Catalog

Peter G. Davis writes: "Spanning the years 1978 to 2001, the music on this disc gives a useful overview of the musical aims and stylistic development of a prominent, productive, and often provocative American composer between the ages of 17 and 40. It is a useful mini-survey and a revealing one as well. All five works are written for small instrumental combinations, an exposed medium in which no composer has ever found an easy place to hide. In chamber music every note counts, and the composer must make the performer as well as the listener feel actively engaged with the music's substance and forward progress at all times, if the piece is to emerge as a fully satisfying listening experience. Anyone who listens closely to Lowell Liebermann's scores has to be impressed by their ability to do precisely this in music notable for its clarity and textural lucidity. Some will be tempted to call these works neo-romantic, neo-classical, post-modern, or any number of other fashionable terms, most of them not very helpful. Labels are often misleading, but one thing is certain; Liebermann is not concerned with startling his audiences by experimenting with radical new structures, never-before-heard musical sounds, or extended instrumental techniques. Indeed, he adopts a more conservative stance that apparently stings certain critics for whom novelty is absolutely essential if a new work is to be considered artistically valid. So much the worse for them. Liebermann is too busy composing to enter into such aesthetic arguments. The title of each piece on this disc honestly describes what it is, and in terms that composers as far back as Haydn and Mozart would recognize. Liebermann's music falls gratefully upon the ear, but it is filtered through the sensibility of a composer who clearly lives in our time and is fully aware of the tumultuous musical upheavals of the past century, even as he consciously makes the choice to offer us something that rises above the fray. Liebermann writes music that above all strives for balance and beauty - and braininess as well, for all those who care to dig beneath the surface. It is a healthy sign of the times that a composer can once again choose to be accessible in this way and not be automatically squashed and discouraged by the mandarins of contemporary music. Such was the fate of many American composers active in the generation that preceded Liebermann, and the new music scene is still in recovery from those bad old days."

Wolfgang David (b.1971) has become ensconced on the international stage, both as a recitalist, and as a guest soloist with many of the world's leading orchestras. His teachers included Rainer Kuelchl, the concert master of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Igor Ozim at the Berne Conservatory and Yfrah Neaman at London's Guildhall School of Music. David Gompper (b.1954) has lived and worked professionally as a pianist, a conductor, and a composer in New York, San Diego, London, Nigeria, Michigan and Texas. He is currently Professor of Composition and Director of the Center for New Music at the University of Iowa. In 2002-2003, he was in Russia as a Fulbright Scholar, teaching, performing and conducting at the Moscow Conservatory. He has performed with Wolfgang David in Moscow, the United States and Vienna.

America began forging its own cultural identity in the 19th Century with music reflecting a vast array of cultures coming together. By the time the first music conservatory opened in 1865, European classical music had begun to be mingled with music influenced by Native American themes, African-American styles of ragtime and spirituals, Latin American and rural American folk music, and the traditional military band. With Vintage America, Calico Winds showcases these American musical roots. Known for exploring the full palette of tone colors available to the wind quintet, Calico Winds plays "in perfect balance with each other, each [member] contributing lovely tone quality and flawless intonation..." (The Times Herald, Olean, NY) It is with these attributes that Calico Winds brings to life America's rich musical legacy.

