 DAVID
CLAMAN grew up in Denver, Colorado. He holds degrees
from Wesleyan University in Connecticut, the University of
Colorado at Boulder, and Princeton University. During the
1980s he played electric bass in rock bands in Boston and
he still picks up an electric guitar on occasion. Before joining
the faculty at Holy Cross, he was a visiting professor of
music at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. His music has
been performed in the United States, Canada, Europe, and India
at such venues as the Bang on a Can Marathon at Lincoln Center
in New York, at Merkin Hall in New York, and at the Hans Eisler
Academy in Berlin. Recordings can be found on the Innova and
Princeton labels. In 1998-1999, Claman was awarded a fellowship
from The American Institute of Indian Studies and spent the
year studying, teaching and composing in Madras, India. During
2001-2002 he held residencies at the MacDowell Colony and
at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy.
He has received commissions from The American Composers Forum
to compose a piece for New York’s Cygnus Ensemble, from
the High Altitude Trombone Quartet, from the New Millenium
Ensemble, and from Princeton University.
David's piece Loose Canons, scored for three electric
guitars playing e-bows, "was written in response to the
music of Johannes Ockeghem (ca. 1410-1497). Ockeghem's music
has been described as idiosyncratic, without system, even
as 'sounding improvised.' He has also been characterized as
a 'pure cerebralist, almost exclusively preoccupied with intellectual
problems.'"
Listen to Loose
Canons (mp3)
 JENNIFER
FITZGERALD (b. 1975) is the recipient of national
awards and fellowships from the American Composers Orchestra,
the North Carolina Arts Council, the Millay Colony, the Virginia
Center for the Creative Arts and others and she was a finalist
for the National Symphony Orchestra’s American Residency
Commission in North Carolina. Fitzgerald’s music has
been performed at the American Dance Festival, the Duke/UNC
Milestones Festival, The Eastman School of Music, Tufts University,
and Vassar College, as well as other venues throughout North
America. Fitzgerald is the pianist for Durham, NC’s
new music ensemble and composers collective, pulsoptional.
She holds a PhD in Composition from Duke University and is
currently a postdoctoral fellow at Lawrence University.
Jennifer's piece how terrible orange
"is a manifestation of the performer relationships within
my long-term ensemble, pulsoptional.
The classical guitarist and I (the pianist) had performed
primarily as soloists before we began playing with pulsoptional
while the other instrumentalists had a tremendous amount and
variety of ensemble experience, including rock and jazz. The
piece is in three parts – two related outer sections
that frame an inner core. The outer sections are characterized
by two main ideas that compete with each other. The saxophone,
voice, electric guitar and percussion raise hell with a series
of monolithic chords in terrifyingly difficult rhythms. At
the same time, the classical guitar and piano play continuous
figures of a more melodic character, but while the material
that the guitarist and pianist play is similar, they rarely
play in unison. They must struggle to stay together while
the rest of the ensemble wails around them. The inner section
is the moment in which everyone finds each other and plays
together to achieve the same musical goal."
Listen
to how terrible orange (mp3)
 MONIKA
HEIDEMANN twists together jazz sensibility, improvisation,
catchy pop melodies, the grind of rock n’ roll and enough
subconscious creativity to still question where her music
could have come from. Monika's musical endeavors started with
the saxophone in the 4th grade elementary school band and
continued into her years at the University of Vermont in Burlington.
Initially pursuing a career in wildlife biology, Monika instead
found herself singing and playing saxophone in local rock
bands. While in Burlington, she directed and arranged for
the a cappella group The Cat’s Meow and led her own
jazz trio with local artists. In May 2003, Monika received
her Master’s degree in Jazz Performance from the New
England Conservatory where she studied jazz voice, improvisation,
and composition with artists Dominique Eade, Danilo Perez,
Jerry Bergonzi, and Steve Lacy. Monika performs her original
music with The Monika H. Band. She also sings with The Animal
Channel (ethnic inspired dance), The Bunkbeds (electro-pop),
and plays saxophone in the all female Afro-beat band, FemmNameless.
