Packard Hall the Music of Stephen Scott
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The Music of Stephen Scott: A Retrospective 1977 1987 2011 2013 March 29 & 30, 2014 Colorado College Packard Hall 1 2 3 5 6 Terry Riley 4 9 8 10 7 11 12 13 Stephen Scott Biography Stephen Scott was born in Corvallis, Oregon in 1944 to parents trained in the sciences; early study of music included tutoring in recorder in England, clarinet and saxophone in school bands, and private study and transcription of recordings by Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Gil Evans, Oliver Nelson and John Coltrane in high school. He played saxophones and piano in a jazz quintet as a teenager, but he also learned and played, as a clarinetist, the classics of the European tradition. After studying composition with Homer Keller at the University of Oregon and Gerald Shapiro at Brown, he met and studied informally with Steve Reich in Ghana. Later he collaborated with Terry Riley, and these two composers became his most important influences outside jazz. Scott is a professor of music at Colorado College and has served the Music Department as both chair and associate chair. In 1972 he established the Colorado College New Music Ensemble (NME), and in 1977 The Bowed Piano Ensemble, a branch of the NME. He has served on the faculty of The Evergreen State College and as visiting composer at Eastman School of Music, Aspen Music School, New England Conservatory, Princeton University, University of Southern California, Cal Arts, and at festivals and conservatories in Germany, Italy, Estonia, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Ireland, Norway, England, Italy, Canary Islands, Malta, Bermuda, New Zealand and Australia. In February 2011 he and New York Philharmonic English horn soloist Thomas Stacy premiered his Lyric Suite for English Horn and Bowed Piano. In the summer of 2004 Scott was a resident scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Study and Conference Center on Lake Como, Italy. In 2008 United States Artists named Scott the USA Simon Fellow. Scott is listed in New Grove's Dictionary of American Music and Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, and his work is discussed in several books on twentieth-century music. Awards include commissions from Meet the Composer/USA, Pacific Symphony and the Barlow Endowment, a grant from the Peter S. Reed Foundation, the New England Conservatory/Rockefeller Foundation Chamber Music Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts Composer's Fellowship. His music may be heard on the New Albion, Albany and Navona labels. Film and television credits include Traffic (DVD version), Egg: the Arts Show (PBS) and the NBC special Revenge of the Whale. Scott lives in Colorado Springs with his wife, Victoria Hansen, who tours with the Bowed Piano Ensemble as soprano soloist. Scott’s interests outside music include reading and writing, sailing, hiking with friends and his grown children, anesthesiologist Benjamin Scott of Denver and public radio reporter Amy Scott of Baltimore and their spouses, pediatrician Halden Scott and photographer/art professor Alex Heilner. Scott has summited ten Colorado “Fourteeners” and several peaks in Oregon and Washington. He has three grandsons and expects his first granddaughter to arrive in May. All of the Scotts, from the elders to the toddlers and infants, seem to have hot feet and travel quite a bit. Stephen’s parents were world travelers and often took their three young children along. By 1957 Stephen and his brother and sister had visited all of the then forty-eight states, as well as Great Britain and most of Western Europe. Visits to Hawai’i and Alaska came much later. At Colorado College, Scott’s passions for music and travel seemed made for each other; from 1972 to the present, his ensembles, from NME to BPE, have toured at least once, and often twice, almost every academic year. More about the travels and travails of ensemble touring will be found on the final program page. Saturday, March 29 – Symposium Session Welcome Remarks Ryan Raul Bañagale, PhD, Class of 2000 Assistant Professor of Music, Colorado College A Brief Overview of the Bowed Piano Current members of the Bowed Piano Ensemble demonstrate how the instrument produces a variety of intricate and subtle sounds through a host of techniques. From Workbench to Soundboard: the Maiden Voyage of ‘Vikings’ Shawn Marie Keener, Class of 1993 PhD Candidate in Music History, University of Chicago “My experience at CC, first as a music major, then as department paraprofessional, is unimaginable without Steve. Sound walks around campus, ruined pianos, trips to the junkyard for instruments, the opportunity (and permission) to make music with fire—who but Steve could make these possible? The rigors of participating in the Bowed Piano Ensemble, not the least of which was getting to rehearsals at the crack of dawn, paid off in a uniquely intimate experience of ensemble musicianship. Touring the world and recording