Category: Headlines

On January 11, the National Endowment for the Arts announced $20,452,500 awarded through 825 grants in the first major funding round of fiscal year 2001. The awards, constituting 24% of the Endowment’s grant funds for the year, will be distributed to nonprofit national, regional, state and local organizations across the country. The Arts Endowment’s FY 2001 budget appropriation is $105 million, an increase of $7 million over last year’s budget and the agency’s first increase since 1992. Of the $105 million, $87 million is designated for grantmaking.

Grants will be distributed through two of the Endowment’s major Grants to Organizations categories, Creativity and Organizational Capacity, as well as through Leadership Initiatives and Literature Fellowships. Creativity awards comprise the largest single element of the Endowment’s direct grantmaking work.

Grant distribution is Creativity with 718 grants totaling $16,335,500; Organizational Capacity with 60 grants totaling $2,272,000; and Leadership Initiatives with seven grants totaling $1,045,000. Within these categories, multi-state projects—those with broad impact reaching audiences in several states—constitute $7,530,500 in grant funds. All grants to organizations must be matched at least dollar for dollar. In addition, the Endowment will award $800,000 through Literature Fellowships, 34 fellowships in poetry and six fellowships for translation of poetry into English from other languages.

Creativity (formerly Creation & Presentation) grants will support all aspects of the creation and presentation of artistic work. Projects funded with these grants will result in the anticipated creation of 170 new works, including 70 commissions; 87 exhibitions; 150 publications; and 500 performances, readings and festivals. 200 artists will participate in residencies and workshops supported by Creativity grants. Among the grant recipients whose projects dealt with new American music, the Albany Symphony received a grant to support Composing the Future; Minnesota Orchestra received a grant to support a series of eleven commissions; Portland Stage Company, in partnership with the Women’s Project and Productions, received a grant to support the development and co-production of Kim D. Sherman and Kate Moira Ryan’s Leaving Queens; and Michigan Opera Theatre received a grant to support the commission of a new opera by Richard Danielpour and Toni Morrison. For a complete list of Creativity grant recipients, click here.

For more information on the Albany Symphony’s $25,000 grant, click here.

For more information on the Minnesota Orchestra’s $75,000 grant, click here.

For more information on the Portland Stage Company’s $22,000 grant, click here.

For more information on the Michigan Opera Theatre’s $25,000 grant, click here.

Organizational Capacity grants will support projects that develop future arts leaders and enhance the skills of those already working in the field. This new grant category is the result of ten colloquia convened in 1999 by the Arts Endowment to discuss strategies for strengthening arts organizations. It refines the goals of the Endowment’s earlier grant category, Planning & Stabilization. For a complete list of Organizational Capacity grant recipients, click here.

Through the Endowment’s Leadership Initiatives, funds will support significant national projects in accessibility, dance creation and touring, and the commissioning of music. An example of projects supported is Adaptive Environments Center in Boston and its Access to Design Professionals program, a first-time effort to increase the number of and support for people with disabilities in design professions. For a complete list of Leadership Initiatives grant recipients, click here.

Karissa Krenz photo by Melissa Richard

Margaret M. Lioi, CEO of Chamber Music America, is pleased to announce the appointment of Karissa Krenz as Editor of Chamber Music magazine, the award-winning bi-monthly magazine published by Chamber Music America. “It is always a sign of an organization’s strength to promote from within. We are delighted to support Ms. Krenz as she grows into her new position,” said Ms. Lioi.

Karissa Krenz replaces Johanna B. Keller, who was Editor for the past three years. Formerly the Associate Editor of Chamber Music magazine, Ms. Krenz has written for a number of publications including Stagebill, Gramophone Explorations 4, and NewMusicBox. Ms. Krenz holds a degree in music history from Bucknell and studied music composition at Bucknell and Wesleyan Universities.

“I’m delighted to be following in the footsteps of Johanna Keller. I look forward to working with my colleagues at CMA to uphold the magazine’s high standards while continuing to push the limits and educate the cultural community about the expanding art form of chamber music.”

Ms. Krenz said in an interview that she hopes to be able to focus increasingly on “hard-hitting issues that are important to the industry, to the chamber music field, and to CMA’s members. [I want to print] things that will get our readers to respond, that will create a dialogue. That may take a while with a bi-monthly.”

Ms. Krenz received a bachelor’s degree in music history from Bucknell University, where she studied composition with Kyle Gann and William Duckworth. She has also studied with Alvin Lucier and Meredith Monk. Given her background as a composer, she is naturally eager to continue Chamber Music’s coverage of issues relating to new music. “So many composers write chamber music because it is affordable to write,” she commented. Chamber Music runs regular features on new music and on jazz by Kyle Gann and Gene Santoro, respectively. She hopes to augment information on composers with more information on ensembles who play new music.

