Lawrence Dillon@Sequenza21.com

"There are no two points so distant from one another that they cannot be connected by a single straight line -- and an infinite number of curves."

Composer Lawrence Dillon has produced an extensive body of work, from brief solo pieces to a full-length opera. Three disks of his music are due out in 2010 on the Bridge, Albany and Naxos labels. In the past year, he has had commissions from the Emerson String Quartet, the Cassatt String Quartet, the Mansfield Symphony, the Boise Philharmonic, the Salt Lake City Symphony, the Ravinia Festival, the Daedalus String Quartet, the Kenan Institute for the Arts, the University of Utah and the Idyllwild Symphony Orchestra.

Although he lost 50% of his hearing in a childhood illness, Dillon began composing as soon as he started piano lessons at the age of seven. In 1985, he became the youngest composer to earn a doctorate at The Juilliard School, and was shortly thereafter appointed to the Juilliard faculty. Dillon is now Composer in Residence at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, where he has served as Music Director of the Contemporary Ensemble, Assistant Dean of Performance, and Interim Dean of the School of Music. He was the Featured American Composer in the February 2006 issue of Chamber Music magazine.


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Saturday, May 07, 2005
Send in the Prunes

I’m trying to keep myself regular, so a bit more pruning is on the menu for today.

Going by decade, Sequenza21 readers have voted Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach as the most influential piece of the 1970s, and John Adams’s Harmonielehre as the most influential piece of the 1980s. How about the 1990s? I know I have specific pieces that affected me in a very powerful way, but I’m not so sure their influence was as cultural as it was personal. I’m curious to hear from younger composers on this one.

To refresh your memory, the nominations are below. Again, I’m not looking for the best piece, whatever that means, but the piece that had the most widespread impact on American composers -- widespread in the sense that it affected the greatest number of composers. What do you think?

Gyorgi Ligeti: Violin Concerto (1990)
John Cage: Four2 (1990)
Iannis Xenakis: Knephas (1990)
Pauline Oliveros: Crone Music (1990)
Martin Bresnick: Opere della Musica Povera (1990-99)
Julia Wolfe: Four Marys (1991)
John Cage: Five3 (1991)
Robert Ashley: Improvement (1991)
Milton Babbitt: Mehr Du (1991)
John Adams: The Death of Klinghoffer (1991)
Meredith Monk: Atlas (1991)
Judith Weir: I Broke Off a Golden Branch (1991)
Frederic Rzewski: De Profundis (1991)
John Adams: Chamber Symphony (1992)
Magnus Lindberg: Clarinet Quintet (1992)
Conrad Cummings: Photo Op (1992)
John Cage: Fifty-Eight (1992)
David Lang: Cheating, Lying, Stealing (1993)
Milton Babbitt: String Quartet No. 6 (1993)
David First: Jade Screen Test Dreams of Renting Wings (1993)
Michael Daugherty: Metropolis Symphony (1993)
Elliott Carter: Symphonia (1993-96)
Magnus Lindberg: Aura (1994)
Olivier Messiaen: Eclairs sur l'Au-Dela (1994)
Milton Babbitt: Triad (1994)
Gyorgi Kurtag: Stele (1994)
Mikel Rouse: Failing Kansas (1995)
Michael Gordon: Trance (1995)
Eve Beglarian: Landscaping for Privacy (1995)
Mikel Rouse: Dennis Cleveland (1996)
Gerard Grisey: Vortex temporum (1996)
Tobias Picker: Emmeline (1996)
Esa-Pekka Salonen: LA Variations (1996)
Tan Dun: Marco Polo (1996)
Michael Finnissy: Seventeen Immortal Homosexual Poets (1997)
Thomas Ades: Powder Her Face (1997)
Sofia Gubaidulina: Canticle of the Sun (1997)
Michael Finnissy: Multiple Forms of Constraint (1997)
Pierre Boulez: Sur incises (1998)
John Luther Adams: In the White Silence (1998)
Beat Furrer: Still (1998)
Mark Adamo: Little Women (1998)
John Adams: Naive and Sentimental Music (1998-99)
Elodie Lauten: Waking in New York (1999)
Toshio Hosokawa: Koto-uta (1999)
Louis Andriessen: Writing to Vermeer (1999)
The Magnetic Fields (aka Stephin Merritt): 69 LOVE SONGS (the album) (1999)