Richard Festinger

Richard Festinger

Richard Festinger’s music has been performed throughout the United States, and in Europe and Asia. His works have been composed for numerous ensembles, including Parnassus, Earplay, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the New York New Music Ensemble, the Alexander String Quartet, the City Winds, the Laurel Trio, the Left Coast Ensemble, the Alter Ego Ensemble, the Miroglio-Aprudo Duo, the Washington Square Contemporary Music Society, the Redwood Symphony Orchestra, and the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra. His music has been performed by Griffin, New Millennium Ensemble, Speculum Musicae, Phantom Arts, Composers Inc., the Empyrean Ensemble, the Sun String Quartet, the Alexander String Quartet, the Berkeley and Riverside Symphonies, sopranos Jane Manning, Patricia Green, Amy Burton, Alissa Deeter, and Karol Bennett, the Orchestra da Camera Italiana G.F. Ghedini, the Ensemble Italiano per la Musica Contemporanea, Ensemble Anti-Dogma, the Seoul, Korea Festival of Electro-Acoustic Music, and the Boston Chamber Ensemble.

Mr. Festinger�s works have been commissioned by the Jerome Foundation, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, the Koussevitzky Foundation in the Library of Congress, the Barlow Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trust, the Mary Flagler Cary Trust, the Argosy Foundation, the Music Teachers National Association, the Hoff-Bartelson Music School, the Ross McKee Foundation, Volti, the Ringling College of Art and Design, and the American Composers Forum. He has received recording awards from the Aaron Copland Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Alice M. Ditson Fund, the American Composers Forum Subito Program, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He has been a resident artist at the Camargo Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, Cit� Internationale des Arts in Paris, Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Liguria Study Center for Arts and Letters in Bogliasco, Italy, the Rockefeller Foundation Conference and Study Center in Bellagio, Italy, the Centre International d�Accueil et d�Echanges des R�collets in Paris, the Aaron Copland House, the Oberpf�lzer K�nstlerhaus in Schwandorf, Bayern, and the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, China. A recipient of the George Ladd Grand Prix de Paris, he has been a fellow at the Wellesley Composers Conference and the June in Buffalo Festival, Composer in Residence several times at the Festival of New American Music in Sacramento, and has received both the Walter Hinrichsen Award and an Academy Recording Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Mr. Festinger earned a Ph.D. in composition at the University of California in Berkeley where he studied with Andrew Imbrie. Before turning to composing he led his own groups as a jazz performer, and later founded the acclaimed contemporary music ensemble Earplay. He has taught at the University of California in Berkeley and Davis, at Dartmouth College, and since 1990 has been a professor of music at San Francisco State University. His music is published by C.F. Peters, and recorded on the Bridge, Centaur, CRI and CRS labels. Bridge records released a CD of his works in February of 2008.

For information visit:
Howard Stoker Management

Yohanan Chendler

Yohanan Chendler

Yohanan Chendler, violinist and composer, was born in Jerusalem in 1983. He is pursuing his PhD degree in composition at Brandeis University, where he has studied composition, with Prof. Martin Boykan, Prof. Eric Chasalow and Prof.  David Rakowski, as well as violin with Prof. Daniel Stepner. He has received his Bachelor of music in composition from the Jerusalem Academy of Music and where he studied composition with Prof. Mark Kopytman and took private violin lessons with Mr. Albert Yaffe. This past summer he also worked with renowned Italian composer Azio Corghi at the Accademia Chigiana is Siena.
Yohanan Chendler’s works have been performed in Israel, Europe and the US. He has received several prizes, among them the Michele Pittalluga composition competition and scholarships of the America-Israeli Cultural Foundation for both composition and violin performance. His works have been published by Berben Musical Editions and by Lucian Badian Edition.

Tan Hainu

Tan Hainu

Tan Hainu, a winner of the inaugural ICA/SF Symposium on Music in the 21st Century 2009 Composition Competition, is an accomplished and innovative composer, performer, trainer, and cultural emissary whose works and charm have drawn respect and attention across continents: her music has been performed in China, the U.S., and Europe. She enjoys the challenge of conveying elegant Eastern aestheticism, Western expressionism, and abstractionism through her composition technique. A child prodigy, Tan began her musical training at four and composed a piano capriccio at age eight. She obtained her BA in music composition at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, China’s best music school, where she received the highest mark for her graduation composition. She immigrated to the United States in 2004 (where she is currently a permanent resident) and has been a graduate teaching assistant at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and California State University, Los Angeles. Tan has received nineteen scholarships, presented compositions at four music festivals, and produced six music-paper presentations during her Master’s Degree schooling. Her paper The Conflict and Fusion of Japanese and Arabian Music Culture was selected for presentation at the 2008 Society of Composers’ Student National Conference. In the summer of 2008, Tan was privileged to have studied at the Freie Universität Berlin under Professor Samuel Adler of The Juilliard School, who gave her the highest marks and complimented her work ethic. She is affiliated with the American Composers Forum, American Music Center, and the Society of Composers.

