 American-born
composer and performer IAN DICKE (b. 1982)
creates music that is uniquely representative of today's overlapping
musical cultures. His compositional voice emerges from a range
of influences including electronica, math-core rock, pop music
from Southeastern Asia, and contemporary concert music. The
subject matter of Ian's music is often inspired by his passion
for environmental issues and politics. His work has received
many awards and distinctions including the Jim Highsmith Orchestral
Award and a Meet the Composer Creative Connections grant.
His music has been presented around the world by a variety
of ensembles and festivals including the 16mm Orchestra, Capital
M, the University of Michigan's Philharmonia Orchestra, the
San Francisco Conservatory of Music Symphony Orchestra, Gamma-UT,
60x60, and the Midwest Composers Symposium. Ian has studied
composition with David Conte, Daniel Becker, Bright Sheng,
and Michael Daugherty. Current composition projects include
a work for cello and electronics and a large scale piano piece.
About his piece Press Play!, Ian writes, "When
I finally made the decision to study music seriously in my
late teens, I entered the San Francisco Conservatory of Music
and quickly realized that I didn't know anything about classical
music. In my youth, Nirvana was my Mozart and while I am in
love with almost all forms of sound, my kinship with pop and
rock music still remains my most important influence. To compensate
for my lack of a classical background, my undergraduate years
were filled with a complete immersion into the great sonatas
and symphonies and a tour de force of writing derivative pieces.
I had my Impressionistic chamber works, my Prokofievian piano
concerto, and I even paid tribute to Steve Reich with a piece
that included two marimbas playing canonic African rhythms.
After graduating the conservatory and through the encouragement
of my teacher Dan Becker, a few friends and I started a 'new
music' chamber ensemble with the idea of fusing rock and
classical music. Press Play! is the fruit of that
labor. Its conception marked a return to my roots as a rock
musician while maintaining the classical ideals of form and
variation.'"
 MIKE
GAMBLE was born in the U.S. of A's smallest state,
Rhode Island, and has been on the road ever since. Mike and
his family relocated to rural New Jersey, Atlanta, GA, and
finally Columbus, Ohio, where Mike gave up the sports and
video games to pursue music full-time. After years of playing
sousaphone in marching band, cello in youth orchestras, and
guitar in various rock/jazz bands, Mike decided to pursue
a Jazz degree at NEC, where he studied with John Abercrombie,
Gene Bertoncini, Bob Brookmeyer, Bob Moses, and George Garzone.
Gamble now teaches guitar all over the tri-state area and
is in and out of his apartment in Brooklyn. In addition to
Capital M, Mike performs with other NYC-based groups such
as the Inbetweens, Bootyjuice, A.D.M., Michael Cain, Snuggle/Stencil,
the Barbarians, Brooklyn Qawwali Party, and collaborates on
several movie scores.
"In the fall of 2005 I had the wonderful
opportunity to fly across the world with my girlfriend Devin
to visit her brother Jared, whom was studying to be a business
lawyer in Hong Kong. Within a short week Jared managed to
squeeze in snapshots of both the traditional and modern lifestyle
of China. We visited a jade market in Kowloon, the ever-so
bustling Hong Kong, a small city on stilts, the Great W all,
an enormous Buddhist temple, the forbidden palace of Beijing,
and even the casino-ridden Macao. As we trekked along I managed
to fit my belongings into the case of my 'backpacker' guitar,
in which I periodically took out to work out some ideas I
had going through my head. Meanwhile, Devin jotted down her
observations in her diary, which now serves as the text of
the suite that I have arranged for Capital M. China, from
what I saw and felt, is geared up to take over the world.
It is said by many that the "American Century" has
run its course. Some argue (notably Hunter S. Thompson) that
9/11 undeniably marks its death. Others, such as the neo-conservative
US think tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC),
continue to promote US military and economic space, cyberspace,
and global domination. With the rise of its free-flowing economy
coupled with the loosening up of its communist ideals, China
could conceivably carry the torch. So, more or less, this
piece is a short-lived journey through a vastly changing country,
Zhongguo (the region of China and its surrounding islands).
As you will hear, the piece concludes with an Morse-code S.O.S.
motif, which I heard as the ferry was docking in Macao. The
very next moment a lady attempted suicide off of the footbridge.
She failed miserably."
 Composer
CAROLINE MALLONÉE (b. 1975) received
her Ph.D. from Duke University. She also holds degrees from
Harvard University and the Yale School of Music. She held
a Fulbright Fellowship for study with Louis Andriessen at
the Koninklijk Conservatorium in Den Haag from 2004-2005.