Vikings of the Sunrise made all the bleary-eyed rehearsing and the stern 7:35 wake- up calls worth it. Thanks for everything, Steve!” Bowing Together in Time Tamara Roberts, PhD, Class of 2000 Assistant Professor of Music, University of California, Berkeley “I first came to know Steve through his music. I was fascinated by the BPE in my first year at CC and couldn’t wait to get a chance to audition and learn to create those sounds myself. As an ensemble member, student, and (later) paraprof, I grew to know Steve as a person: a fantastic teacher, encouraging director, pragmatic producer, and a fiercely creative composer who creates music that speaks to the mind and the soul.” Messages, Memories & Music Fifty years of performing, composing and revolutionizing music adds up to a wealth of stories and a trove of memories. At this point in the program, alumni, scholars, critics, composers and colleagues share their remarks and reflections on Stephen Scott and his influence. Contributing Distinguished Alumni RYAN RAUL BAÑAGALE (CC Class of 2000) is an Assistant Professor of music at Colorado College where he offers classes on a range of American music topics, including musical theatre, jazz, popular music, and media studies. A recipient of the American Musicological Society’s AMS-50 and Howard Mayer Brown Fellowships, he received his PhD from Harvard University in 2011. His work appears in journals such as Jazz Perspectives and the Journal of the Society For American Music. His first book, titled Arranging Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue and the Creation of an American Icon, will be published by Oxford University Press in the fall of 2014. He currently sits on the editorial board of the George Gershwin Critical Edition and will be editing at least three separate arrangements of Rhapsody in Blue. SHAWN MARIE KEENER (CC Class of 1993) is a cultural historian of vernacular music in early modern Italy. Her dissertation, “The giustiniana phenomenon and Venetian cultural memory, 1400- 1600,” investigates how a peculiarly Venetian style of singing navigates the space between written and oral traditions and indexes shifting notions of civic identity. Keener’s work has been supported in part by a Fulbright Fellowship for a year of research in Venice and a William Rainey Harper–Provost’s Dissertation-Year Fellowship from the University of Chicago. She has contributed to two volumes of collected essays and has presented her work at national meetings of the American Musicological Society and the Renaissance Society of America, as well as other symposia in the U.S.A., Italy, and Germany. TAMARA ROBERTS (CC Class of 2000) is Assistant Professor of Music at University of California, Berkeley, where she is also affiliated faculty with the Folklore program and Gender and Womens Studies. Her current research investigates connections between sound and race, centering on interracial and intercultural histories of popular and folk music in the Americas. Her forthcoming book, Resounding Afro Asia: Interracial Music and the Performance of Unity (Oxford UP), examines Afro Asian musical collaborations as a window onto inter-minority politics in the post-multicultural era. Tamara also co-edited Yellow Power, Yellow Soul: The Radical Art of Fred Ho (Illinois UP), a special issue of Journal of Popular Music Studies on Michael Jackson, and has published several other articles and essays. She has given keynote addresses and guest lectures on music, race, Afro Asian cultural politics, and theatrical sound design at a variety of institutions in the U.S. and abroad. Tamara is also an active musician and has worked nationally and internationally as a composer, sound designer, and performer (percussion, voice) in theater, dance, and film. She performs with a number of Bay Area musicians, including Las Bomberas de la Bahía and The Crane and The Crow. Tamara recently co- founded the HushArbor, a community-based performance workshop that promotes the study and performance of early African American music, an endeavor closely linked with her new research on spirituality, technology, and politics in plantation slavery-era music in the U.S. and Puerto Rico. DANIEL WIENCEK (CC Class of 1991) joined the BPE as a sophomore in 1988, and has been fortunate enough to be on a handful recordings and several tours throughout the world. He has served as BPE rehearsal critic, concert video mixer, and occasional ensemble fill-in. Of course, he’s also been an enthusiastic concertgoer. Saturday Concert March 29 7:30 p.m. Packard Hall Departures (1996) Stephen Scott Batavia, 1770 (b. 1944) Ruth Blues for Miles and Gil June Tune (for Bill Evans) Vivian Lake Victoria, 1970 Ryan Raul Bañagale, piano These six miniatures were commissioned by pianist Lois Svard and premiered by her at Colorado College in September 1997. The title reflects a sense of departure inherent at three different levels. First, the scope of the piece differs hugely from my custom of writing works of symphonic proportions.