For information on Tan visit:

Tan Hainu’s site

Tolga Yayalar

Tolga Yayalar

Tolga Yayalar played electric guitar in rock and jazz bands before taking up composition. Upon his encounter with the music of Webern, his first serious works incorporated serialism with jazz. Since then, texture and timbre have always been in the center of his music. To overcome the harmonic and sonic limitations of the tempered system, his music focuses on the different systems of microtonality. As the harmonic series constitute the harmonic focal point of this compositions, he also fuses some of the eastern tuning systems with the western tradition. His music has been highly influenced by his interests in architecture, psychoanalysis and post-structural narrative.

Ensemble and performers who have played Tolga’s music include Ensemble FA, Ying Quartet, Alrm Will Sound, the Cullithumpian Consort, Chamber Players of the League-ISCM, White Rabbit, Yesaroun Duo, Samual Z. Solomon, Benjamin Schwartz, Cihat Askin. His recent projects include an Orchestra piece for Orchestre National de Lorraine.

For more information on Tolga, visit:

Tolga Yayalar’s Site

Suzanne Sorkin

Suzanne Sorkin

Suzanne Sorkin (b. 1974) is active as a composer and educator.  She has received awards and commissions from the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University, Chamber Music Now, Third Millennium Ensemble, counter)induction, ASCAP, and others.  Her work has been programmed on Piano Spheres in Los Angeles, Washington Square Contemporary Music Society, Denison University New Music Festival, Chamber Music Quad Cities, Florida State University Festival of New Music, and Vassar Modfest.  She has written for ensembles including the Mannes Trio, Cabrini Quartet, Cleveland Chamber Symphony, Third Angle, and Aspen Contemporary Ensemble.  She has been a composition fellow at the Wellesley Composers Conference, the Ernest Bloch Composers Symposium, the Advanced Masterclasses in Composition at the Aspen Music Festival, and the Oregon Bach Composers Symposium.  Residencies include Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ragdale Foundation, Artists’ Enclave at I-Park, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, and Atlantic Center for the Arts.  She received her Ph.D. in composition from the University of Chicago through the support of a four-year Century Fellowship in the Humanities.   In Fall 2005, Suzanne Sorkin joined the faculty at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia as Assistant Professor of Music where she teaches composition, theory, and history.
For more information visit:

Suzanne Sorkin’s site

Carl Schimmel

Carl Schimmel

Winner of the 1999 Bearns Prize, Carl Schimmel has received numerous honors and awards for his compositions, and his works have been performed throughout the United States, from Alaska to Rhode Island, as well as in Canada, Japan, Korea, and the Netherlands. He has received performances and commissions from the California EAR Unit, saxophonist Taimur Sullivan, bass clarinetist Henri Bok, North/South Consonance, and many others. A graduate of Case Western Reserve University (B.A., Mathematics and Music) and the Yale School of Music (M.M. Music Composition), he has received fellowships and residencies from the Aspen Music Festival, the MacDowell Colony, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and is currently in his sixth year in the Music Composition doctoral program at Duke University. His teachers have included George Tsontakis, Ezra Laderman, Martin Bresnick, Evan Ziporyn, Ned Rorem, Anthony Kelley, Scott Lindroth, Sydney Hodkinson, and Stephen Jaffe. His most recent works have explored humor and absurdity, set theoretical approaches, diatonicism, and short forms. For more info and sound clips, check out:

www.carlschimmel.com
Carl’s MySpace
Carl’s Facebook

Sam Nichols

Sam Nichols

Sam Nichols is a composer who lives and works in Northern California. His music has been performed by eighth blackbird, the Empyrean Ensemble, and the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, among other groups. Recent projects include Monkey Fist for cellist David Russell, and Crank for pianist Amy Dissanayake. New projects include pieces for several Bay Area ensembles, including Earplay, the Empyrean Ensemble and the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. He is also working on solo works for percussionist Chris Froh, cellist David Russell, and pianist Karen Rosenak. Currently, he’s working on a commission from Guerilla Opera for their 2009-10 season: Unnamed: or, the Unnamed.(Guerilla Opera is a collective of young Boston-based singers and instrumentalists dedicated to promoting a unique theatre-oriented brand of chamber opera featuring a repertoire of newly commissioned works.)