Henry Holden Huss was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in New York City, where his family moved when he was two. His father had emigrated from Germany and became a successful organist and piano teacher in this country. Young Huss began to study music with his father, then others in this country, finally traveling to Munich to study at the Royal Conservatory. He studied piano, organ and composition with two other American students who began the same time he did: Horatio Parker and Arthur Whiting. All three excelled. Upon his return to the United States, Huss received some recognition with his Piano Concerto (his graduation piece from Munich). He performed it both with the Boston Symphony and the New York Philharmonic. Daniel Gregory Mason related to Huss in 1892, that John Knowles Paine, the dean of American composers with whom Mason was studying at the time, considered Huss "the best of the young generation of American composers". Many shared this opinion. But like many other American composers of the time, Huss found it very difficult to get his music performed and published. His Trio in d minor, Op. 23, was composed in 1886 and dedicated to his teacher Joseph Rheinberger. Mortimer Wilson was born in Charlton, Iowa. He studied organ, violin and composition with Frederick Grant Gleason at the Chicago Musical College. He then studied in Leipzig with Max Reger. John Tasker Howard (the great observer of early American composers) wrote of his rigorously trained former teacher that he "...could toss complicated counterpoint from his pen as easily as he could talk to his friends". Upon his return to this country in 1911, he taught at the Atlanta Conservatory and conducted the Atlanta Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1916, he moved to Brenau College in Gainesville, Georgia. By 1918, he had taken a job as consulting editor for the National Academy of Music in New York City, where he remained until his death. Today, his works are mostly in manuscript and includes five symphonies and a great deal of chamber music. The suite, From My Youth, Op. 5 was published in 1911 and premiered by the Sitting Trio. Adolf Martin Foerster was born in Pittsburgh. He began with piano lessons from his mother and then pursued music in the public schools which had just incorporated Lowell Mason's ideas about music education into its public schools. He also then went to Leipzig to complete his education. Upon his return to America he spent one year teaching in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, before he returned to Pittsburgh, where he soon became one of the musical leaders of the community. Though mainly known as a songwriter, Foerster's many compositions include numerous suites, overtures, and festival marches for orchestra; a violin concerto, two other piano trios; a piano quartet and pieces for violin and piano. His Trio Serenade was composed in 1907 and is a lush romantic work.

Allen Shawn has composed a large catalog of chamber and piano music, 11 concertos and orchestral works, choral music, and several song cycles. He has composed incidental music for theater, two chamber operas to libretti by his brother, playwright Wallace Shawn, a one act children's chamber opera, music for ballet, and music for the film "My Dinner with Andre." He performs frequently as a pianist and has been a faculty member since 1985 at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont. He is also the author of the book, Arnold Schoenberg's Journey, as well as many articles about contemporary music.

David Rakowski grew up in St. Albans, Vermont playing trombone in community bands and keyboards in a rock band. His first composition was a band piece he wrote his junior year in high school, in order to win the Vermont All-State Composition Competition (he lost). The first music he heard that he really liked was Le Soleil des Eaux of Boulez and Ensembles for Synthesizer of Babbitt, on a Time-Life "Music of Today" compilation that his band director had lent him. He eventually studied composition at the New England Conservatory, at Princeton with among others, Milton Babbitt, and at Tanglewood with Luciano Berio. He has been composer-in-residence at the Bowdoin Summer Music Festival and Guest Composer at the Wellesley Composers Conference. He has taught at Stanford, Harvard, and Columbia Universities. Currently he is Professor of Composition at Brandeis, whose faculty he joined in 1995.

Major critics have praised Erica Muhl's music, describing it as "strong and poetic," "ravishingly beautiful," "haunting," even "fearless". Paul Hertelendy, one of America's most esteemed writers on music, wrote, "Muhl has a fine ear and an iridescent palette...[Her work] is a contemporary foray into impressionism, mysticism, veiled allure and the shimmering colors of a concert orchestra". She was born and raised in Los Angeles, where her father, Edward, was head of production for Universal Pictures and her mother, Barbara, an author and opera singer. Her parents associated with such musical figures as Stravinsky, Schnabel, Stokowski, Andre Previn and Henry Mancini. As may have been expected in this musical milieu, Muhl was trained both as a composer and conductor, with much of that training completed in Europe. At age sixteen she was invited to study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. After returning to California to earn her B.M., she traveled again to Europe for graduate studies at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome and the Accademia Chigiana in Siena, studying with the great Italian composer Franco Donatoni. In 1991, she completed her Doctorate of Musical Arts at the University of Southern California. She studied conducting with Walter Cataldi-Tassoni, a student of Mascagni and Fritz Zweig, a student of Humperdinck and a close colleague of Richard Strauss and Otto Klemperer. Muhl has served as Assistant Conductor for Los Angeles Opera Theater, Seattle Opera and the Pacific Northwest Wagner Festival's complete Ring. Erica Muhl is Professor of Composition at the University of Southern California's Thornton School of Music and resides in Los Angeles.