In writing her piece, The Incoming Queen,
Monika "drew upon one particular aspect of Capital M
that is absent in the other compositions they play, trying
not to lose the group sound that they had developed. I noticed
that Ian never used lyrical content in his compositions for
Capital M, so this would be a major focus in the piece. The
lyrics started out as a philosophizing with oneself on the
significance of outward beauty, trying to prove that it does
indeed matter—a sort of counter-reasoning in this day
and age where 1. we are told we must be outwardly beautiful;
2. we thought we smartened up by telling ourselves that looks
aren't everything; but 3. realized one way or another that
they actually are everything. Through exploration, it becomes
a love song. The introduction to the vocals is like the grandiose
entry of royalty, like Kings and Queens arriving on the scene
of some obscure futuristic party of intellectuals and Capital
M is the entertainment. The tension of self-importance at
the party eases itself. Everyone in the room is joyously dancing
by the end."
 BRADLEY
KEMP graduated in 2002 from the New England Conservatory
with a B.M. in double bass performance, under the mentorship
of Don Palma. Kemp's compositions have been performed in Boston,
New York, Philadelphia, Miami, and Graz, Austria. His orchestral
arrangements have been played by the Houston Symphony and
Detroit Symphony, among others. Tracks from Kemp's ambient/IDM
electronic album (titled under his pseudonym b-radius) are
used in several documentaries currently showing at the Santa
Barbara Museum, CA. Mr. Kemp currently writes, plays and sings
in The Bunkbeds with Monika Heidemann, co-directs Ditch Productions
(multi-media performances), performs with a Feldman &
Cage trio "Kilter," is fulfilling a grant from the
Henry Cowell Performance Incentive Fund, and is an Artist
in Residence of The Space in Long Island City, Queens.
Bradley writes, "Air Around is
a simple passing of sounds; their constant returning, looping
and sustaining slowly creates individual atmospheres. In the
slightly shifting texture, the ear naturally circles through
a palette of timbres and tones. The ear is not led; it is
presented with the musical equivalent of two-dimensional splashes
of color, allowing the ears to fall where they will at any
given moment. The piece does not have compositional complexity,
but instead has a complexity in its realization, in the sonic
and psychological experience it seeks to evoke. This piece
is influenced by childhood memories many people share. Imagine
being a bored child, sitting on a water bank. You are passing
time watching a stick get caught in a circular current of
a pond, moving in various manners at various speeds, but with
no particular direction or purpose. After a while one pays
close attention to the water, the grass, the leaves and the
air as well as the stick, seeing the effect each element has
on the others. Natural complexities slowly float to the surface
of the mind's eye when one stares, or listens, to anything
for extended periods of time. It is this experience Air
Around seeks to provide."
 IAN
MOSS began his musical studies at the age of 12 by
transcribing classics from the Wee Sing songbook for his computer’s
monophonic PC speaker. His first major composition was a “rock
symphony” written as an independent study project during
his senior year in high school. While earning a degree in
music at Yale University, he served as the Undergraduate Assistant
Conductor of the Yale Glee Club, and for two years as President
of the Yale College Composers’ Group, an organization
he founded in the fall of 2000. He has sung baritone with
the Dessoff Choirs, the Canticum Novum Singers, the Choral
Arts Society of Philadelphia, and the Yale Glee Club and is
co-founder of C4: The World's First Choral Composer/Conductor
Collective. In addition to Capital M, his music has been performed
or read by ensembles including the Princeton Singers, Forecast
Music, Cerddorion, Due East, the Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia,
the Yale Symphony Orchestra, and the Way Blue Bucket. By day,
Ian is Development & Marketing Associate for the American
Music Center.
Of Art, Ian writes, "For a long
time I've wanted to combine my interests in experimental rock
and choral music, but the task seemed impossible because my
writing styles in each genre are so diametrically opposed
to each other. My music for Capital M tends to favor harsh
distortion, intense syncopation, and surges of adrenaline,
while in my choral music, I love to construct rich, delicate
harmonies that seem to go on forever, unburdened by rhythmic
concerns. In the Thoth Tarot deck which my mother uses and
teaches, the 14th card represents the process of alchemy,
the medieval science of transforming base metals into gold.