Ms. Mallonée’s compositions have been played
by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the Contemporary Music Forum,
the Women Composer's Orchestra, the Baltimore Choral Arts
Society, the Virginia Pops Symphony, Non Sequitur, the PRISM
Saxophone Quartet, the Greater Baltimore Youth Orchestra,
the Del Sol, Ciompi, Alexander, and Mendelssohn String Quartets
and the Gregg Smith Singers. Her music has been heard at the
Bowdoin Summer Music Festival, on the New Music New Haven
series, at the Chapel Hill Arts Festival and at the Durham
Downtown Music Festival. Her music has been performed in the
U.S., the Netherlands, Wales, England, and Mexico, and has
been broadcast several times over National Public Radio on
Garrison Keillor's "Prairie Home Companion.” Ms.
Mallonée has been on the faculty of The Walden School
for young composers in Dublin, NH for nine summers, where
she teaches composition and musicianship. She holds the position
of Director of Composer Forums, directs the female choir,
and is the Academic Dean. She has been co-commissioned by
the Walden School and artists-in-residence for a new work
five times. Ms. Mallonée is a member of pulsoptional,
a sextet and composers’ collective devoted to new repertoire
that performs regularly in Durham, NC and Chapel Hill, NC.
Please visit her website at www.carolinemallonee.com.
Caroline writes, "Hey Yeah Nanny Nanny
(The Tease) is at once an homage to one of my former
teachers, Louis Andriessen, and a rock ballad. The realization
that the opening motive was reminiscent of 'Nanny Nanny Boo-Boo'
led to the title. This piece was written for Capital M, and
is dedicated to them."
 Capital
M founder 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 (now known as Igigi),
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 at venues including Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall,
Brooklyn Academy of Music, Philadelphia's Kimmel Center and
Academy of Music, and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine,
and is co-founder of C4: The Choral Composer/Conductor Collective.
His music has been performed or read from New Jersey to Alaska
by ensembles including the Princeton Singers, Forecast Music,
Mosaik Two, Cerddorion, Due East, the Choral Arts Society
of Philadelphia, the Yale Symphony Orchestra, and the Way
Blue Bucket. Ian is currently Development Manager for the
American Music Center.
"Obelisk is at once a return to
my roots with Capital M and an exploration of new territory.
Like my earliest compositions for the band, it divides musical
material up into 'cells' which can be repeated an unspecified
number of times, creating a cloud of polymetric possibilities.
However, I also took cues from later compositions such as
liberal use of vocal harmonies, additive rhythmic processes,
notation allowing for minor variations within the same measure,
and a brief obsession with the band Interpol. The result is
a synthesis of a number of techniques I've had interest in
for quite a while. My computer's two-year-old hard drive died
an untimely death in the middle of the conception of this
piece, with the result that Obelisk is the first
manuscript-only composition I have completed in nearly five
years."
 EDWARD
ROSENBERG III is 27 years old. He obtained a bachelor’s
degree in Saxophone performance from The Eastman School of
Music, in Rochester, NY. He is currently working towards a
Masters degree in composition at Queens College here in New
York City. Ed recently co-authored a book with saxophonist
Walt Weiskopf called “Beyond the Horn,” published
by Jamey Aebersold Jazz. He plays tenor saxophone and writes
music for "lungcore" pioneers Jerseyband.
Of Prelude to Beast-Wedding, Ed writes,
"A human being and an animal are frozen and bonded together
by way of some unknown, futuristic mechanism. The overseers
of the experiment have employed said mechanism in order to
produce a creature that will rule the future world. The impetus
for this piece was the rhythm and sound of the word 'Cryogenic.'"
 San
Francisco-based composer JONATHAN RUSSELL
writes music for a wide variety of ensembles, from orchestra
to chorus to rock band, and is especially interested in music
that straddles the line between classical music and popular/folk
genres such as rock, jazz, and klezmer music. Important musical
influences include Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler, Igor Stravinsky,
Olivier Messiaen, Charles Mingus,
Steve Reich, Guns 'n' Roses, Fiona Apple, Cornelius Boots,
Ryan Brown, Ben Gribble, Klezmer music, and free improvisation.
