“Evocative Original Music” – LOS ANGELES TIMES
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“Evocative original music” – LOS ANGELES TIMES A composer who brings to her music feverish imagination, impeccable musicianship, complexity, versatility, unbridled joy, and fearlessness, Emmy-award winning composer Laura Karpman’s rigorous musical approach, coupled with conceptual and progressive uses of technology and recording, is that of a true 21st century American composer. Named one of the most important women in Hollywood by Variety Magazine, she is one of a handful of female composers with an active career in film and television, winning four Emmys and receiving an additional seven nominations, an Annie Award nomination and two GANG awards and a nomination for her video game music. Karpman’s concert music is widely performed in major venues internationally, and her lifelong obsession with jazz (which began with memorizing Ella Fitzgerald’s scat solos at age 11) is embedded in her uniquely creative work. Recent and upcoming commissions include a new opera Wilde Tales for The Glimmerglass Festival, her new genre-breaking work Hidden World of Girls with the Kitchen Sisters for the Cabrillo Festival, the One Ten Project for the Los Angeles Opera, Different Lanes for string quartet and two iPads, a new opera Balls! about Billie Jean King/Bobby Riggs with New York Times columnist Gail Collins for The Industry in LA (and for which she received an Opera America female composer grant), plus works for the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus and Pacific Symphony. Karpman's ground-breaking, two-time Grammy-Award winning score for the multi- media evening ASK YOUR MAMA, featuring Jessye Norman, The Roots, jazz vocalist de’Adre Aziza, and George Manahan conducting, premiered with the Orchestra of St. Luke's to a sold-out house at Carnegie Hall and made its West Coast premiere, with Nnenna Freelon joining the cast, at the Hollywood Bowl and returned to New York’s famed Apollo Theater. Her concert works have been commissioned by Carnegie Hall, percussionist Evelyn Glennie, Los Angeles Opera, Tonya Pinkins, American Composers Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic, Juilliard Choral Union, among others, and performed by orchestras and ensembles internationally, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Cabrillo Music Festival and conductor Marin Alsop, Juilliard Chorus, and the Detroit, Richmond, Seattle, Houston, New York Youth, Tucson, San Jose Chamber, and Prague Symphonies. Her theater catalog includes three musicals for Los Angeles's A Noise Within theater company as well as underscore for dozens of classic plays. Among her extensive media music credits are most recently the score to WGN hit TV series Underground, Steven Spielberg's Emmy-winning 20-hour miniseries Taken, PBS's acclaimed series The Living Edens, for which she received nine Emmy nominations, a collaboration with Raphael Saadiq scoring the musical film Black Nativity for Fox Searchlight, plus numerous films, television programs and video games, including music for Halo 3 and her award-winning score for Everquest II. Karpman received an Annie Award nomination for "A Monkey's Tale," a short film commissioned by the Chinese government, the score later received its US premiere by the Detroit Symphony. Karpman has received an Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and several ASCAP Foundation and Meet the Composer Grants, residencies at Tanglewood, where she studied with John Harbison, and The MacDowell Colony. Karpman was among the first composers selected as a Sundance Institute Film Scoring Fellow, where she worked with Dave Grusin, Robert Redford, and David Raksin. She attended the Aspen Music School and spent a life-changing summer studying with the legendary Nadia Boulanger at Ecoles d'Art Américaines de Fontainebleau. She received her Bachelor of Music from the University of Michigan, where she studied with William Bolcom and Leslie Bassett, and received both her Master’s and Doctoral degrees at The Juilliard School where she studied with Milton Babbitt, composing and studying the complexities of concert music by day, while playing jazz and scat singing in Manhattan clubs by night. A member of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, she is currently a professor at USC Thornton, and has taught at UCLA, ran the first master’s degree film-scoring program at Berklee College of Music’s campus in Valencia, Spain, and has appeared as Guest Composer/Lecturer at the Juilliard School, San Francisco Conservatory, Mills College, Emerson College, and many others. She is founder and President of the Alliance for Women Film Composers, an advisor at the Sundance Institute, serves on the Music Peer Group Executive Committee of The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and was recently elected Governor of the Music Branch of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Photo: Histeria Producciones PRESS NEW YORK TIMES “Ms. Karpman’s music [in ASK YOUR MAMA], melding Ivesian collage with club-culture remixing, morphed from one vivid