Monday, December 4th, 2017
ACF is thrilled to announce that composer Judd Greenstein has been selected as the 2017-2018 ChoralQuest® composer. Greenstein will work with choir director Kayla Roth at Great Falls Middle School in Montague, MA. Great Falls was selected to host the residency due to its talented leadership and program excellence.
Greenstein expressed, “I look forward to working with middle school students on the creation of a new composition. Bringing new music into a community that hasn’t had it before is an exciting opportunity for me, and hopefully one that can give the students and their families a new and enriching experience.”
ChoralQuest is a music series that commissions new works for middle-level choirs by world-class composers. The series is designed to breathe new life into the available repertoire for choral students in middle school and junior high, introduce students to the composition process, and give commissioned composers the unique opportunity and challenge of writing new works for young, changing voices.
Based on the success of the American Composers Forum’s decade-long BandQuest® program, the composers selected for ChoralQuest partner with a middle school in their area. Composers visit rehearsals and engage with the students before composing a piece specifically for the choir. These pieces are published by ACF and will be distributed exclusively by the Hal Leonard Corporation. The experience is fully funded and provided free of cost to Great Falls Middle School.
Students can expect fulfilling experiences working with Greenstein. He will visit the school several times over the next months, giving students the opportunity to interact with a living composer as he writes a new piece specifically for a choir at the school. Roth, Great Falls’ Choir Director, reflects on the opportunity saying, “The Great Falls Middle School is very excited to partner with Judd Greenstein of Gill, MA, through ChoralQuest’s composer-in-residency program. We are thankful for the opportunity to premier one of his songs for our 8th grade chorus concert in the spring, and cannot wait to get started!” The premiere performance will take place in the spring of 2018.
Judd Greenstein is a composer of structurally complex, viscerally engaging works for varied instrumentation. A passionate advocate for the independent new music community across the United States, Judd’s philosophy as both composer and curator involves the creation and promotion of music that is an organic blend of multiple styles, sounds, and instruments, open to all influences.
Standout groups that reflect this polyglot sensibility, including yMusic and Roomful of Teeth, counted Judd among their earliest commissions and continue to perform his work to this day. Recently, Judd has been increasingly in demand as a composer from major institutions such as the Minnesota Orchestra, the North Carolina Symphony, and the Lucerne Festival, among many others. Current and recent projects include an opera about Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, a flute concerto for Alex Sopp and the Knights, and an orchestral song cycle for indie rock vocalist DM Stith.
Judd is a founding member of NOW Ensemble, the composer/performer collective, and is the co-director of New Amsterdam Records, an artists’ service organization that supports post-genre musicians in developing their most personal new projects. He is the curator of New York’s Ecstatic Music Festival, an annual showcase of new collaborative concerts between artists from different musical worlds, and co-curates the Apples & Olives festival in Zurich, Switzerland.
For more information, please visit www.ChoralQuest.org.
Download a PDF of this press release here.
This commission is made possible with generous support from Alfred and Ann Moore.
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