Composer Aaron Perrine is coming to the University of Missouri in February for a residency and concert featuring the premiere of a new commissioned work he wrote for the Mizzou Wind Ensemble.
Perrine (pictured) will arrive in Columbia on Thursday, February 13. While he’s on campus, he’ll give lessons to composition students; make a presentation about his music; and coach the Wind Ensemble and the Symphonic Band, which will perform two of his older works at a concert later in the month.
His visit will conclude with a performance by the Wind Ensemble and All-Juniors Honor Band at 7:00 p.m. Monday, February 17 at the Missouri Theatre, at which the Ensemble, directed by Brian Silvey, will present the world premiere of Perrine’s new work “Stained with Light.”
Aaron Perrine is a Minnesota native who holds degrees from the University of Iowa, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Minnesota, Morris, and currently is on the faculty at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa.
He has composed music in a variety of genres, and is noted especially for his works for concert and symphonic bands, twice winning the American Bandmasters Association Sousa/Ostwald Award for his compositions “Only Light” in 2015 and “Pale Blue on Deep” in 2013.
Perrine’s music for winds has been featured at numerous national, regional, all-state, state conference, and honor band concerts, and his works for saxophone also have received many notable performances. He also is an active conductor who has worked with a variety of honor bands.
Composer and pianist Amy Williams is coming to Mizzou next month for a residency and concert.
Williams, who is an associate professor teaching composition and music theory at the University of Pittsburgh, will be on campus in Columbia on Wednesday, October 9 and Thursday, October 10.
The daughter of two professional musicians, Williams grew up in Buffalo, NY, frequently hearing contemporary music and meeting composers such as John Cage, Morton Feldman, Lukas Foss, Elliott Carter, and more. She earned her undergraduate degree at Bennington College, and then completed both her master’s degree in piano performance and her Ph.D. in composition at the University at Buffalo. She previously taught at Bennington and Northwestern University before joining the Pittsburgh faculty in 2005.
One of Williams’ best-known works as a composer is the Cineshape series of chamber pieces inspired by different films, first performed in May 2016 by the JACK Quartet, flautist Lindsey Goodman, and percussionist Scott Christian, with video by Aaron Henderson.
“My performance influences my composition very directly — I think very much about the role of the performer, sometimes specifically (what would she or he want to play, what is his or her sound at the instrument), but also performative issues such as physicality and coordination,” Williams said in a 2015 interview. “And I analyze pieces that I play very much from a composer/theorist’s perspective. So it works both ways.”
Her compositions have been presented at renowned contemporary music venues in the United States, Asia, Australia, and Europe, including Ars Musica in Belgium, Gaudeamus Music Week in the Netherlands, Dresden New Music Days in Germany, Festival Aspekte is Austria, Festival Musica Nova in Brazil, and many more.
Williams’ works have been performed by prominent soloists and ensembles such as the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, Ensemble Aleph, Ensemble Dal Niente, Wet Ink, Talujon, Empyrean Ensemble, California E.A.R. Unit, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), pianist Ursula Oppens, and numerous others. Her compositions also have been featured on two “portrait” CDs of solo and chamber works released by Albany Records, “Crossings: Music for Piano and Strings” (2013) and “Cineshape and Duos” (2017).
Williams formed the Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo with Helena Bugallo while both were graduate students at the University at Buffalo. The duo has been featured at major contemporary music festivals and series in Europe and the Americas, including the Ojai Festival, Miller Theatre, Symphony Space, Le Poisson Rouge, Musica Contemporanea Ciclos de Conciertos in Buenos Aires, Festival Attacca in Stuttgart, and many more. They have released five CDs, featuring the music of Conlon Nancarrow, Morton Feldman and Edgard Varèse, György Kurtág, and Igor Stravinsky.
Donnacha Dennehy returns to the Mizzou International Composers Festival in 2019 as a distinguished guest composer, having previously served in the same capacity in 2012, and thereby making MICF history by becoming the only composer to play that role twice.
Considered one of Ireland’s top living composers, Dennehy (pictured) is a founder of the new music group Crash Ensemble and an associate professor of music at Princeton University. His music has been featured at major festivals and venues around the world, including the Edinburgh International Festival; Carnegie Hall; the Tanglewood Festival; the Kennedy Center; The Barbican, Wigmore Hall, and the Royal Opera House in London, and many others.
In recent years, Dennehy has concentrated especially on large-scale musico-dramatic works, including his first opera “The Last Hotel,” which premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in August 2015 and was released on an album earlier this year by Cantaloupe Music; and “The Second Violinist,” which won the 2017 Fedora Prize for Opera, premiered in July 2017 at the Galway International Arts Festival, and was presented in September 2018 at the Barbican in London.
