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, with so much good listening online:
Virgil Moorefield (b. 1956 — US)
With not only an M.F.A. and Ph.D. in composition from Princeton, but a B.A. and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Columbia (with a bit of Juilliard thrown in), you might expect some “high-concept” mixing with the music in Virgil Moorefield’s work, and so there is. But Virgil has a powerful weapon for keeping that ivory tower from becoming a tomb: he’s also a drummer. Not just any drummer, either; that’s him in the upper-center of the lower photo, the one-man motor driving Glenn Branca’s 100 guitars in Branca’s Symphony #13, “Hallucination City” (in a pic from the 2006 L.A. performance), a role he’ll be reprising when the symphony is done again this Oct. 12th at The Roundhouse in London. Toss in his time with The Swans, Elliot Sharp, Damage et al, and there’s just no way the academic cobwebs are going to close in on his compositions.
Virgil’s officially an Associate Professor of Music at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, but with his performing it just might be hard to catch him in a classroom there. Where you can catch him compositionally is at his website linked above, which includes a fair number of complete MP3 files of enitire pieces and/or movements. These are culled from his excellent and varied discography, which just happened to grow by one this year thanks to the Innova release Things You Must Do To Get To Heaven. Whether as a CD or as downloads from your MP3-site-of-choice, I can wholeheartedly recommend having this stuff around your house.
When he went to work for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center a few years ago, Ronen Givony knew very little about classical music. Not himself a musician, but a passionate music fan, his tastes inclined to Indie-rock. He listened to Radiohead, David Byrne, Björk, and other, more obscure eclectics. At CMS he discovered classical music and was quickly smitten by old fogies like Bach, Mendelssohn, and Ligeti. Seeing his fellow Indie fans as a natural audience for classical music, he proposed a series of joint rock/classical concerts at Lincoln Center. He now works at Nonesuch.
Official blurb: “A native of Shenyang, Fuhong learned to play the piano at the age of eight, and began to study composition at fourteen. She graduated from the music school affiliated with the Shenyang Conservatory of Music in 1995, where she received the highest entrance exam score on the National Examinations for admission to the Central Conservatory of Music (CCOM) in Beijing. At the CCOM she studied composition with Jianping TANG, and received a Bachelor’s degree in composition in 2000. She then earned a Master’s degree in composition under the direction of John Celona and Dániel Péter Biró at the University of Victoria in 2005. In the fall 2005, she began her doctoral studies with Gary Kulesha at the University of Toronto.”
Them thar hills are alive with composers!… Like Larry Gaab out in the “wilds” of Chico, California (O.K., more valley than hill, but what the hey): family and marital counselor by day, experimental electroacoustic musician by any-other-time. Spare with biographical and other details, about all he’ll tell you is that he “blends treated acoustic sources and electronic instruments into works which are in part composed and in part improvised. The electronic instruments are invented and played live by various extended techniques.”