Founded in 1989, the Nevelson Duo, named for the American artist Louise Nevelson, is committed to performing works by American composers, as well as both standard and less-familiar repertoire for violin and piano. Elizabeth Reed Smith is Professor of violin, viola, and chamber music at Marshall University. Since earning degrees in violin performance from Yale and Eastman, Dr. Smith has received numerous awards. She has studied violin with Charles Castleman, Szymon Goldberg and Burton Kaplan. She has spent five summers as concertmaster of the Spoleto Festival Orchestra. With degrees from the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Missouri at Kansas City, Leslie Petteys is Professor of piano and graduate studies at Marshall University. She has also taught at Stephens College and served as Assistant Director of the Institute for Studies in American Music at University of Kansas City - Missouri. She has studied piano with David Burge and performed in master classes for Gilbert Kalish, Byron Janis, and Elly Ameling. She has appeared as a solo recitalist and chamber musician throughout the eastern and Midwestern states. The Nevelson Duo has performed extensively in the Mid-Atlantic states and has been featured in recitals at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. and the Longy School of Music in Boston. Bidder to Better was commissioned by the Nevelson Duo as part of the national series of works sponsored by Meet The Composer/Arts Endowment Commissioning Music/USA.

Richard Felciano's interest in musical acoustics led him through language, voice and organ studies to electronic and then computer, as well as to music for architectural and public spaces and music for non-Western instruments. Many of these works demonstrate a strongly ritualistic bent, reflective of the large Portuguese and Asian populations of his Northern California childhood. In the words of his colleague and fellow composer, Howard Hersh, "the vitality of invention and depth of artistic curiosity are clearly enormous, (yet) the major thrust of his contribution...lies in the power with which he has fused his innovative techniques to that timeless element of dramatic immediacy and his acutely-tuned sensibility to the sheer beauty of sound. There has never been any doubt that behind his music - whatever its external form - there stands a human - a humane - sensibility". The composer himself writes: "It has been said that artists spend much of their lives following a path which they somehow know is right but cannot yet clearly define. Scientists know a similar situation: Einstein spoke of 'something which is there but we don't know what it is.' In both instances, knowing that 'something' becomes compelling. In the notes about the works which are on this CD, my own search for that 'something' will become clear - a desire to approach composition through a deepening knowledge of 'what is there' in music - the physical nature of sound itself, so that, as in architecture, whatever structure is possible is defined by the nature of the materials. Picasso observed that the real problem in creativity is the materials, meaning that only through knowledge of them can anything at all be expressed. He was right."

Harold Farberman’s career as a conductor has overshadowed his achievements as a composer. In fact, while a member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Farberman turned first to composition as a further creative outlet, which in turn led to his more visible conducting career. From the mid-fifties onward, when he composed his first work, Evolution, for soprano, French horn and seven percussionists, Farberman has never stopped creating music. Farberman was born in New York City’s Lower East Side. Coming from a family of musicians (his father was the drummer in a famous 1920’s Klezmer band; his eldest brother was also a drummer) it seemed inevitable that he pursue music as a career. After graduating from Juilliard on a percussion scholarship in 1951, he immediately joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra percussion section. With a performer’s knowledge of percussion instruments and a dissatisfaction with their conventional treatment, he became an early advocate for the use of percussion sonorities as a major voice in compositional structures. His very first work, Evolution, written in 1954 before he began formal studies in composition, is scored for over 100 percussion instruments and has been recorded four times, once by Leopold Stokowski. Note the special way we are featuring Mr. Farberman this month; not only as the conductor of the fine Bazelon orchestral disc (TROY370), but here he also is represented as a composer.

