesota are amazingly supportive. It’s a composer’s dream to have a community like this to connect with,” he stated. Festival Dancing on Your Head has received support from the Walker Art Center, the Jerome Foundation and the Target Foundation.

Louis Karchin photo by William Tomlin

Lieberson Fellowship winner Louis S. Karchin is Professor of Music at New York University. He earned his Ph.D. and A.M. degrees from Harvard University, and his B.M. degree from the Eastman School of Music. He has been composer-in-residence at the Wellesley Composers Conference, and has received composition prizes from the Heckscher Foundation, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the Alice M. Ditson Fund, the Jerome Foundation, the National Opera Association, the American Composers Alliance, and the NEA, among others. He has been a fellow at the MacDowell and Yaddo colonies and has received fellowships from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts and the Berkshire Music Center. He is also a past recipient of the Walter Hinrichsen Award from the AAAL. His music is recorded by CRI and New World Records. C.F. Peters Corporation is his publisher.

Karchin is putting the finishing touches on a piece for saxophonist Taimur Sullivan and piano. It is a single-movement piece of about 15 minutes, a “virtuoso work” in keeping with what Karchin describes as Sullivan’s “extraordinary” abilities. The piano and sax parts, according to the composer, are “continuously intertwined.” Karchin is also starting work on an orchestra piece.

Karchin’s percussion quartet was given its premiere at Merkin Hall on March 20, 2001, by members of the Washington Square Contemporary Players. The piece was commissioned by the Koussevitsky Foundation for the group Talujon. Another of his works, Deux PoËmes de MallarmÈ, will receive its first performance on April 6, 2001, at NYU, with singer Jane Cummins and pianist Margaret Kampmeier.

Karchin is hoping to feature these two recently premiered works, along with the new saxophone piece, on a new CD. “The money came at a good time,” he confessed. The musicians involved in the initial performances have agreed to record the pieces, but he has not yet approached a label with the project idea.

Jonathan Newman self-portrait

Ives Fellowship recipient Jonathan Newman received his M.M. degree from The Juilliard School, and his B.M. degree summa cum laude from Boston University. He attended the Aspen Music School and the Boston University Tanglewood Institute Young Artists Composition Program. His principal teachers include John Corigliano, David Del Tredici, Bernard Rands, George Tsontakis, Richard Cornell, Charles Fussell, and Robert Sirota.

The Ives Fellowship will provide Newman with enough money to participate in advanced compositional study at a venue such as the Darmstadt Festival, Dartington College, or the Britten-Pears School. The stipulations of the award state that the recipient must use the money towards tuition or towards study with a private teacher.

Mr. Newman is working on an orchestra piece that he plans to send to some new music readings in the near future. He is also working on a sequel to his first concert band piece, OK Feel Good , which received performances by the University of Las Vegas and Yosui (Japan) Wind Symphonies in the fall of 2000. Newman is currently planning a collaboration with writer Kristina Faust on a series of new cabaret songs.

His Wapwallopan for string quartet, commissioned by the New York Youth Symphony for their “First Music 17” program, will be given its Weill Hall premiere on April 11, 2001. Recent performances include his Practicing Joy, choreographed by Charlotte Griffin, at the Juilliard Dance Division Fall Concert, and his Tree, for triple string quartet, choreographed by Toshiko Oiwa and presented as “I Saw Me When We Were Dancing” by Toshiko Oiwa Dance at P.S. 122.

Gabriela Frank photo by Sabina Frank

Gabriela Lena Frank is a D.M.A. candidate at the University of Michigan and has M.M. and B.M. degrees from Rice University. Her principal composition teachers have included William Albright, Leslie Bassett, William Bolcom, Evan Chambers, Michael Daugherty, Samuel Jones, Paul Cooper, and Ellsworth Milburn. She has studied at La Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, the Czech-American Summer Music Institute, and the Composers’ Seminar at New York University. She has received commissions from the NEA, the International Alliance for Women in Music Diversity Commission, a fellowship at Banff Center for the Arts, and a MacDowell Colony residency. She has won the Theodore Presser Music Award and numerous awards from the University of Michigan, including the Rackham Pre-Doctoral Fellowship.

Frank will receive her doctorate in composition from Michigan this spring and will be recording a CD of Leslie Bassett’s piano music over the summer. She will also be serving as guest composer at Musicorda. This summer festival and string program received NEA money to commission Frank to write two quartets for students. The commission specified that Ms. Frank would write quartets that incorporated South American folk and European classical music styles, a blend that characterizes much of her work. Each movement of the quartets, according to Ms. Frank, will represent a folk music style from a different South American country.