An ongoing collaboration with sculptor Robin Hill has produced two multi-media installations. One of these, Kardex, an interactive piece, was featured at Another Year in LA, the CSU Stanislaus Art Gallery, epicenter07 (the annual exposition of the University of California Digital Arts Research Network) and at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts in Davis, CA.

He attended Vassar College (BA, 1994) and Brandeis University (MA 1999; PhD 2006), where he studied composition and theory. His composition teachers include Ross Bauer, Eric Chasalow, Annea Lockwood, David Rakowski, Richard Wilson and Yehudi Wyner. For the past six years he has worked as a lecturer in the UC Davis Music Department; he also teaches in the Technocultural Studies Department.

For information visit:
Sam Nichols’ site

Luciano Berio

His work constantly re-invented continuities where others saw only the possibilities of rupture. Not that he was ever tempted by the assorted nostalgias that haunted some part of the music of the last century. On the contrary, he maintained an insatiable curiosity about the explorations of his contemporaries – musical or otherwise. But his dialogues with literature, with linguistics, with structural anthropology, with ethnomusicology always proved to be the most inventive of piratical raids – seizing the materials that he needed as a musician, and drawing from them creative consequences often far removed from their original context. They are a fraternal “homage”, not an imitation. Beyond his apprentice years of the late forties and early fifties, much the same might be said of his response to his musical contemporaries. His oblique relationship to the post-Webernian mainstream was the first instance of a trait that has remained central to his work ever since. Seizing with relish upon its demonstrations of inexhaustible metamorphic potential, he expanded this into a basic principle: you may always re-write what is already written. The exuberant melodic confidence of his work from the late fifties and sixties – whether the nervous brilliance of the flute Sequenza I, or the by now classic lyrical intensity of works written for Cathy Berberian, such as Circles or Sequenza III – bears witness to the confident authority with which he grasped these means. Equally, the series of Chemins that revisit solo Sequenzas demonstrate not just a Joycean “work in progress”, but our obligation to treat each completed work as a “listening in progress”. But the sixties also saw the first indices of an unwillingness to side-line issues central to his rigorous sense of musical tradition. Where some contemporaries seemed content to treat harmony as simply a sub-category of “texture”, Berio insistently returned to the harmonic dimension as central to his larger musical aspirations. Training his own and his listeners’ ears to find their way through the harmonic jungle was at first a matter of brilliantly alert intuition – in, for instance, Sequenza IV for piano – but was soon absorbed into a focussed framework, first in O King, but then in many subsequent works of the early seventies, by exploring the consequences of harmonic projections from a line. The fruits of this patient process of exploration came in the major works of the eighties and nineties, where harmony resumed its rights as the organising force behind such major theatre works as La vera storia, Un re in ascolto, and Outis, but could equally determine the masterly concision of Sequenza XIII for accordion. Although Berio drew admiration in the late fifties as an exuberant explorer of electronic resources, his vivid empathy for the risks and rewards of live performance tended to gain the upper hand over any disembodied search for “new sounds”. However fragile and temporary the community created in the concert-hall by a brilliant performance, it is one that Berio served with singular fixity of purpose. Since the sixties a vigorous inhabitant of McLuhan’s “global village” (of which any concert-hall or radio station may propose itself as a temporary microcosm) he asserted music’s obligation not only to its own singular history, but also to the re-statement of human concerns that, without such patient and committed reiteration, could so easily evaporate. His is a music that “refuses to forget”.

-David Osmond-Smith - Universal Editions

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen, Composer (born August 22nd 1928 in Mödrath, near Cologne, died December 5th 2007 in Kuerten). Stockhausen composed 370 individually performable works, published 10 volumes of TEXTE zur MUSIK / TEXTS about MUSIC,and a series of booklets comprising sketches and explanations about his own works (Stockhausen-Verlag). His first 36 scores were published by Universal Edition in Vienna and, since its establishment in 1975, the Stockhausen- Verlaghas published the rest of his works. In 1991, the Stockhausen-Verlagalso began to release compact discs in the Stockhausen Complete Edition which comprises 139 compact discs to date. All Stockhausen scores, CDs, books, videos and music boxes may be ordered directly by mail or e-mail (Kettenberg 15, 51515 Kuerten, Germany; Fax: +49 (0)2268- 1813; www.stockhausen.org / stockhausen-verlag@stockhausen.org). Since 1998, the Stockhausen Courses Kürtenfor composers, interpreters, musicologists and auditors take place annually.