section to the next in a dream-like flow, with repeated phrases and motifs lending a strand of continuity. The audience thundered its approval.” SAN FRANCISCO CLASSICAL VOICE “The night belonged to Karpman [for her piece Hidden World of Girls], who’s brilliant underscoring showed her cinematic chops through and through. Karpman is a true craftswoman, whose sensibilities in, and understanding of, multimedia served to uncover new emotional dimensions. Her compositions were bold and self-assured.” VARIETY “…imaginative, colorful, and often surprisingly varied music.” VANITY FAIR “[ASK YOUR MAMA] is fevered, restrained, super-lush in turns…always impressive.” LOS ANGELES TIMES “Laura Karpman's "Waxing Nostalgic" for viola, guitar and electronics was fascinating churning of historic scratchy Edison wax cylinders made by a historical local figure, Charles Lummis, into snappy Latin rhythms.” SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS “We just listened and marveled.” GRAMOPHONE "Karpman has developed the skill to shift musical gears with ease" SMITHSONIAN.COM “[In ASK YOUR MAMA] words take flight, soaring to the rafters...both funny and prescient...playful and serious all at once.” THE NEW YORKER “Carnegie Hall...reaches a climax with Laura Karpman’s new work [ASK YOUR MAMA]” LOS ANGELES TIMES “Hidden Girls" could become a work worth wide exposure.” COVERS MAGAZINE “[ASK YOUR MAMA]....one of the most compelling pieces to rile ears this side of the twentieth century.” NEW MUSIC BOX “[In Rounds for viola and piano] the music was so visual that a film could have been made as accompaniment to the score.” OUT MAGAZINE “A pioneer.” THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER "[Karpman] has got some real chops.” Cabrillo Festival's 50th anniversary By Joshua Kosman | Published 2:17 pm, Wednesday, July 25, 2012 No one ever accused Marin Alsop or the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music of thinking small. So as the festival's 50th anniversary season came into view, they decided to commission a big multimedia extravaganza to mark the event. The result, which has its world premiere this weekend during the festival's opening program, is "Hidden World of Girls: Stories for Orchestra," a musical and audio exploration of female lives from around the world. The 90-minute piece is based on the popular radio series created for NPR by Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, the producing team known as the Kitchen Sisters, with music by four composers led by Laura Karpman. "The original idea was to try to figure how these stories could be adapted to work as an evening's entertainment," Karpman said during a recent phone interview. "The Kitchen Sisters have these fantastic stories, but they're finished pieces. The question was how to keep what they do intact, and still bring that work into the context of a symphonic culture." The solution was to assemble a collection of radio stories and stand-alone orchestral pieces, stitched together communally after the manner of a quilting bee. Karpman, who has extensive experience writing music for film and television, wrote new orchestral scores for 10 of the existing radio segments, designed to be performed live. Then she and Alsop tagged three younger female composers - Alexandra du Bois, Clarice Assad and Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum - to write orchestral pieces in response to a particular story of their own choosing. "The idea was for them to each write a piece that was kind of programmatic, but not really," says Karpman. "We decided we wanted to give them an opportunity to respond musically to these stories, without taking on the burden of a traditional storytelling underscore." The music that emerged spans the globe, from the Iranian desert conjured up in du Bois' "Beneath Boundaries" to the mass graves of El Mozote, El Salvador, treated in Assad's "The Disappeared." Kroll-Rosenbaum's "Double Adventures" takes listeners into the expanses of outer space. Karpman's contribution, "Portraits for Orchestra and Samples," found its inspiration from photographs taken in the prisons of Louisiana by Deborah Luster. "She takes these amazing photographs that are like frozen moments in time. They're choreographed by the prisoners themselves - dressing up and showing themselves with chosen objects - and they're always the opposite of what you'd expect. The project is just drenched in humanity." Karpman, 53, has pursued a multifold career for years, ever since graduating from the Juilliard School in New York. She's won four Emmys for her scores for the PBS series "The Living Edens," and been nominated for her work on the science fiction series "Odyssey 5." She's written music for video games and political campaigns. But she's also been an active composer of concert music - most recently "Ask Your Mama," a large orchestral setting of Langston Hughes' poetry premiered in 2009 by soprano Jessye Norman. Future plans include a number of film documentaries and an opera based on the 1973 Battle of the Sexes tennis showdown between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.