: SCRAPING SKIES

October 27 , 2000 at 8pm - Salomon Hall

Poster by Colin Hartnett.
Click on image to enlarge (pdf file).

Ursuline Avenue - Sarah Michael

Thomas Jerde: flute • Jonathan Warman: tenor sax • Dan Restuccia: bass clarinet • Ben Asriel, David Buttrick: trumpet • Ashton Allen: trombone • Ju Dee Ang: violin • Jen Schwartzman: viola • Bridgett Mueller: cello • Nathan J. Stumpff: conductor

Broken Glass - Thomas Goss

Stephanie Krejcarek: violin • Nathan J. Stumpff: guitar

Oppenheimer Project, scene VI - Music: Elaine Bearer, Choreographer/Author/Director: DJ McDonald

Matty Goodman, Abby Lau: violin • Jen Schwartzman: viola • Troy Chang: cello • Elaine Bearer: keyboard • Stacey Yen (soloist), Jennifer Johanos, Jonathan Martin, Courtney Rowe, Ryan Smith (lanterns): dancers • Glenn Barrett: Oppenheimer • Michael Wartella: Hiroshima boy

- intermission -

Soliloquies and Transformations - Julian Wachner

Virginia Pierce: flute • Dan Restuccia: clarinet • David Buttrick: trumpet • Stephanie Krejcarek: violin • Troy Chang: cello

Trudeau is Dead - Nathan J. Stumpff

Thomas Jerde: piccolo • Virginia Pierce: flute • Jonathan Warman: alto sax • Steve Canon: clarinet • Dan Restuccia: bass clarinet • Aaron Saloway: bassoon • Sarah Bowman: horn • Ben Asriel, David Buttrick: trumpet • Ashton Allen: trombone • Colin Hartnett, Long Nguyen: percussion • Ju Dee Ang, Matty Goodman, Stephanie Krejcarek, Abby Lau: violin • Jen Schwartzman: viola • Troy Chang, Bridgett Mueller: cello • Melissa Zerofsky: bass • Nathan J. Stumpff: conductor • Inho Kim, Courtney Naliboff, Gerald Shapiro: players

Colin Hartnett: poster

composer biographies

Sarah Michael, composer, received her B. Music in music history from San Francisco State University, and her M.A. in Composition from Mills College in Oakland, California.  During the 1970s she was an active performer of Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque music on the viola da gamba in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Her first opera The Sealwoman premiered in June 1996 and her second, Arachne premiered in April 2000.  Her works have been played by the Oakland Easy Bay Symphony, the Diablo Symphony, the Contra Costa Wind Symphony and the Contra Childrens Choirs.  She has written many works for modern dance and served as composer in residence for Moving Arts Dance Collective from 1997 to 1999.  Her current project is composing electro-acoustic works for the Blue Dinghy, a rowboat transformed into a stringed instrument.

Thomas Goss' revolving professions of writer, educator, poet, concert pianist and vocal artist inform his identity as a San Francisco composer. As resident composer for Moving Arts Dance Collective, he has created new dance works with choreographers Anandha Ray and Robert Moses. He appeared as a vocal artist with Chippewa healer and singer Fred Jack Miles Manitoumawhingon in Eagle's Children, his most recently composed dance work for Moving Arts, and premiered this year in the role of Curly in Mark Alburger¹s opera Mice Suites. He is internationally recognized for his work in mentoring, participating this summer as a tutor at the Young Composers Workshop in Nelson, New Zealand. He sits on the steering committee of the Bay Area Chapter of the American Composers Forum, and helped create the chapter¹s successful Composers in the Schools program, now in its third year. He is a regular contributor to the journals 21st Century Music, sounding board, and San Francisco Classical Voice.

Excerpts from Broken Light, his concerto for viola and strings, were presented by Composers Inc. and Marin Symphony's Bay Area Composers Symposium with Linda Ghidossi-DeLuca as soloist. He is a past member of New Release Aliance Composers, and participated in the premiere concert of the California Composers Collective with Bay Brass.

Elaine Bearer has often been called a "Renaissance Woman" because of her diverse interests and accomplishments. She is internationally recognized as both a composer of serious music and as a scientist.  She studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris and has a Bachelor of Music from The Manhattan School of Music and Master of Music from NYU.  She also holds a MD-PhD and is a licensed board-certified physician.  At Brown, she was an Associate Professor in both Pathology and in Music.  Bearer has had three premiers of new musical compositions, in addition to this one, in the last four months.  A CD of Bearer's music, Bearer of Music (Albany Records) can be obtained through amazon.com.  Before coming to Brown, Bearer was on the faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.  Among the awards she has received are grants from Meet the Composer, the Jaffe Foundation, the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts and the National Museum for Women in the Arts.

DJ McDonald began his performing career in Levittown, Long Island, as a steam shovel in a kindergarten play. Since 1982, after venturing onstage again at the age of 20, his work has been presented by numerous companies in New York and Albany, and as part of the Riverside, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, and Jacob's Pillow Festivals.  McDonald was one of seven American choreographers chosen by the American Dance Festival to tour France in 1988, as part of the first Franco American young choreographers exchange.  He has been an occasional contributor to the Village Voice, as well as a dance correspondent and critic and has performed with the dance companies of Andrew DeGroat, Yoshiko Chuma and the School of Hard Knocks, David Dorfman, and with director/choreographers Jeannie Hutchins, Robert Wilson, Pina Bausch and Ann Carlson.  DJ gave a one-day improvisational workshop in the Dance Program at Brown University on Oct 28.

Julian J. Wachner, described by Richard Dyer of the Boston Globe as "a complete musician" and "the man to watch", is the University Organist and Choirmaster of Marsh Chapel.  In addition to his duties at the Chapel, he is an Assistant Professor of Sacred Music at the Boston University School of Theology, Music Director of the Back Bay Chorale and Artistic Director of the Providence Singers.  He is a Visiting Lecturer in Music Composition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as a Fellow of the American Guild of Organists. Wachner has conducted numerous performing ensembles, including the New England Philharmonic, the Boston Bach Ensemble, the Boston University Symphony Orchestra, the Back Bay Chorale, the Providence Singers, and Time's Arrow. 

"One of Boston's finest and busiest young composers", according to the Boston Globe, Wachner has been awarded numerous grants and prizes including first prize in the Chatauqua Chamber Singers Choral Composition Competition, the S. Lewis Elmer Award, a grant from Meet the Composer, Inc., and ASCAP award, a Fellowship to the Schweitzer Institute of Music at Sandpoint, a grant for young artists from the St. Botolph Club Foundation, and departmental awards in composition from Boston University. 

Nathan J. Stumpff ('02) was a junior Music concentrator at Brown University.  Nathan collaborated with choreographer Lauren Hale ('02) on opening and upward, a song cycle for chorus and chamber ensemble based on texts by e.e. cummings, performed by the Brown University Chamber Chorus, directed by Frederick Jodry, at the Spring Dance Concert in Stuart Theater.  At Brown he has studied with Elaine Bearer and Gerald Shapiro, and in 1999 won the Margery MacColl Award for Musical Excellence. A graduate of Boston University Tanglewood Institute-Young Composers program, he studied with Dr. Richard Cornell and has participated in master classes with Sophia Gubaidulina, Lukas Foss and David Lang among others.