CMA, the national service organization for professional chamber music professionals, was founded in 1977 to support the creation and performance of ensemble music across the country. With a membership of more than 10,000, including musicians, ensembles, presenters, artists, managers, educators, institutions, and advocates of ensemble music, CMA welcomes and represents a wide range of musical styles and ensemble formations. In addition to an annual conference, CMA provides its members with consulting services, health and instrument insurance, grant programs, and several publications including the bi-monthly magazine, Chamber Music, and website, www.chamber-music.org.

Margaret Lioi photo by Melissa Richard

The National Endowment for the Arts and Chamber Music America have entered into a four-year program wherein the NEA will make additional funds available to one of CMA’s five annual commissioning-grant recipients, specifically for performance costs.

“We have a commissioning program that requires the work be performed three times,” explains Margaret M. Lioi, CMA’s chief executive officer. “But we do not fund the performances.” Instead, CMA makes its award to the ensemble, presenter, or festival that applies, which in turn pays the composer his or her commissioning fee.

”It’s very difficult to get presenters to make the commitment to perform new work, because it’s risky,” Lioi elaborated. “This provides fee support for the group, making it a wonderful incentive to get the [commissioned] pieces performed. That is the point of the program.”

The amount of the NEA funds will differ from year to year. For the fiscal year beginning July 2001, it is $47,500. That will augment the $7,500 commission fee, $1,000 copying costs, and up to $3,000 ensemble honorarium that comprise each of the CMA commissioning program grants. The intent-to-apply deadline for the current round of commissioning grants is Wednesday, January 31. The final application is due April 15.

Applications are reviewed by a peer panel and judged on the quality of ensemble (through “blind” tape), the composer specified for the commission, and such routine criteria as outreach and internal housekeeping. The CMA panel will determine which of the grant recipients will get the NEA monies. “We will have to come up with special criteria for that,” says Lioi. The NEA funds will be given to CMA for distribution.

The idea for the program, which apparently took some board members by surprise when it was announced at the CMA conference on January 14, came out of discussions between Wayne Brown, who heads up the opera and music programs at the National Endowment for the Arts, and Viki Roth, senior program director for CMA. Its full title is the Chamber Music America-National Endowment for the Arts Special Commissioning Award.

February 2001 marked the debut releases of two Cantaloupe CDs, which are currently available on the Cantaloupe website. The first is Renegade Heaven, featuring the Bang On A Can All-Stars in compositions written for them by Glenn Branca, Arnold Dreyblatt, Michael Gordon, Phil Kline, and Julia Wolfe. harmonia mundi will release Renegade Heaven into stores on March 13, 2001. The pieces are united by an edgy spirituality: Wolfe’s Believing, Branca’s Movement Within, Dreyblatt’s Escalator, Gordon’s I Buried Paul and Kline’s Exquisite Corpses deal with faith, ascension, death and the afterlife.

Also available is The Passing Measures, composer David Lang’s newest work, performed by bass clarinetist Marty Ehrlich with members of the orchestra and chorus of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. This CD will hit the shelves on April 10, 2001.

Passing Measures was a joint commission by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and the presenter Birmingham Jazz. The recording was made from a live performance. Lang calls the piece “an absolute reduction of what both [Birmingham and Ehrlich] can do. “Having originally come to him wanting a piece for a jazz soloist in a classical context, Lang feared that the language of either classical music or jazz, when imported into another context, “would be misinterpreted.”

Lang describes the piece as “hugely mathematical.” It took him eight months to work out the numbers. The extremely slow tempo hides somewhat the fact that the meter changes every measure. Halfway through the 42-minute piece, the notes change, and the first dissonance is introduced. Two-thirds of the way through, the pace quickens. “If you can lower your blood pressure enough, it sounds like a Beethoven scherzo,” Lang quipped.

“Meditation is the wrong word, but a large part of this music exists to teach you to listen to the rest of the music. It takes a long time for the body and the ear to learn,” the composer explained. Lang wanted to write a piece that was “not obvious on the surface, not manipulative. I didn’t want there to be moments when everyone laughs, everyone gasps. I wanted to write something with slow power and incredible scope.”

Cantaloupe will release virtuoso clarinetist-composer Evan Ziporyn’s first all-solo record, This is Not a Clarinet, in March 2001. The CD will be available in stores in June. Ziporyn reinvents the clarinet using traces of Balinese gamelan, African drumming, Croatian singing, and James Brown; the instrument masquerades as everything from an electric guitar to a didgeridoo to a djembe to an airplane landing.

Derek Bermel photo by Tom LeGoff

Derek Bermel‘s Dust Dances was premiered and recorded by Norwalk Symphony in 1998, and will be performed three times by the Memphis Symphony in March 2001. Dust Dances was first performed at the American Composers Orchestra’s Whitaker New Music Reading Session in 1994. It is published by Peermusic Classical.

The orchestra work Dust Dances comes out of the rhythmically intricate gyil music of West Africa. Bermel makes fluent use of polymeters, metrical undercurrents that run across the established beat, and a beat that can often be felt in two different ways simultaneously.

