Maurice Abravanel Visiting Distinguished Composers Series

"There could be no more appropriate tribute ot the musical life and achievements of Maurice Abravanel, who brought to glowing performance the music of so many places and times, than the presences and musics of composers of our place and time. Such a series is certain to bring the academic, musical and general communities an immediate sense of the rich, exciting range and variety of music being created by today's composers..." -Milton Babbitt

Maurice Abravanel Visiting Distinguished Composers for 2009-2010

Fred Lerdahl

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Composer Fred Lerdahl studied at Lawrence University, Princeton, and Tanglewood. He has taught at UC/Berkeley, Harvard, and Michigan, and since 1991 he has been at Columbia University, where he is Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition. He has received numerous honors for his music, including the Koussevitzky Composition Prize, two composer awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Two of his pieces, Waves and Time after Time, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in music. Commissions have come from the Fromm Foundation, the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Spoleto Festival, National Endowment for the Arts, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Library of Congress, and others. Among the organizations that have performed his works are the New York Philharmonic, the Pittsburgh Symphony, the San Francisco Symphony, the Seattle Symphony, the Cincinnati Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the American Composers Orchestra, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the Manhattan Sinfonietta, the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, eighth blackbird, Speculum Musicae, Collage, Antares, the Juilliard Quartet, the Pro Arte Quartet, Ensemble XXI, Lontano, and the Venice Biennale. He has been in residence at the Marlboro Music Festival, IRCAM, the Wellesley Composers Conference, the American Academy in Rome, the Bowdoin Summer Music Festival, the Yellow Barn Music Festival, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Lerdahl is also prominent as a music theorist. He has written two books, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (with linguist Ray Jackendoff) and Tonal Pitch Space, both of which model musical listening from the perspective of cognitive science.

For more information, visit www.fredlerdahl.com.

David Rakowski

Monday, April 5, 2010

David Rakowski grew up in St. Albans, Vermont and studied at New England Conservatory, Princeton, and Tanglewood, where his teachers were Robert Ceely, John Heiss, Milton Babbitt, Paul Lansky, and Luciano Berio. He has received a large number of awards and fellowships, including the Elise L. Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Rome Prize, and he has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music (for pieces commissioned by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the US Marine Band). He has composed five concertos, three symphonies, 93 piano etudes, five song cycles, and a large amount of wind ensemble music, chamber music, and vocal music for various combinations, as well as music for children. His music has been commissioned, recorded, and performed widely and is published by C.F. Peters. He is currently the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Composition at Brandeis University, having also taught at New England Conservatory, Harvard, Columbia, and Stanford.

For more information visit http://home.earthlink.net/~ziodavino/album1_005.htm.