Either/Or - composers

Composers featured on Either/Or concerts
Peter Ablinger
John Luther Adams
Robert Ashley
Harrison Birtwistle
Earle Brown
Andrew Byrne
John Cage
Cornelius Cardew
Richard Carrick
Nick Didkovsky
Karlheinz Essl
Morton Feldman
Daniel Felsenfeld
Christopher Fox
Beat Furrer
Michael Gordon
Georg Friedrich Haas
Gyorgy Kurtág
Helmut Lachenmann
Massimo Lauricella
Josh Levine
Gyorgy Ligeti
Keeril Makan
Thomas Meadowcroft
Luigi Nono
Mauricio Rodriguez
Elliott Sharp
Howard Skempton
Alexander Stankovski
Steve Voigt
Christian Wolff
Iannis Xenakis
John Zorn

biographies:

Harrison Birtwistle is one of the leading figures in European contemporary music. Drawing inspiration both from contemporary art and from the rituals of classical mythology and pre-history, his works uniquely balance the cerebral and the visceral. A disciplined modernist aesthetic is tempered by an emotionally powerful and sometimes brutal primitivism in its presentation. Ring a Dumb Carillon, on a text by British poet Christopher Logue, hints at the aulodie of Greek antiquity through its interwoven lyric lines for voice and clarinet while drawing its structure and pacing from the percussive interruptions and extreme shifts of non-Western theater traditions.

Andrew Byrne is a New York-based composer, who has written works for film, dance, theater, and the concert hall. His music, which always betrays a fascination with polyrhythm, is influenced by American experimental tradition and world music and has been described as "sounding like a weird and wonderful otherworldly folk music." Performances over the last year include Lines Towards Another Century, a collaboration with Melbourne-based visual artist Tom Nicholson; Ascension by L’Arsenale in Treviso, Italy; When Worlds Collide, a commission from Ethos Percussion Group; and music for [in]visible years, a documentary by Israeli filmmaker Gideon Boaz. Upcoming projects include Collaborations for a Dispersed Camp, a piece for 25 percussionists; his multimedia/music theater piece The Othersiders: New Australians in Paraguay for three singers and samplers; as well as the recording project Radiation Studies for piano and percussion. visit website.

Richard Carrick (co-director) is a composer, pianist and guitarist who writes music for soloists, chamber ensembles, orchestra, film and concert music with video. Cosmicomics, his "operatically ambitious and scintillating" (Kyle Gann, The Village Voice) multimedia piece with an "organic, restless, unruly score" (Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times) is based on stories by Italo Calvino and was premiered by the Sequitur Ensemble in Merkin Hall in 2005. He has written for the Nieuw Ensemble of Amsterdam, the Nouvel Ensemble Modern, the Ensemble-On-Line of Vienna, the Arditti Quartet, the Cabrini Trio, Patricia Kopatchinskaija, Petra Ackermann and has been performed by the ISCM World Music Days 2004 in Switzerland, The Lange Nacht in Vienna’s Konzerthaus, le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, The Auros Group for New Music, IRCAM’s Stage d’éte, Royaumont Voix Nouvelles, and others.
As pianist, conductor and guitarist he has performed on the Green Umbrella Series in Los Angeles, MATA Festival in New York, Karnatic Lab in Amsterdam and at the Banff Centre, Canada. He recently performed on marimba with Kyandu Muziki in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Carrick studied at Columbia University (BA, Mathematics and Music), the Koninklijk Conservatorium of The Hague and with Brian Ferneyhough at the University of California-San Diego (MA, PhD) before moving back to Manhattan, where he currently teaches for the New York Philharmonic's Very Young Composer Program and the Hoff-Barthelson Music School (Composition Faculty and Music Technology Director). visit website

Nick Didkovsky is a guitarist, composer, and software programmer. In 1983, he founded the avant-rock septet Doctor Nerve. He presently resides in New York City, where he composes, creates music software, and teaches computer music composition at New York University. He has composed music for Bang On A Can All-Stars, Meridian Arts Ensemble, Fred Frith Guitar Quartet, California EAR Unit, New Century Players, ARTE Quartett, and other ensembles. He is the principle author of the computer music language Java Music Specification Language. He is director of bioinformatics for the Gensat project at The Rockefeller University, and develops software at a neurobiology lab there.