Stephen Scott writes: "Sounding Landscapes is a kind of song-cycle fantasy celebrating various landscapes, both physical and imagined, both natural and cultural, of Lanzarote, eastern-most of the Canary Islands. I was inspired to make this work not only as a personal manifestation of my affection for Lanzarote, which I have visited three times, but also in response to two other sources: the evocative visual art of painter/photographer Ildefonso Aguilar, Founder and Director of the Visual Music festival of Lanzarote, whose recent series of paintings, Paisajes Audibles, provides my title and the cover paintings; and works by various writers, including Plato, Lorca and Agustin Espinosa, who have examined ideas of landscape and the humans who are shaped by it and shape it in turn. My work for the past 25 years has centered on the bowed piano, a medium primarily of my own devising but influenced also by the discoveries of other experimentalists such as Henry Cowell, John Cage and Curtis Curtis-Smith. Most of the sounds are made directly on the strings of one open grand piano by ten players using a variety of materials and tools; among these are nylon fish line, horsehair, guitar picks and fingernails, piano hammers, percussion mallets and specially-designed piano mutes. The music also owes a huge stylistic debt to the thinking of Terry Riley and Steve Reich, as well as to various world musics, especially West African music, jazz and flamenco. Paisajes Audibles/Sounding Landscapes is my first major work to integrate the human voice with the Bowed Piano Ensemble. The texts sung and spoken by the soprano (and occasionally by the players) are in English, Spanish and French and most are self-explanatory. The work was composed on commission from Meet the Composer Commissioning Music USA, for San Francisco's Other Minds Festival. It is dedicated to the Festival's director, Charles Amirkhanian, and to Ildefonso Aguilar, two of contemporary music's most visionary presenters; Aguilar's work has given life to Harry Partch's dictum that "the eye explains to the ear and the ear fulfills the vision"; and Amirkhanian has for decades been teaching Americans, musicians and listeners alike, much of what we need to know about our own contemporary music and about each other."

Steven Stucky has written commissioned works for many of the major American orchestras, including Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Minnesota, Philadelphia, St. Louis and the National Symphony. As a conductor, he appears frequently with the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group and Ensemble X, a contemporary music group he co-founded in 1997. Mr. Stucky's work with the Los Angeles Philharmonic comprises the longest composer residency of any American orchestra. First appointed composer in Residence by Andre Previn in 1988, he has worked closely with Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen since 1990. Since 1980, Mr. Stucky has taught at Cornell University, where he serves as Given Foundation Professor of Composition, and where he chaired the Music Department from 1992 to 1997. He was Visiting Professor of Composition at the Eastman School of Music in 2001-2, and Ernest Bloch Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2003.

Born in Buenos Aires, Jorge Liderman began his musical studies at the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem. In 1988, he received his doctorate in composition from the University of Chicago where he worked with Ralph Shapey and Shulamit Ran. A year later, Liderman joined the composition faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. The composer writes: "Continuity and the lack of continuity have been at the center of my musical thinking for nearly fifteen years. By continuity I mean the presence of a musical fabric woven by one or more musical processes that unfold gradually. This leads the listener, "uninterruptedly," from one harmonic idea to another, from a low to a high register for example, or from a clearly irregular and non-metric rhythmic pattern to a regular and pulsating beat. On the other hand, the lack of continuity shapes itself through the abrupt juxtaposition of sharply contrasting brief musical statements. Here the contrast is created by the juxtaposition of far reaching harmonic areas which could also be different in nature. Trompetas de Plata, a collection of some of my most recent chamber works for strings, percussion and piano, was composed with these ideas in mind."

Ezra Laderman writes: "I love writing tunes and the pull to a specific key or note. I take pleasure in perpetual variation, creating whole blocks of music derived from small motivic cells. I enjoy putting into motion a number of musical issues and making them work together in a cohesive, symbiotic manner. I find the disjunct note, silence, and space, a powerful metaphor...and most of all I thrill to a long line, an arch that weaves and spins itself out giving a sense of completeness, of wholeness. I do not want to forsake this musical world that I inhabit. The challenge is to make it work, to make the music relevant for our time, for it to be evocative and for the music to engage the heart and the mind. On a different level, there is a personal, emotional, fallible, human level that is within each of us, one that I find not easily verbalized or articulated. The language of music has enabled me to go to that source, to communicate those inner feelings. We have collectively lived through joy, tragedy, uncertainty, determination, to mention but four dimensions of life. Without furling out the banner and showing my stripes, I have been able to express myself. What I have done has given me great satisfaction. Using these disparate tools together has made it possible for me to express these feelings persuasively, consciously, or intuitively. At least, it is my hope that I have done so. It is a life spent composing my way, and trusting that it reaches and speaks to you, and it will stand the test of time...My early works are clearly grounded in tonality, spiked with dissonance. In the middle years, my music is absorbed in atonality and serial techniques. These last years my compositions have embraced all that has been meaningful to me over a lifetime of creativity. And it is very apparent in the works that make up this CD."