“The piece demands close attention to rhythm,” Bermel commented. “I wrote it when I was 24 or 25, and for the most part I wrote what I was hearing. I was trying to translate xylophone music into orchestra music, and it doesn’t translate directly.” For instance, African players don’t read music, but according to Bermel “they are thinking in several time signatures at the same time.” Translating that complex sense of pulse into the language of the American orchestral player was a challenge.

Bermel has had some hands-on experience with West African music. In addition to studying composition at Yale University and the University of Michigan with William Albright, Louis Andriessen, William Bolcom, and Michael Tenzer, he studied ethnomusicology and orchestration in Jerusalem with André Hajdu, and Lobi xylophone in Ghana with Ngmen Baaru. For more comprehensive information on both Bermel and Dust Dances, click here.

Bermel is laidback when it comes to the subject of competitions. “My teacher Bill Albright used to say [of competitions that] ‘If you win you get the money, if you lose you get the honor.’” He doesn’t apply for many competitions, admitting that he prefers practicing and writing to the work of putting together applications. In the case of Masterprize, a contact at his publisher, Peermusic Classical, alerted him to the possibility.

One of Bermel’s concerns with competitions is that if judges are picked entirely from one “sector” of the music profession, certain kinds of compositions will always prevail. For instance, a jury comprised entirely of composers will look for one thing, whereas conductors will look for something else. If there are enough different kinds of competitions, Bermel argues, unknown composers will be brought to light. He finds the Masterprize approach “interesting,” with its mix of jurors from across the music profession. Bermel is pleased that the competition benefits multiple people: the works of all twelve semifinalists will get some exposure.

Activities this year included the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center‘s premiere of Soul Garden for viola and string quintet at Alice Tully Hall, featuring violist Paul Neubauer, and the premiere of Natural Selection, four songs for medium voice and large chamber ensemble, at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, UK.

Bermel is currently working on a commission by WNYC’s John Schaefer for The Kitchen’s “house band” Kitchen House Blend. Large-scale projects on the horizon include an orchestral commission from the Westchester Philharmonic for 2002, and an opera, The Loving Family, supported by Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust and a Guggenheim Fellowship, with a libretto by Wendy S. Walters. A disc of Bermel’s chamber music is in progress at CRI, and plans for an orchestral CD are afoot.

Carter Pann photo by Carolyn Lukancic

Carter Pann’s nine-minute Slalom depicts the awesome thrill and beauty of downhill skiing at Steamboat Springs, Colorado. The American Composers Orchestra read the work in the summer of 1998 as part of their Whitaker New Music Reading Sessions and the Haddonfield Symphony premiered it in March 1999. Slalom is published by Theodore Presser.

“When I have the dough, I go downhill skiing at Steamboat Springs,” Pann explained. “I can’t do it very frequently, but I’ve been doing it for about twelve or thirteen years. I started to bring a Walkman up on the slopes to listen to my favorite tunes: the Rachmaninoff Symphonic Dances, Shostakovitch 10th Symphony, American in Paris, Cuban Overture. It sort of happened that I was on a big orchestral writing kick. I wanted to produce a barn-stormer, presto throughout.” He decided to write an orchestral piece that would depict the thrill of downhill skiing. Pann tried to convey not only the speed of skiing, but also the beauty of the scenery. He describes it as “a ten-minute bit of movie music – it’s very cinematic.”

Of course, Pann is pleased to be one of the Masterprize semifinalists. In general, however, his interest in competitions waxes and wanes. “It’s one way to supplement an income,” he posited. “Because it has the potential to give me some cash, I sometimes apply ravenously. Then [there will be] a month of nothing. They come in waves.” He also likes the opportunity for performance that competitions provide. “It’s a way to get a performance on a subscription concert [when you’re not] connected to a school or on a board somewhere.”

The 28-year-old Pann received his M.M. in composition from the University of Michigan, where he studied with William Bolcom, William Albright, and Bright Sheng. Honors in composition include the K. Serocki Competition for his Piano Concerto (premiered by the Polish Radio Symphony in Lutoslawski Hall, Warsaw), first prizes in the Zoltan Kodály and Francois d’Albert Concours Internationales de Composition, a concerto commission for clarinetist Richard Stoltzman (premiered in Carnegie Hall), a Charles Ives Scholarship from the Academy of Arts and Letters and four ASCAP composer awards. His works have been performed in the United States and Europe.

In February of 2000, four of his orchestral works were released on Naxos’ 21st-Century American Classics series. His Clarinet Concerto, originally commissioned by the New York Youth Symphony, will be recorded by Stoltzman and the Seattle Symphony in July 2001 and released on MMC. He is currently working on a concerto for the Ying Quartet and orchestra entitled Love Letters, and has plans to return to school to begin work on a doctorate in the fall of 2001.