Often grouped with his contemporaries Earle Brown, John Cage, and Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman's music defined a distinct personal style from the very beginning. A concentration on sound as object, driven equally by an expressionist intuition and a formalist concern with pattern, informed his entire output from the piano miniatures of the 1950’s to the lengthy chamber works he composed in the 1980’s. Approximately 90 minutes in duration, Crippled Symmetry is the second of three trios which Feldman composed for the unusual combination of flute, piano, and percussion. It shares certain elements found in his 1977 Why Patterns? (performed by Either/Or last season), including the metrical non-alignment of the three performers’ parts and the focus on distinct instrumental colors and, often, idiomatic gestures. However, in Crippled Symmetry, a common ground of sorts is slowly forged through the echoing of similar and sometimes identical material across the three instrumental voices. Uniformly quiet, as are most of Feldman’s works, the subtle oscillations of ensemble texture, instrumental material, and harmonic rhythm combine to produce an overall form where local details may be elastic but the global shape remains constant in each performance.

Composer Daniel Felsenfeld earned his Doctorate at the New England Conservatory in 2000. Since then, he's had performances at the New York City Opera (“Summer and All it Brings”) and The Kitchen (“The Last of Manhattan”), both written in collaboration with poet Ernest Hilbert. His piano piece “Insomnia Redux; 4AM,” commissioned by Jenny Lin, was performed in Gijon, Spain, as part of the New Millenium Piano Festival. Other recent New York premieres include a song cycle (“The Bridge”) commissioned by Marie Mascari. He is currently working on a commission from The New Gallery Concert Series of Boston for string trio this May. He has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Wellesley Composer's Conference. Daniel is also the author of seven books about classical music, and serves as an essayist, critic and annotator, having contributed to Time Out New York, Newsday, Playbill, The New Yorker, Symphony, Strings, Early Music, and more. visit website

Christopher Fox is a composer. He was born in York in 1955, grew up in the north of England and now lives in London. He studied composition with Hugh Wood, Jonathan Harvey and Richard Orton at Liverpool, Southampton and York Universities and was awarded the degree of DPhil in composition from York University in 1984. In 1981 he won the composition prize of the Performing Right Society of Great Britain; since then he has established a reputation as one of the most individual composers of his generation. Between 1984 and 1994 he was a member of the composition staff of the Darmstadt New Music Summer School. In 1994 he joined the Music Department at the University of Huddersfield, eventually becoming Professor in Composition. Since April 2006 he has been Research Professor in Music at Brunel University.

Beat Furrer was born in Schaffhausen, Switzerland in 1954. In 1975 he went to Vienna where he trained and found international success. In 1985, after studying under Roman Haubenstock-Ramati (composition) and Otmar Suitner (conducting), he founded the Klangforum Wien ensemble, of which he has since been a regular conductor. Since 1991 Beat Furrer has been professor of composition at the Graz University of Music and Dramatic Arts.

Michael Gordon grew up in the jungle on the outskirts of Managua, Nicaragua. His family moved to Miami Beach when he was 8 years old. In addition to performing on keyboards with the Michael Gordon Band, he writes music for large orchestras and has been performed in Carnegie Hall, the Royal Albert Hall in London, and by the Lucerne Symphony, the Basel Sinfonietta, the Ensemble Modern Orchestra, Icebreaker, the Kronos Quartet, Oper Aachen, Concerto Koln, The Lithuanian State Symphony, and the American Composers Orchestra, among others. Gordon is a founding member of Bang on a Can.

Gyorgy Kurtág is one of contemporary music’s most expressive figures, a composer whose influence broadened immensely towards the end of the 20th century. Born in Romania, he moved to Budapest, Hungary, at a young age. His decision to stay in Budapest after his studies, rather than leaving for Western Europe as did many of his colleagues, resulted in relative anonymity in the West until his retirement from the academy in 1993. A noted instructor of composition and interpretation, he has since held composer-in-residence posts in many of the major institutions throughout Europe and recently received the prestigious 2006 Grawemeyer Award for his work ...concertante...