In 1977, Stockhausen began to compose the music-scenic work LICHT (LIGHT)The Seven Days of the Week. LICHT with its Seven Days of the Week comprises about 29 hours of music: THURSDAY from LIGHT 240 minutes; SATURDAY from LIGHT 185 minutes; MONDAY from LIGHT, 278 minutes; TUESDAY from LIGHT 156 minutes; FRIDAY from LIGHT 290 minutes; WEDNESDAY from LIGHT 267 minutes; SUNDAYfrom LIGHT 298 minutes.

Following the world première on October 16th 2004 of LICHT-BILDER (LIGHTPICTURES), the last scene Stockhausen composed of his work LICHT (LIGHT), Stockhausen began the work KLANG(SOUND), The 24 Hours of the Day. Until 2007, he composed the 1st Hour HIMMELFAHRT (ASCENSION) to the 21st Hour PARADIES (PARADISE).

Already the first compositions of “Point Music” such as KREUZSPIEL (CROSS-PLAY)in 1951, SPIEL (PLAY) for orchestra in 1952, and KONTRA-PUNKTE (COUNTER-POINTS) in 1952/53, brought Stockhausen international fame. Since then, his works have been opposed to the extreme by some and admired by others. Fundamental achievements in music since 1950 are indelibly imprinted through his compositions:

The “Serial Music”, the“Point Music”, the “Electronic Music”, the “New Percussion Music”, the “Variable Music”, the “New Piano Music”, the “Space Music”, “Statistical Music”, “Aleatoric Music”, “Live Electronic Music”;new syntheses of “Music and Speech”,of a“Musical Theatre”,of a “Ritual Music”,“Scenic Music”;the “Group Composition”, polyphonic “Process Composition”, “Moment Composition”, “Formula Composition”to the present “Multi-Formula Composition”;the integration of “found objects” (national anthems, folklore of all countries, short-wave events, “sound scenes”, etc.) into a “World Music”and a “Universal Music”;the synthesis of European, African, Latin American and Asian music into a “Telemusic”;the vertical “Octophonic Music”.

From the beginning until now, his work can be classified as “Spiritual Music”;this becomes more and more evident not only in the compositions with spiritual texts, but also in the other works via “Overtone Music”, “Intuitive Music”, “MantricMusic”, reaching “Cosmic Music”in STIMMUNG(TUNING), AUS DEN SIEBEN TAGEN (FROM THE SEVEN DAYS), MANTRA, STERNKLANG(STAR SOUND), INORI, ATMEN GIBTDAS LEBEN (BREATHING GIVES LIFE), SIRIUS, LICHT(LIGHT), KLANG(SOUND).

In a spherical auditorium conceived by the Stockhausen, most of his works composed until 1970 were performed at the Expo ’70 world fair in Osaka, Japan for 5 1/2 hours daily for 183 days by twenty instrumentalists and singers, thereby reaching an audience of over a million listeners.

Stockhausen is the perfect example of the composer who – at nearly all world premières and in innumerable exemplary performances and recordings of his works world-wide – either personally conducted, or performed in or directed the performance as sound projectionist.

In addition to numerous guest professorships in Switzerland, the United States, Finland, Holland, and Denmark, Stockhausen was appointed Professor for Composition at the State Conservatory in Cologne in 1971. In 1996 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Free University in Berlin, and in 2004 received an honorary doctorate from the Queen’sUniversity in Belfast. He is a member of 12 international Academies for the Artsand Sciences,was named Honorary Citizen of Kürten in 1988, becameCommandeur dans l’Ordredes Arts et des Lettres, received many gramophone prizes
and, among other honours, the Federal Medal of Merit, 1st class,the Siemens Music Prize,the UNESCO Picasso Medal, the Order of Merit of the State of North Rhine Westfalia, 8 awards from the German Music Publisher’sSociety for his score publications, the HamburgBACH Prize, the Cologne Culture Prize and, in 2001, the Polar Music Prizewith the laudation: Karlheinz Stockhausen is being awarded the Polar Music Prize for 2001 for a career as a composer that has been characterized by impeccable integrity and never-ceasing creativity, and for having stood at the forefront of musical development for fifty years.

Joel Phillip Friedman

ADORNO is delighted to feature composer Joel Phillip Friedman, who teaches extensively on the Beatles and is faculty at Santa Clara University, Notre Dame de Namur, and the Stanford University’s Adult Extension courses. Friedman has always had the spirit of collaboration at the core of his musical activities whether serving as co-composer for the award-winning Off-Broadway and London West End hit musical Personals, Read more

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