ACF’s 2016 summer development intern, Henry Dykstal, conducted a series of interviews with our incoming cohort of board members. Meet Asha Srinivasan! After reading her interview, learn even more about her here. 1. How did music come into your life as something you wanted to pursue as your life’s calling? Music has always been a […]
Continue ReadingACF’s 2016 summer development intern, Henry Dykstal, conducted a series of interviews with our incoming cohort of board members. First up is Chris Osgood. After reading his interview, learn even more about him here. 1. How did music come into your life as something you wanted to pursue as your life’s calling? As a kid in […]
Continue Readingwritten by Tim Hansen In the email ping-pong prefacing this article, JFund awardee Sean Harold warned me that his biographies “tended to be heavy on the sarcasm and light on actual detail.” For example, one iteration of his biography began: “Initially trained as a jazz bassist and improviser, Sean Harold turned his attention to concert […]
Continue ReadingSAINT PAUL, MN (August 24, 2016) – The American Composers Forum is pleased to announce the next cycle of Faith Partnerscomposers-in-residence. This nationally recognized program brings together composers and communities of multiple faith traditions for the creation of new sacred music and the reinvigoration of worship. Gary Ruschman has been selected by the consortium of […]
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Composer Paul John Rudoi and poet Brian Laidlaw met weekly over dinner with the children and families at the Twin Cities Ronald McDonald House. Premiered by the Minnesota Boychoir in May 2016, their beautiful work “My Friends and I,” focuses on hope, friendship, love, and loss through the eyes of children. ACF: What was it like getting to know the kids at […]
Continue Readingwritten by Tim Hansen The Vietnam War. An international clash of ideologies fought in the theatre of a small southeast Asian country. And it sucked. For everyone. Scarcely a person alive in the US today could be ignorant of the misery thousands of young conscripts and their families endured at the behest of their own […]
Continue Readingwritten by Tim Hansen A couple of years ago Californian-based composer Saad Haddad was accepted into the prestigious masters program at Juilliard. Like countless young composers before him, it would mean uprooting from home and hurling himself into the maelstrom of New York City. It’s exciting, but tough, and more than one young artist has […]
Continue Readingwritten by Tim Hansen When JFund awardee James Everest was three years old, he composed a thunderstorm on his parents’ upright piano. He recalls the “crashing thunder on clusters of low keys, and sprinkling rain drops on individual high notes—with an arc of the storm building and dissipating over time.” And sure, while the actual […]
Continue Readingwritten by Tim Hansen “My music is almost always several times removed from its inspiration,” states vocalist and JFund awardee Tiffany Skidmore. Both prolific and versatile, Skidmore has produced an extensive catalogue of work that ranges from finely crystalline chamber music to gothic contemporary art song fused with electronics. Perhaps then it’s unsurprising that the […]
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The invitation to showcase American composers at the Havana Contemporary Music Festival was, quite frankly, one of the most extraordinary opportunities in the history of ACF. We have grown measurably from our early roots, and it was a great honor to present the work of ten American composers who represent such a wide range of […]
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by Tim Hansen Composer Alex Temple is fascinated by cheese. Not the dairy kind. The musical kind. Faux world-music. TV news themes. General midi instruments. Sound logos. That music your massage therapist puts on and it’s all soothing pads and bells and a husky-voiced alto going “ooh ooh aah ooh” over a floaty bed of […]
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by Tim Hansen Contemporary art photographer artist Bill Henson is a wizard with a camera. Internationally renowned for his sometimes controversial exhibitions, the Australian artist is famous for creating textures in his images that are close to those in paintings. In particular, he is recognised for his skilful use of chiaroscuro, a visual art technique […]
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written by Tim Hansen If one wants to gain an insight into a composer’s brain, reading their bio is a good place to start. Usually these are carefully curated mini-autobiographies, where the composer outlines what they consider to be their proudest achievements, most cherished influences, beloved mentors and general philosophy on music and the […]
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by Tim Hansen In 1942 Aaron Copland was commissioned to write a new ballet for Martha Graham with broad brief of creating something “American themed”. No prizes for guessing the work: Appalachian Spring was an instant success, immediately becoming a cornerstone of Americana and continuing to thrive today in concert halls and SUV commercials. Years […]
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by Tim Hansen Kids who grew up in the ’80s came of age when, for the first time since the industrial revolution kicked off, the international community began to ask itself seriously: what kind of a world are we leaving for our children? I have these vague childhood memories of news reports of “the greenhouse […]