Helmut Lachenmann was born in Stuttgart in 1935 and was the first private student of the composer Luigi Nono in Venice from 1958 to 1960. He also worked briefly at the electronic music studio at the University of Ghent, but thereafter focused almost exclusively on purely instrumental music. He has referred to his compositions as ‘musique concrète instrumentale,’ implying a musical language that embraces the entire sound-world made accessible through unconventional playing techniques. According to the composer, this is music ‘in which the sound events are chosen and organized so that the manner in which they are generated is at least as important as the resultant acoustic qualities themselves.’ His scores place enormous demands on performers, due to these reinventions of instrumental technique. He has regularly lectured at Darmstadt since 1978 and was professor of composition at the Stuttgarter Musikhochschule from 1981 to 1999.

Massimo Lauricella was a concert pianist for many years before starting his composing activities as a pupil of his father Sergio Lauricella and gained immediate international success. His music is recorded and performed by the Arditti Quartet, the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, and numerous other European orchestras and he has received many prizes such as the "Center for Jewish Culture Competition" Los Angeles 1994, "Sommerliche Musiktage Hitzacker" Saarbrücken 1996, "Japan International League of Artists Competition" Tokyo 1997, "J.B. Comes" Segorbe 2000, "Earplay" San Francisco 2001, "Ciutat de Palma" Palma de Mallorca 2001, “Auralia" Los Angeles 2002. In 2002 he was appointed to conduct the Carlo Felice Theatre Orchestra of Genoa, and continues to conduct internationally and teach at the "N. Paganini" Conservatory in Genoa.

Josh Levine was born in Corvallis, Oregon (USA) in 1959. He trained as a guitarist at the Musik-Akademie der Stadt Basel, Switzerland, before going on to study composition there with Balz Trümpy. He subsequently studied for a year at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique in Paris with Guy Reibel. During 1994-95, he participated in Ircam's Cursus de composition et d'informatique musicale. Most recently he worked with Brian Ferneyhough at the University of California, San Diego, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 2002. Josh Levine’s tape composition, Tel, received First Prize at the Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition in 1987 and a Euphonie D’Or in 1992. Past commissions include Pro Helvetia, Ensemble Contrechamps, guitarist Magnus Andersson, and two works for the Ensemble Intercontemporain. His current projects include music for Australia’s ELISION ensemble and a work commissioned by the Rümlingen Festival in Switzerland. He currently teaches composition, theory, and electronic music at San Francisco State University. visit website

One of the world’s best known living composers, Gyorgy Ligeti is widely acknowledged as a musical pioneer of the late twentieth century. In response to a general stylistic crisis in the mid-century avant-garde, Ligeti forged a musical alternative based on texture and sound density that has become one of the major influences on contemporary music. His varied output can be searingly intense at times and full of vivacity, humor, and irony at others. Monument-Selbstporträt-Bewegung (Three Pieces for Two Pianos), is considered his first decisive break from modernism, paying homage to the repetitive structures of his American contemporaries Reich and Riley.

Keeril Makan has received commissions from ensembles such as the Kronos Quartet, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the Paul Dresher Electroacoustic Band, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, and the Del Sol String Quartet, and performances by the New York New Music Ensemble, California EAR Unit, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Continuum, and Ensemble Nomad. He has received prizes from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and ASCAP, and commissions from the Gerbode and Hewlett Foundations of San Francisco and the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard. Makan is Assistant Professor of Music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also Managing Editor of Computer Music Journal, published by MIT Press.