The fusion of South American and European styles is part of Ms. Frank’s heritage. Her mother is Peruvian; her father, originally from New Rochelle, NY, was one of the first Peace Corps volunteers. Ms. Frank grew up in Berkeley, CA, and her first music was Peruvian music. “I wasn’t aware how much I knew until I went back to start studying it.” It was Ginastera‘s piano music, she explained, that encouraged her to go back and explore her musical roots. “He had the audacity to bring out these [ethnic] influences. When I heard what he was doing, I started to do it consciously also.”

In the summer of 1998, Ms. Frank worked at the FundacÌon Vicente Emilio Sojo, an organization that works to preserve Venezuelan folk music. It was here that Ms. Frank encountered a great deal of the Latin American popular music that she has since incorporated into her repertoire as a pianist. She became particularly interested in the work of Ramon Delgado Palacios, described as a “Venezuelan Gottschalk,” and a volume of whose work she helped to publish. “Many of these composers in South America, it is so hard to get [a copy] of their music because it is not published yet ¤ they don’t have the resources yet down there that we have here.” Ms. Frank also plays the music of Ernesto Lecuona, the “Cuban Gershwin.” “It’s virtuosic stuff,” she commented.

Ms. Frank’s doctoral thesis, entitled Elegia Andina (Andean Elegy), was commissioned by the Albany Symphony and performed in December 2000. She dedicated it to her older brother, who once spoke Spanish but has since forgotten the language. “He hasn’t yet made the pilgrimage to South America,” she explained. “I wrote it to encourage him to do that.”

At the time this article was written, Gabriela Frank was waiting to find out if she had been awarded a Fulbright grant to study in the Peruvian village of Huanuco with the composer and ethnomusicologist Carlos Obregon. If Ms. Frank wins the Fulbright, she will use the Ives Fellowship money to help cover expenses during her time abroad; otherwise, she will use it to pay for additional composition lessons with her current teacher, Leslie Bassett.

Russell Platt photo by Melissa Richard

Russell Platt is senior editor for classical music at the “Goings On About Town” section of The New Yorker. He was educated at Oberlin College, the Curtis Institute of Music, Cambridge University, and the University of Minnesota, where he earned his Ph.D. He has been a fellow at Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, the Blue Mountain Center, the Djerassi Foundation, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. He has received commissions from the American Composers Forum, the tenor Paul Sperry, and the Dale Warland Singers, and The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra Ensemble has performed his music.

Platt recently completed his chamber symphony for the Intergalactic Chamber Ensemble. It will be performed “sometime next season,” according to Platt. He is currently working on a concerto for former Milwaukee Symphony principal clarinetist Russell Dagon, commissioned by the American Composers Forum as part of their Composers Commissioning Project program. Dagon will perform the new concerto with the Waukesha (WI) Symphony under the direction of the composer’s brother, Alexander Platt. He also has plans to write a violin sonata and a cycle of songs for voice and chamber ensemble. The Fellowship, Platt commented, will give him “a little breathing space.”

Platt describes his music as “pretty much in the mainstream lyrical tradition of the 20th century,” a tradition embodied in the works of his teachers Ned Rorem and Dominick Argento. As a Curtis student, he also became quite familiar with the works of Samuel Barber. At the same time, he has a long-standing interest in minimalism and feels that it is his “responsibility to incorporate stylistic technical innovations of the Second Viennese School.” While this last influence may sound incompatible with the first two, Platt explained that he sees Schoenberg‘s influence in his music’s “forceful, expressive profile.”

Platt faces a formidable challenge in balancing the work of a full-time writer with that of a composer. The challenge is not new to him: before coming to The New Yorker, Platt was the principal music critic at the St. Paul Pioneer Press. “It is hard to have a sense of perspective,” Platt confessed. “There are only so many things in your life you can concentrate on. Like everyone, I am trying to pull off a balancing act.”

James Barry
James Barry is a doctoral student at Florida State University. He earned his Master of Music at the University of Texas at Austin and his Bachelor of Music from the University of South Florida. His principal teachers are Ladislave Kubiak, Dan Welcher, Donald Grantham, Stephen Montague, Mark Schultz, James Lewis, and Paul Reller.

Braxton Blake
Braxton Blake, a native of Galveston, TX, attended the University of Houston and Eastman School of Music. His principal teachers include Francis J. Pyle, Samuel Adler, Warren Benson, and Joseph Schwantner. He has also studied at the Bayreuth Festival, the Dartington Festival, and the Staatliche Musikhochschule Stuttgart. His music is published by Theodore Presser and Columbia University Music Press.

Michael Djupstrom
Michael Djupstrom is an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan. His principal composition instructors include Susan Botti, Bright Sheng, and Erik Santos. He has been awarded a Theodore Presser Scholarship, a National Merit Scholarship, and he was a finalist for the 2000 ASCAP Young Composers’ Awards.