Christopher Pegis, cellist is the founder and Artistic Director of Amici Chamber Players and a cellist with the Florida String Quartet. He writes: "This recording is in many ways a product of my large extended musical family, my work with the Florida West Coast Symphony, and indeed the very nature of creative collaborations. Although it was not planned this way, the performers and composers are all linked to one another in some way by family, friendship and work. I was lucky to have met Soulima Stravinsky and his wife, Francoise, and was involved in earlier recordings and performances of his music before they both passed away. Through the Stravinskys, a link was made to his father Igor and to fellow composer Charles Jones. Although my memory of this is dim, apparently I did shake Jones' hand at a reception in New York City following my ensemble's concert to honor Soulima's chamber music compositions. Thomas Massella and Efrain Amaya are former college classmates of myself and my wife, respectively; Paul Ramsier came to us via the Florida West Coast Symphony and his collaborations with Symphony bassist John Miller. When we started to physically record this music, we jointly decided to try to avoid cutting and splicing at all costs. Our aim was to impart the excitement and sweep of a live performance to our audience. This put extra pressure on all of the performers, but the result is that what you are hearing is 98% splice free from beginning to end. In fact, nine of the eleven compositions are complete takes from start to finish."

This is the first recording of Collin's songs and instrumental duos, including the 1933 Suite for Violoncello and Piano, a major addition to the repertoire for this combination of instruments. Born in Joliet, Illinois, Collins studied piano with Ganz in Chicago and composition with Bruch and Humperdinck in Europe. A 1912 Berlin debut and subsequent concerts in the USA and Europe earned strong critical praise. Collins was hired as an assistant conductor for the Bayreuth Festival in 1914; that engagement was ended by World War I and service in the US Army. After the War, Collins began a teaching career in Chicago, continuing to conduct, perform and compose. His music attracted the attention of Chicago Symphony Orchestra Music Director Frederick Stock, who conducted many of Collins's orchestral compositions. Those include a symphony, three piano concerti, and a secular cantata. Collins also composed dozens of songs, piano solo works and other chamber music. The songs presented on this CD were composed between 1917 and 1944. As a former opera house assistant conductor at New York's Century Opera and at the Bayreuth Festival, Collins understood voices and had a thorough appreciation for the best of them. Having coached many singers, he knew what to expect in regard to range, color, tessitura and expression. He did not, therefore, approach song writing as if composing for instrumentalists. A man who was an avid reader of the classics, he brought a literate acuity to his choice of texts and even wrote some fine ones himself; the best songs merit the attention of any sensitive singer.

Composer and conductor Anthony Iannaccone studied at the Manhattan School of Music and the Eastman School of Music. His principal teachers were Vittorio Giannini, Aaron Copland and David Diamond. During the early part of his career, he supported himself as a part-time teacher at the Manhattan School of Music and as an orchestral violinist. Iannaccone's catalogue of approximately 50 published works includes three symphonies, smaller works for orchestra, several large works for chorus and orchestra, numerous chamber pieces, large works for wind ensemble, and several extended a cappella choral compositions. In 2001, his Waiting for Sunrise on the Sound was chosen as one of the five finalists in the BBC-London Symphony Masterprize competition from a field of 1151 orchestral works submitted. Anthony Iannaccone enjoys an active conducting career in both new music and standard orchestral repertory. Since 1971, he has taught at Eastern Michigan University, where he received the Distinguished Faculty Award and, for thirty years, conducted the Collegium Musicum in late eighteenth-century music for chorus and chamber orchestra.