Then there’s “The Hunger,” which was performed first as a work-in-progress at the 2012 MICF, subsequently co-produced in completed form by Alarm Will Sound and Opera Theatre St. Louis, and presented in 2016 at Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York.
The work follows the story of an American who went to Ireland during the Great Famine when so many were fleeing, and shows through text and music her transformation “from clerical observer to empathetic participant.” Now in its completed form, “The Hunger” will be released as an album in CD and digital formats on Friday, August 23 by Nonesuch Records.
Other recent projects of Dennehy’s include “Surface Tension,” premiered by Third Coast Percussion in February 2016 and released last month as part of an album on the New Amsterdam label; “The Weather of it” for the Doric String Quartet, co-commissioned by Wigmore Hall and Carnegie Hall and premiered at Wigmore Hall in July 2016; a piece for the LA Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella series; and “Broken Unison” for So Percussion, co-commissioned by the Cork Opera House and Carnegie Hall.
Along with the forthcoming album of “The Hunger,” Dennehy’s music can be heard on a number of recordings. Grá agus Bás, his 2011 release on Nonesuch featuring Crash Ensemble and singers Dawn Upshaw and Iarla O’Lionáird, was named as one of NPR’s “50 favorite albums’’ for the year.
Donnacha Dennehy, director Tom Creed, and singers Iarla Ó Lionáird and Katherine Manley are interviewed about the 2016 production of “The Hunger” at Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York
“Broken Unison,” performed by So Percussion on January 19, 2019 at Koerner Hall in Toronto
“Stainless Staining,” performed by Isabelle O’Connell (piano) with electronics on March 30, 2017 at SARC, Queen’s University in Belfast, Ireland
“Bulb,” recorded in 2014, featuring Vicky Chow (piano), Ashley Bathgate (cello) and Todd Reynolds (violin)
“The weather of it,” performed by Isaac Allen (violin), Bram Goldstein (violin), Angela Choong (viola) and Alex Greenbaum, (cello) on October 16, 2018 at Historic Old St. Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco
Resident composer Charles Halka comes to the 2019 Mizzou International Composers Festival having already done a good deal of world traveling in his composing and teaching career.
Originally from Tulsa, OK, Halka (pictured) currently is an assistant professor of composition and theory at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. He earned a doctor of musical arts degree from the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University in Houston, TX, and holds degrees in both piano and composition from the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, MD.
Halka’s works include acoustic and electronic music for concert, dance, and opera. They have been performed in North America, Europe, Asia, and South America at venues such as the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, and Foro Internacional de Música Nueva.
As a U.S. Fulbright grantee, Halka spent 2008-09 in Vilnius, Lithuania, researching Lithuanian music and writing an opera in collaboration with director and librettist Marija Simona Šimulynaitė. The opera, “Julius,” was premiered in 2010 in Vilnius, and a choral excerpt, “Dipukų Rauda,” was performed at the ISCM World Music Days 2012 in Belgium.
Other significant works include “Round and Round,” premiered in 2011 at the Library of Congress, then revised and premiered again in 2013 in Hong Kong at the Intimacy of Creativity partnership led by composer Bright Sheng; “And Jill Came Tumbling After,” a chamber opera with a libretto by John Grimmett, written for the Baltic Chamber Opera Theater and selected for Fort Worth Opera’s 2015 Frontiers showcase; and “Imaginary Spaces,” a dance and percussion project created in collaboration with Houston’s Frame Dance Productions with support from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music.
Amy Beth Kirsten occupies a unique place in Mizzou International Composers Festival history, returning in 2019 as a distinguished guest composer after having been one of the eight resident composers at the very first MICF (then called the Mizzou New Music Summer Festival) in 2010.
Kirsten is the only composer to take part in the festival in both capacities, and to celebrate her return, the 2019 MICF will feature the world premiere of excerpts from a major new composition of hers.
A member of the composition faculty at Longy School of Music of Bard College since 2017, she also teaches music composition privately and, for the past eight years, at the HighSCORE summer festival in Pavia, Italy. Kirsten previously served on the faculty of the Peabody Institute from 2015 to 2017, and she has been a guest lecturer at institutions including the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester (U.K.), Yale University, Princeton University, Curtis Institute, Cornell University, and the Royal Academy of Music in London.
The expansive nature of “Jacob in Chains” is in keeping with Kirsten’s aesthetic, which is “characterized by an abiding interest in exploring theatrical elements of creation, performance, and presentation…Her body of work fuses music, language, voice, and theatre and often considers musicians’ instruments, bodies, and voices as equal vehicles of expression.”