It signifies bringing union to polarity, the struggle to reconcile
apparent opposites in order to forge the desired synthesis.
This card, appropriately enough, is called Art. I realized
that it was a perfect metaphor, not only for what I was trying
to do in this piece, but also for what this concert and Capital
M are all about. The texts consist of the Latin motto found
on the card's painting and remarks from a Tarot workshop led
by my mother in the 1980s."
 FRANK
J. OTERI's voracious musical appetite finds many
avenues of expression, but ultimately all lead back to his
musical compositions which range from full-evening stage works
to chamber and solo compositions. In all of these works, Oteri
(b. 1964) combines emotional directness with an obsession
for formal processes incorporating techniques from styles
of music as seemingly-unrelated as minimalism, serialism,
Broadway show music and bluegrass. His music has been performed
in venues ranging from Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall
and the Knitting Factory in New York City to the Theatre Royal
in Bath, England, and the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum
of Art to a Baptist church in the middle of Emanuel County,
Georgia. MACHUNAS, a "performance oratorio in
four colors" created in collaboration with Lucio Pozzi
and inspired by the life of Fluxus founder George Maciunas,
received its world premiere in August 2005 at the Contemporary
Arts Center in Vilnius, Lithuania as part of the International
Christopher Summer Festival conducted by Donatas Katkus. In
addition to his activities as a composer, Oteri is a frequently
published music journalist, a pre-concert lecturer at venues
including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and Columbia University's
Miller Theatre, and the Editor of NewMusicBox,
the Web magazine from the American Music Center. Oteri holds
a B.A. and a M.A. (in Ethnomusicology) from Columbia University
where he served as Classical Music Director and World Music
Director for WKCR-FM.
Of Imagined Overtures, Frank says,
"In the early years of the 20th century, composer/pianist
Busoni contemplated a new beginning for music using third-tones
and sixth-tones although he ultimately never created anything
microtonal. Imagined Overtures presents a new way to explore
Busoni's 36-tone temperament by taking three electric guitars
and tuning one a sixth tone higher, leaving one alone, and
tuning the third a sixth-tone lower. It is a beginning of
what will hopefully be a new window of opportunity for a fascinating
scale. As it is a beginning, it seemed appropriate to title
the three movements based on various theories of creation.
'Natural Selection' exploits perfect fifths and natural sevenths,
the two best-sounding intervals in 36-tone equal temperament,
through a 36-tone row that rhythmically degenerates until
only a handful of chords are left. 'Intelligent Design' is
a quintuple meter palindrome featuring Carterian metrical
modulations triggered from a fabulous rhythm by a student
of Kyle Gann's that Kyle posted on his blog. The final movement,
'Exquisite Panic' (named for a somewhat anarchic set of religious
beliefs promulgated by Robert Delford Brown) is an acoustic
demonstration of equidistant 9-tone clusters which, depending
on your aesthetic disposition, are either an amazing harmonic
discovery or Busoni's worst nightmare. The cluster is certainly
the most dissonant chord I have ever used in my music, and
might be the most dissonant chord I've ever heard."
 STEFAN
ZENIUK was born in New York City, where he continues
to reside. Growing up in the downtown music scene, he spent
his formative years in clubs like the Knitting Factory &
Tonic, soaking up the experimentalism of the improvisational
scene in the mid 90's. He currently curates the Open Ear Music
Series of experimental music at the Bowery Poetry Club, and
is an active performer & composer, leading his own group
Gato Loco, and is a member of the avant-rock soul group the
New York Howl.
"A Letter's Tale (2005) was written as a fictional
ballet. It is based loosely on Igor Stravinsky's ballet L'Histoire
du Soldat which is based on a script by C.F. Ramuz. L'histore
du Soldat is to be performed alongside narration &
dancing. The music in A Letter's Tale directly corresponds
with the actions and emotive content of Ramuz's script, and
thus is forced into a narrative structure. A Letter's
Tale takes the formal structure and some of the emotive
content of Stravinsky's composition, and uses it as merely
a FORM, thus giving the piece a natural dramatic arc. There
is no text narration to A Letter's Tale, and no choreographed
dancing, though spontaneous dancing is encouraged." |