Composer Barbara White was born in Boston and was educated at Harvard/Radcliffe Colleges and the University of Pittsburgh. She is currently a faculty member at Princeton University, and she spent a recent sabbatical year as a Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She writes: "Apocryphal Studies is a sonic scrapbook of sorts, a compilation and documentation of my musical memories. Anyone who has ever been haunted by a fragment of a melody knows how enduring such memories can be; yet by the time we hear a sound, it has already begun to decay. In assembling my memories into new work, I play in the field between these apparent extremes: ever presence and impermanence. Musical reminiscences are simultaneously lasting and ephemeral, palpable and immaterial, indelible and fleeting. The marriage of persistence and elusiveness recalls other familiar paradoxes, for musical fictions are untruths we choose to believe - lies that, like an apocryphal story, contain an element of psychic, if not literal, truth. The four works on this recording embrace pre-existing music, in ways that range from veiled allusion to explicit paraphrase to willful mutilation."

Hailstork received his doctorate in composition from Michigan State University, where he was a student of H. Owen Reed. He had previously studied at the Manhattan School of Music under Vittorio Giannini and David Diamond, at the American Institute at Fontainebleau with Nadia Boulanger, and at Howard University with Mark Fax. Dr. Hailstork has written numerous works for chorus, solo voice, various chamber ensembles, band and orchestra. Dr. Hailstork was commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music to write Festival Music for the Baltimore Symphony. Other performances of his music have been conducted by Lorin Maazel, Daniel Barenboim and Kurt Masur. In 1999, the composer's Second Symphony (commissioned by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra), and his second opera, Joshua's Boots (commissioned by the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, and the Kansas City Lyric Opera), were premiered. In 2002, James Conlon conducted his oratorio Done Made My Vow at the renowned Cincinnati May Festival. Currently, Hailstork is Eminent Scholar and Professor of Music at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.

Elizabeth Brown grew up on an agricultural research station near Camden, Alabama. She studied piano, sang in the church choir, and played mallet percussion in the school band until she started playing flute at 16, and fell in love with it. She attended the College Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati, then moved to New York and received a Master's degree in flute performance from the Juilliard School in 1977. In her late twenties she began writing chamber pieces for her colleagues, never having formally studied composition. Since then, there have been hundreds of performances of her music worldwide. Kyle Gann in Chamber Music Magazine writes: "Elizabeth Brown writes the only music I know of in which the flute might be playing "London Bridge is Falling Down" while the cello is sliding through a long glissando underneath, yet nothing feels incongruous. There's a kind of imaginary quality to her music. It's as if not only each piece but each passage is based on some strange conceit: a bird sings while a pianist plays Mozart and a cellist shakes like a bowl full of Jell-O. Each conceit morphs into the next in a stream of non-sequiturs, and yet every juncture is smoothly blended, no seam visible. It's elegant, quiet, thoughtful, well-crafted music, and as bizarre as hell. Imagine walking into a Magritte painting: fish protrude from the vase instead of flowers, the chairs are bolted to the ceiling, but the wallpaper is lovely and the furnishings tasteful. That's a little what listening to Elizabeth Brown is like." The composer writes: "I think and dream in music, and to listen to my chamber music is to eavesdrop on an intimate, lyrical, melancholy interior world. The sound landscape is resonant, smooth, and extremely elastic - ideas can wobble or completely dissolve and slide away. Fragments of familiar tunes sometimes drift through, disappearing so quickly you're not sure if you actually heard them. While it can sound improvisatory, the music is honed over a long period of time and carefully notated. Pieces often include exotic or non-western instruments, and the playing techniques and musical styles of these other instruments influence all my writing. I use subtle microtonal gestures and inflections within a predominantly tonal language, and explore the sound world of each instrument in an unorthodox yet idiomatic way."