Performing on clarinet, bass clarinet, and saxophone is also
a central
part of Jonathan's musical life. A member of the heavy chamber
music Edmund Welles bass clarinet quartet and the Balkan/Klezmer/Experimental
band Zoyres, he also plays in, composes for, and is a founding
member of the Sqwonk bass clarinet duo and the rock chamber
music band Oogog. He also freelances as a classical, contemporary,
and klezmer clarinetist/bass clarinetist. In order to make
a living (and also because he enjoys it), he teaches Theory
and Musicianship at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music,
serves as Music Director at First Congregational Church, San
Francisco, and is a critic for the San Francisco Classical
Voice. He has a BA in Music from Harvard University and an
MA in Composition from San Francisco Conservatory. His composition
teachers have included Dan Becker, Elinor Armer, Eric Sawyer,
John Stewart, and Eric Ewazen. For more information, visit
him online at
www.jonrussellmusic.com.
Jon's piece Expanding and Contracting
"is a meditative work that happens to have intricate
mathematical processes underlying it. Briefly, this involves
three independent parts that each gradually expand and then
contract their material over the course of the piece according
to different mathematical processes - prime numbers in one
part, a fibonnaci series in another, and an arithemetical
progression in the third. But you don't really need to know
that in order to get the piece, it functions perfectly well
as a nice meditative piece without thinking about any of that."
 KYLE
SANNA began learning rock guitar at age 12 and within
a few years was studying jazz, composition and learning folk
traditions from many parts of the world. His broad interests
have led him into diverse musical territories professionally,
and have earned him a reputation for challenging categorization.
Kyle has performed his original or improvised music in Canada,
Luxembourg, France, Germany, and throughout the U.S. at such
venues as Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, concert halls at The
Juilliard School, Manhattan School of Music, Eastman School
of Music, Cal Arts, UCLA, and others. He performs regularly
in the New York area on acoustic and electric guitar, dobro,
and lapsteel. Kyle has received awards for Outstanding Performer
from the Reno Jazz Festival and the University of Oregon School
of Music. As a composer, Kyle most often produces works that
support other media: film scores, music for theater, and dance
pieces. He was a 2003 Finalist in Turner Classic Movies’
Young Film Composers Competition and his latest film score
(for the indie documentary Liferaft in the Desert) will see
its premiere screening in summer, 2007. Other new works this
year will include a piece commissioned by the Elisa Monte
Dance Company and orchestral arrangements of songs by Christina
Courtin. Kyle holds a Bachelor of Music degree in Jazz Performance
from the University of Oregon and studied composition at the
Université Lumière in Lyon, France. His teachers
include Steve Owen, Gary Versace (jazz), Pat O’Brian,
Don Latarski (guitar), Harold Owen and Michel Kawka (composition).
In May, 2006, Kyle participated as both composer and performer
in Carnegie Hall’s Porous Borders of Music Workshop
with bass virtuoso Edgar Meyer. Kyle lives in Manhattan and
teaches guitar at the New York Conservatory of Music.
Of Speaking in Tongues, Kyle writes, "Having
not written a note of this piece I jokingly emailed Capital
M bandleader and vocalist, Ian Moss, asking him if he’d
had any experience singing in Chinese. I believe his terse
reply was 'uh, no.' I had no intention to write to a Chinese
text (or any text) but when he later said that my idea wasn’t
entirely out of the question, I started imagining Ian singing
a sort of pseudo Chinese. This led to the idea of speaking
in tongues: a phenomenon that already fascinated me. For my
piece, titled Speaking in Tongues, the vocalist will
enter a trance. This will be accomplished with a precise combination
of sleep deprivation, hypnosis, pre-concert chanting, and
pharmaceuticals. The piece is best understood in two movements:
I. Xenoglossy: the paranormal ability to speak a language
that could not have been acquired by natural means.
In this movement the vocalist begins on wordless syllables,
singing with, behind, and around the saxophone against a backdrop
of distorted guitars that suggests a sampler or edited recorded
music. The syllables change and eventually the vocalist is
asked to interpret, in the most convincing manner possible,
alphabets he does not understand. The vocalist is 'possessed.'
Effects on his voice heighten the intensity. In preparing
for the piece, the vocalist must not determine the meaning
of the foreign characters, nor even learn how they sound,
but rather 'interpret' them based on his best approximation
of the sounds, rhythm, and gesture of the language.
II. Glossolalia: the utterance of unintelligible sounds,
often from a
trance-like state (speaking in tongues).
This movement opens with a trio of electric guitar, saxophone,
and glockenspiel that acts as an interlude between the two
louder vocal sections. The vocalist enters quietly on nonsensical
syllables that do not try to suggest a language but do, however,
use the 6 'tones' of Vietnamese. The piece ends as it began,
with the same wordless melody and the same stark guitar backdrop."
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