Hubert Cliff Ho
Hubert Cliff Ho is enrolled in the M.A./Ph.D. program in music composition at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned a joint A.B. cum laude in music and physics from Harvard University. His composition teachers include John Thow, Olly Wilson, Cindy Cox, Mario Davidovsky, Bernard Rands, and Jeff Nichols. He received first prize from the National Association of Composers USA Young Composers Competition and has had his music performed at a Society of Composers, Inc. National Student Conference, June in Buffalo, Music 99 at the University of Cincinnati, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

Sally Lamb
Sally Lamb is a Lecturer at Ithaca College. She earned her D.M.A. and M.F.A. from Cornell University, her B.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts, and also attended the University of Toronto. Her composition teachers include Steven Stucky, Roberto Sierra, Mel Powell, Barry Schrader, and Alan Chaplin. She has received a Direct Support Grant from the Community Arts Partnership in Tompkins County, NY, and a Meet The Composer grant.

Tom Swafford
Tom Swafford is a Ph.D. student at the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned his M.A. in composition. He earned his B.A. degree from Tufts University. His composition teachers include Edwin Duger, Olly Wilson, Richard Felciano, Andrew Imbrie, T.J. Anderson, and Samuel Adler. He was awarded the Roslyn Schneider Eisner Prize for Composition by UC Berkeley, and the Mabel Daniels Prize for Music at Tufts. He has attended the June in Buffalo workshop.

Joshua Penman photo by Jennifer Bassetti

Yale senior Joshua Penman composed his winning piece As It Is, Infinite between September, 1999 and May 2000. “It marked a break in my style,” he explained in a telephone interview. “I stopped trying to write cute music and decided to write something that I would find beautiful.”

Penman has a strong interest in the use of ambient sound to create “strange imaginary landscapes.” The effects he likes to employ are easier to create on electronic instruments, he admits, but he had two distinct reasons for writing As It Is for a live acoustic ensemble. First, he had the idea of a concert hall in mind as he was writing, with the goal of “filling up the space with shimmering clouds of sound. The way that instruments come out in the air can’t be replicated [electronically].” Penman takes advantage of the physical hall space in a more concrete way, as well: he places two of the four percussionists on the left and right side of the audience, allowing for “stereo panning effects” when figures are passed from player to player.

Penman also enjoys using live players for their musicality, a facet he has taken advantage of by writing two featured solo parts for English horn and for cello. “The solo lines are very difficult,” he confessed. Much of the time the two instruments play in unison. “They evoke this kind of quasi-Arabic lyrical character,” he explained. The florid melodic writing is juxtaposed with “the large sound mass” formed by the rest of the orchestra.

There are other elements in the piece that reference a kind of “quasi-exoticism,” according to Penman. For example, there is a “Gamelan-like” repeating cycle played on Thai button gongs, accompanied by stacks of artificial harmonics in the strings. “I wasn’t trying to use elements of any other music,” Penman explained. “I was just trying to evoke a far-away, distant, imaginary world.”

Penman is currently involved in rehearsals for his opera Samadhi-Lila, which will be performed at Yale in April. He wrote his own libretto for this 80-minute work for chamber ensemble, singer, two actors, three dancers, electronics, and “almost 1300 light bulbs.”

Gregory Spears started his piece Circle Stories while on a Fulbright grant in Denmark in 2000 and finished it during his first semester in the Master’s program at Yale. Spears describes Circle Stories as “layered,” both vertically and horizontally. The piece is based on a “chorale” of his own invention. He then wrote a short piece using each chord. “Each invention on a chord will last two or three measures, and there is a different kind of music for each chord.” For each section, there are also layers stacked within the orchestra. “There are different kinds of music, music inspired by Sibelius, and Tchaikovsky, but always behind a veil.” One of the ways that Spears creates “distortion” is through different kinds of string “noise.” He asks the violins, for instance, to produce “normal” sound and “scratching noise” and everything in between. “I’m glad the ACO will be reading this,” he confessed,” they’re not going to be phased by that sort of thing.”

Spears thinks that Circle Stories could be perceived as a “chain of vignettes.” Though the piece is “fragmentary,” he feels that there is still a strong narrative pull. “There are all these little stories chained together,” he commented, “and within each there is a cyclical process being explored.”

At the moment, Spears is finishing the re-orchestration of an earlier work, Dim, for string quartet, vocal quartet, harp, synthesizer, celesta, and percussion. It will be performed on April 26, 2001 as part of the New Music New Haven series at Yale. “It is the opposite of [Circle Stories],” Spears stated. Dim is also based on a chorale, but here he treats it in a more minimalist fashion. The result is “an ambient texture” as opposed to the “more collage-like” orchestra piece.