Kirsten’s major works in recent years include “Savior,” a collaboration between her own ensemble, HOWL, and musicians of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, that was premiered in 2018 for the 20th anniversary of the CSO’s MusicNOW series; “QUIXOTE,” a 90-minute theatrical work inspired by Cervantes’ epic novel, created with director/designer Mark DeChiazza and HOWL and staged in 2017 at Montclair State University in New Jersey; and “Colombine’s Paradise Theatre,” an evening-length work commissioned and produced by the multi-Grammy-winning eighth blackbird that opened the 2014-15 seasons of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and New York’s Miller Theatre, selling out both venues.
“World Under Glass No. 2,” performed by Equilibrium, featuring Nicole Parks (violin), Mike Avitabile (flute), Stephen Marotto (cello), and Mike Williams (percussion), conducted by Matt Sharrock
“Pirouette On A Moon Sliver,” recorded October 31, 2017, performed by Emma Resmini
“the crowd examines QUIXOTE to find a cause of his madness,” recorded in March 2017 at Montclair State University, performed by HOWL, featuring Jonny Allen, Victor Caccese, Ian Rosenbaum and Terry Sweeney ( percussion), with Lindsay Kesselman (soprano), Hai-Ting Chinn (mezzo-soprano) and Kirsten Sollek (contralto)
“Drink Me,” performed by Alarm Will Sound on July 18, 2010 at the Missouri Theatre
Resident composer inti figgis-vizueta this year will achieve an historic trifecta of sorts in the annals of the Mizzou International Composers Festival, as they will be the first resident composer to have three of their works played by three different ensembles in a single year at the MICF.
Like the seven other resident composers, figgis-vizueta (pictured) has written a new piece for Alarm Will Sound, who will perform their “braiding on golden stoops” as one of the eight world premieres presented in the grand finale concert on Saturday, July 27 at the Missouri Theatre.
inti figgis-vizueta – they use the lower case and non-gendered pronouns – was born in Dublin, Ireland; raised in Washington, DC; and now is based in Brooklyn, NY. When not composing, they work as a curator for Score Follower.
figgis-vizueta writes music that “focuses on combinations of various notational schemata, disparate and overlaid sonic plans, and collaborative unlearning of dominant vernaculars. She/they often write magically real musics through the lens of personal identities, braiding a childhood of overlapping immigrant communities and Black-founded Freedom schools—in Chocolate City (DC)—with Andean heritage and a deep connection to land(s).”
Fittingly for an international festival located in the heartland of the USA, 2019 MICF resident composer Chelsea Komschlies is a native Midwesterner whose music has been performed in eleven countries on four continents around the world.
The daughter of an artist, Komschlies grew up in Appleton, WI creating and loving all sorts of visual art, and still enjoys drawing, digital painting, and creating hand-sculpted jewelry. She often uses real or imagined images as inspiration for her works, hoping that listeners will “make deep, instinctual associations with her music, be they emotional, visual, or otherwise abstract.”
She recently completed a post-graduate artist diploma at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and this fall will begin studies for a doctoral degree in composition at McGill University.
In addition to the piece she’s written for the MICF, her recent projects include a work for organ, harpsichord, and orchestra, premiered by the Curtis Institute in 2018; an extended-reality collaboration with Drexel University game design and software engineer students using the Microsoft Hololens; and “Nunc Dimittis,” an oratorio for voices and period instruments commissioned by the Bach Festival of Philadelphia and premiered in February of this year.
“Steam,” recorded November 4, 2017 at Bread & Salt in San Diego, CA, featuring Beth Ross Buckley (flute) and Sheryl Renk (clarinet)
“Borealis”, world premiere performance recorded April 6, 2018 at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, PA, featuring Emma Resmini (flute), Julian Tello (viola), and Lena Goodson (bass)
For the tenth year of the Mizzou International Composers Festival, the Mizzou New Music Initiative has added a number of new events, including teaming up with Columbia-based experimental music organization Dismal Niche to present two free late-night concerts on Thursday, July 25 and Friday, July 26 after the performances at the Missouri Theatre.
Influenced by “love, anxiety, beats and ambience,” Bels Lontano is an experimental electronic dance music project from composer/producer Bret Bohman(pictured).
Embracing the notion that “music is therapy in both the act of creation and the act of listening,” and drawing on the traditions of IDM, house, hip-hop, contemporary classical, and ambient, “the project explores concepts of liminal spaces, natural beauty, therapy, and personal growth.”
Composer Aaron Perrine is coming to the University of Missouri in February for a residency and concert featuring the premiere of a new commissioned work he wrote for the Mizzou Wind Ensemble.
Composer and pianist 
