Our regular listen to and look at living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening online:
Christopher Hopkins (b.1957 — US)
Christopher Hopkins is an assistant professor of music composition at Iowa State University of Science and Technology, where he teaches courses in composition, music technology, sound synthesis and orchestration. He is director of the Lipa Festival of Contemporary Music. As a composer he works in both experimental and traditional forms, with special interests in electroacoustic music, innovative notations and instrumental techniques, and dialectics between historical and contemporary musical forms.
Christopher’s site is rather bare-bones, but what’s there is what matters: the music.
Katharina Rosenberger (b.1971 — Switzerland, US).
Katharina grew up in Zurich, playing piano and singing in choir through her teens. Her formal music studies began at Jazz School Zurich, but she quickly bailed to Boston and the Berklee College of Music for her BA. Jump again to Zurich, then over to the Royal Academy of Music in London for her MA, and finally (?…) hop back over to the States and Columbia for her DMA. Her works, electronic & acoustic, are often inspired and linked with the visual arts, theater and inquiries into perceptual and phenomenological issues.
“Much of my work manifests in an interdisciplinary context and is bound to confront traditional performance practice in terms of how sound is produced, heard and seen. Taking the audience to peculiar places, ambiguous and deceiving, where the usual expectations have to be thrown overboard. Often the instrumentalists are challenged to go beyond an ‘only’ interpretative function; their corporal presence on stage is fully taken into account.”
Under the “index of works” link at her site, you’ll find descriptions of her work, along with both audio excerpts and complete recordings.