Composer Symposium with Bright Sheng & Bernard Rands
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the philadelphia music project presents new frontiers in music: Composer Symposium with Bright Sheng & Bernard Rands thursday, may 27 registration deadline: monday, may 24, 2010 The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage This event is free, but registration is required. 1608 Walnut Street, 18th floor To register, please call PMP at 267.350.4960 Philadelphia, PA 19103 or email Elizabeth Sayre at [email protected] moderated by Melissa Smey Executive Director, Miller Theatre 4:15 – 4:30 pm Sign-in 4:30 – 6:30 pm Symposium 6:30 pm Reception More than two centuries of ongoing international and cross-cultural encounters have had a profound influence on the music of the United States. In this PMP Composer Symposium, Bernard Rands and Bright Sheng—both preeminent North American composers, both born overseas—discuss their music and careers. Rands and Sheng will share recordings and insights into their compositional processes and influences, including their studies around the world and here in the States. They will also address the business of composition: commissioning, publishing, recording, and more. Melissa Smey, director of New York City’s groundbreaking contemporary music presenter Miller Theatre, leads the discussion. about the composers: Bright Sheng’s music is noted for its lyrical melodies, propulsive Bartokian rhythms, and dramatic theatricality. Many of the Shanghai-born composer’s works exhibit strong Asian influences, a result of his decades-long study of folk music from China to Tibet. The MacArthur Foundation proclaimed Sheng “an innovative composer who merges diverse musical customs in works that transcend conventional aesthetic boundaries.” He has been the recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships and the Naumberg Award. Bernard Rands’ distinctive style has been variously described as “plangent lyricism” with ”dramatic intensity” and a ”musicality and clarity of idea allied to a sophisticated and elegant technical mastery.” Born in England, Rands developed his unique voice in studies with Dallapiccola and Berio. He was the recipient of the Kennedy Center Friedheim Award and the Pulitzer Prize in Music and has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This event is produced by the Philadelphia Music Project, a program of The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. Through more than a hundred published works and many recordings, Bernard Rands is established as a major figure in contemporary music. His work Canti del Sole, premiered by Paul Sperry, Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic, won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize in Music. His large orchestral suites, Le Tambourin, won the 1986 Kennedy Center Friedheim Award. Current projects include an opera entitled VINCENT commissioned by Indiana University, which will premiere in spring 2011; an orchestral work commissioned by the Chicago Symphony and Maestro Muti, which will premiere in fall 2010; and a new work for solo piano for American pianist Jonathan Biss for his debut Carnegie Hall recital in January 2011. Recent projects include a new work commissioned by the New York Philharmonic; a work for solo piano (12 Preludes) for pianist Robert Levin; and a new work for the PRISM Quartet. Conductors including Barenboim, Boulez, Berio, Maderna, Marriner, Mehta, Muti, Ozawa, Rilling, Salonen, Sawallisch, Schiff, Schuller, Schwarz, Silverstein, Sinopoli, Slatkin, von Dohnanyi, and Zinman have programmed his music. Mr. Rands’ works are widely performed and frequently recorded. His work Canti D’Amor, recorded by Chanticleer, won a Grammy Award in 2000. The recording of his Canti Trilogy for soprano, tenor, and bass with chamber orchestra was released in December 2004 to great critical acclaim, including a place on Time Out New York’s top-ten CDs of the year. He has been honored by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; B.M.I.; the Guggenheim Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; Meet the Composer; the Barlow, Fromm, and Koussevitzky Foundations, among many others. A dedicated and passionate teacher, Mr. Rands has been guest composer at many international festivals and Composer in Residence at the Aspen and Tanglewood festivals. He is the Walter Bigelow Rosen Research Professor of Music at Harvard University where he taught with distinction for almost twenty years. In 2004 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. MacArthur Fellow Bright Sheng (b. 1955) is currently the Leonard Bernstein Distinguished University Professor at University of Michigan. He has been recognized with fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim, Jerome, Naumberg, and Rockefeller foundations, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and ASCAP, among others. Sheng has collaborated with distinguished musicians such as Leonard Bernstein, Kurt Masur, Christoph Eschenbach, Charles Dutoit, Leonard Slatkin, Gerard Schwarz, David Robertson, David Zinman, Neeme Järvi, Robert Spano, Hugh Wolff, Yo Yo Ma, Peter Serkin, Emanuel Ax, Chao-Liang Lin, Yefim Bronfman, and Evelyn Glennie. He has been widely commissioned and performed by a great many important musical institutions in North America, Europe, and Asia, including the White House, the 2008 Beijing International Olympic Games, the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, l’Orchestre de Paris, the BBC Symphony, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Santa Fe Opera, and the New York City Opera. Exclusively published by G. Schirmer, Inc., he can also be heard on Naxos, Sony Classical, Telarc, Delos, Koch International, New World labels and BIS Grammofon AB. His music ranges from dramatic to lyrical and is strongly influenced by folk and classical musical traditions from eastern and central Asia. Since 2000, he has been studying and researching the music phenomenon of the Silk Road culture. And he also has served as the Artistic Advisor to Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project, Inc. As a conductor and pianist, he has performed with the San Francisco Symphony, the Detroit Symphony, the Seattle Symphony, the New York Chamber Symphony, the St. Petersburg Philharmonic in Russia, the Dortmund Philharmonic in Germany, the China National Symphony, among others; and has appeared at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Kennedy Center. Melissa Smey was appointed Director of Miller Theatre at Columbia University in 2009. From 2001 to 2008, she served as Miller’s General Manager, in which capacity she managed operations, collaborated on programming—including curating the jazz series, which draws diverse audiences from the surrounding communities of Harlem and Washington Heights—and developed subscriptions that grew from 0 to over 600 in four years. Her passion for audience development continues in her new role at the Theatre; under her direction, in the fall of 2009, Miller Theatre hosted a festival that paired classical music with independent rock bands to invite audiences of all ages to listen more widely. Prior to her arrival at Miller, Smey held positions at the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Opera. She has served as a panelist and speaker for various New York City and national arts organizations, including New York University and Chamber Music America. She holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Connecticut and an MFA in performing arts management from Brooklyn College..