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by Tim Hansen Every non-American school kid like me grows up knowing a handful of US geographic icons. I can’t remember a time I didn’t know about the Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore, and for some reason, Texas; and, I guess because my home country of Australia has a special affinity for unusual place names, pretty […]
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By Tim Hansen On a bare hill overlooking the village of Burnley in Lancashire, England, stands the Singing Ringing Tree, an array of galvanised steel pipes stacked in a swirled sculpture to resemble a stylised broad-boughed tree. Standing alone on this otherwise empty hill it is visually striking enough, but it’s when the wind picks […]
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Written by Tim Hansen “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” So observed Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of The Little Prince, who may well have been describing the central aesthetic tenet of JFund awardee Gabriel Zucker. Zucker, whose work […]
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Written by Tim Hansen The Alaskan town of Homer is, in a word, remote. Although it’s only about 120 miles south of Anchorage as the crow flies, it’s one of the last outposts of civilization on the Kenai Peninsula, overlooking the frigid waters of Kachemak Bay and the inaccessible, fractured coastline beyond. Getting there is […]
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How did Spektral¹s involvement in Behind the Wallpaper come about, and is there anything to keep in mind or listen for when we hear it February 23? Behind the Wallpaper came about like the vast majority of our commissions do…we were keen to work with a specific composer. Alex Temple, who is based in Chicago, and has […]
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By Tim Hansen Composers are generally a diversely intellectual bunch. In addition to their music training, it’s common for them to have undertaken some other form of study or have an abiding curiosity in a non-musical field that gives a specific flavour to their art. JFund awardee Kathy McTavish has a C.V. that, when compared […]
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Written by Tim Hansen Until a few years ago, composer, saxophonist and JFund awardee Erin Rogers did not have an especial bent towards science fiction; a childhood smattered with the occasional Star Trek re-run after school was about as far as it went. Then, shortly after moving to New York City in 2005 “broke but […]
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Written by Tim Hansen Galway Kinnell’s 1973 epic poem The Book of Nightmares is, to put it mildly, bleak. For the most part, it is a horrifying critique of the events of the twentieth century, but nestled within are passages that illuminate “the mystical, otherworldly and mysterious union of man and woman in the context […]
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Written by Tim Hansen When Christopher Cresswell was in the third grade, his teacher asked his class to write about what they wanted to be when they grew up. Ten year old Cresswell had two aspirations: to be a country singer and a baseball player. Sadly, we’ll never get to witness Cresswell’s induction into the […]
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By Will Wlizlo Nona Marie Invie getting some good vibes from members of Anonymous Choir. Some music is born on a hard bench in a piano lesson studio. Other sounds are teased out of the ether in a geodesic dome in Costa Rica. Nona Marie Invie’s latest project comes from both places—and it has both […]
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by Jocelyn Hagen Growing up as an only child in the country, outside a small town in North Dakota, allowed me to spend a lot of time inside my head. Being creative was a part of my everyday life, just as it is now. Through the years I became very comfortable in my mostly singular […]
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Tim Hansen As a teenager, Masatora Goya was more interested in playing rugby than the piano. Born in Malaysia but raised in Japan, Masatora says his home life “wasn’t that musical.” Sure, there were CDs in the house (and cassette tapes, it was the ‘80s after all), but, as Masatora describes, “it wasn’t like […]
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Written by Tim Hansen Fresh-faced young wannabe composers arriving at college are told in Composing 101: find your voice. Refine it down. Success means choosing a niche and painstakingly carving it out of the musical landscape bit by bit, like Andy Dufresne’s prison-cell wall inThe Shawshank Redemption, until you have your own tiny, specialised musical […]
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By Tim Hansen 2013 JFund awardee David Hertzberg is writing a work for saxophones. Four of them. The PRISM Quartet to be precise, which is no small coup. PRISM are not only regarded internationally as champions of new music, their commissioning history reads like a who’s who of Pulizter-Prize winners, Guggenheim Fellows and MacArthur “Genius” […]
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By Tim Hansen One afternoon in the summer of 2012, JFund awardee Eric Nathan arrived in Aldeburgh in England, to participate in the eponymous annual music festival established there by British composer Benjamin Britten. By all accounts, Aldeburgh is a place of desolate beauty, prized by Britten for being rugged, rural and – most importantly […]
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