Mauricio Rodríguez (b. 1976) Studied at the Laboratory of Musical Creation from The National University of Mexico, the Royal Conservatory The Hague, The Netherlands, the Centre de Creation Musicale Iannis Xenakis, and is currently enrolled at Stanford University (DMA). As a composer and player he has participated in musical festivals such as The Internationale Ferienkurse für neue Musik Darmstadt 1998 and 2000, The International Musical Journey Conlon Nanacarrow 1999 Mexico, entre Acanthes France 2004, World New Music Days 2004 Switzerland, Festival Nuevo Leon Mexico 2005, and more. In 1999 his string quartet was selected by The British Council to be premiered by the Arditti String Quartet. His music also has been written for acclaimed musicians such as guitarist Magnus Anderson, harpsichord players Jane Chapman, Anne Faulborn and Annelie de Man, flautists Robert Dick and Walter van Hauwe, Onix New Ensemble of Mexico, Ensemble Ossia, Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Intercontemporain, and Ensemble für Neue Musik Zürich.

Composer/producer/sound artist Elliott Sharp leads the projects Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane and tours extensively throughout the world as a composer-in-residence, as a soloist, with his ensembles, and as part of various collaborations performing at festivals, museums, theatres, galleries, and clubs. Academically trained, he studied with Morton Feldman in the 1970’s before moving to New York City. His compositions have been performed by the Symphony of the Hessischer Rundfunk, the Ensemble Modern, Continuum, Kronos Quartet, and Zeitkratzer and Frances-Marie Uitti. His orchestra piece "Calling" was commissioned by the Hessischer Rundfunk to open the 2002 Darmstadt Ferienkurse fur Neue Musik and the CD won the January 2004 German Critics' Prize. His composition "Quarks Swim Free" was premiered at the Venice Biennale in 2003. visit website

Howard Skempton was born in Chester in 1947, and has worked as a composer, accordionist, and music publisher. He studied in London with Cornelius Cardew from 1967 and Cardew helped him to discover a musical language of great simplicity. Since then he has continued to write undeflected by compositional trends, producing a corpus of more than 300 works - many pieces being miniatures for solo piano or accordion. Skempton calls these pieces “the central nervous system” of his work.

Alexander Stankovski (b. 1968) studied composition with Francis Burt at the Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna and in Frankfurt with Hans Zender. He has been commissioned by, among others, the Alban Berg-Foundation, Klangforum Wien, Ensemble die reihe, and Konzerthaus Vienna. A free-lance composer living in Vienna, he has been teacher for counterpoint and analysis at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz since 1998.

Steve Voigt was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. He received his undergraduate degree in composition from Northern Illinois University, and is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of California at San Diego, where his principal teachers were Brian Ferneyhough, Harvey Sollberger, and Rand Steiger. Mr. Voigt's compositions have been performed throughout the United States. His most recent work, Monochrome, was commissioned and performed by the Noise Ensemble of California. Current projects include a work for Ensemble Sospeso and a long-neglected dissertation. Mr. Voigt lives in Brooklyn.

Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) was born in Brâila, Romania, and studied architecture in Athens, Greece. Xenakis participated in the Greek Resistance during World War II and subsequently fled to Paris, where he worked with Le Corbusier. While his assistant, Xenakis designed the Philips Pavilion, home of the première of Edgar Varèse's Poème Électronique at the 1958 Brussels International Fair. He is particularly remembered for his pioneering electronic and computer music and for the use of stochastic mathematical techniques in his compositions. His works for acoustic instruments push performers to their limits and contain an elemental energy and violence simultaneously disturbing and exhilarating.

Drawing on his experience in a variety of genres including jazz, rock, hardcore punk, classical, klezmer, film, cartoon, popular and improvised music, John Zorn has created an influential body of work that defies academic categories. A native of New York City, he has been a central figure in the downtown scene since 1975, incorporating a wide range of musicians in various compositional formats. He learned alchemical synthesis from Harry Smith, structural ontology with Richard Foreman, how to make art out of garbage with Jack Smith, cathartic expression at Sluggs and hermetic intuition from Joseph Cornell. Early inspirations include American innovators Ives, Varèse, Cage, Carter and Partch, the European tradition of Berg, Stravinsky, Boulez and Kagel, soundtrack composers Herrmann, Morricone and Stalling as well as avant-garde theater, film, art and literature..