What is the American Spirit? How can a country of such diversity and individualism have a national spirit? Perhaps the diversity and individualism ARE the American Spirit. That is certainly true in American music: everything from European influenced classicism to home-grown fusions of jazz or rock. This CD represents a great many different American styles spanning the twentieth century, from two of her greatest early masters, through mid-century serialism and pop-influence, to late century experimentation and codification. Sean Osborn has traveled the US and Europe as soloist and traveled the world during his eleven years with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. He has also performed as principal clarinet with the New York Philharmonic, Pittsburgh Symphony, the Seattle Symphony and the American Symphony Orchestra. The New York Times dubbed him "...an excellent clarinetist," and the Boston Globe called him "...a miracle." Making his recital debut at the Kennedy Center at the age of 17, Sean is a top prize winner in both the ARTS Competition and the International Clarinet Society Competition, and in 1984 was named a Presidential Scholar in the Arts. He studied at the Eastman School and the Curtis Institute of Music. He is also a respected teacher and has given numerous master classes at such institutions as Rice University, Baylor University, the University of Puget Sound and two at the Manhattan School of Music. He is also an award winning composer.

Arthur Kreiger holds degrees from The University of Connecticut and from Columbia University. His teachers have included Hale Smith, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Chou Wen-Chung and Mario Davidovsky. His catalog contains pieces for orchestra, chorus, mixed chamber ensembles, piano, solo voice and the electronic medium. He is presently on the faculty of Connecticut College in New London. This recording collects compositions with electronic sounds from a 23 year period (1974 to 1997) of the composer's life. The music was created during the composer's 27 year association with the Electronic Music Center of Columbia University, where he worked as a student, technical assistant and teacher. Although the technological means of producing electronic sounds has evolved rapidly over the last half century, Kreiger's commitment to the formation of tightly interlocking mosaics of electronic and acoustic sounds has never wavered. Yet existing simultaneously with the frequent partnerships between electronic and acoustic means is an idiomatic electronic language that distinguishes itself from the acoustic instruments, enveloping those instruments in a universe of exotic sounds.

This recording was sparked by concerts in New Hampshire and North Carolina performed by the Ciompi Quartet with guest artists, Susan Narucki and Steven Tharp. The Quartet loved working with both singers, and had the idea that a disc of music featuring a solo singer with string quartet would be both unusual and intriguing. Each of the four works on this disc is wonderfully evocative, and each exploits the medium extremely well. The title for the CD, Melancholie, is taken from the Hindemith cycle, but it also expresses the overall feeling of the four works. The two larger pieces on this CD, Hindemith's Melancholie and Vaughan-Williams' On Wenlock Edge, have interesting parallels. Both are works by young men who went on to have long and distinguished careers, both works represent a coming of age for their respective composers, and both composers must be counted among the major figures of 20th century music with many works now in the standard repertoire. Both of the other works, by Kim and Part continue the theme of melancholy.

Robert Lombardo was born in Hartford, Connecticut to Sicilian immigrants. He graduated with a master's degree in composition from the Hartt School of Music where he studied with Arnold Franchetti. He was awarded a Ph.D. in composition from the State University of Iowa. Lombardo holds the title of Professor Emeritus from Roosevelt University where he was Professor of Theory and Composition and Composer-in-residence from 1965 until 1999. The composer writes: "Although the mandolin has occasionally been used by composers in contemporary literature, e.g., Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Crumb, I always thought of the instrument in the folk category. About a dozen years ago, my perception of the use of the mandolin changed. In 1991, Dimitris Marinos, a student who recently arrived from Greece, came to my studio at Roosevelt University for his first composition lesson. He had a mandolin case tucked under his arm. After his lesson, I was curious and asked him if he wouldn't mind playing his mandolin for me. I guess I expected him to play a folk tune, and was pleasantly surprised - amazed would be a better word - when he played a very complex work replete with multiple stops, fast chromatic passages that covered the entire range of the instrument - in an apparent effortless fashion. I was captivated by this young man's musicality and virtuosity. After he showed me some of the instrument's technical capabilities, I thought about writing a short composition for him." That is the origin of how the compositions that appear on this disc came about.

Elizabeth Hoffman holds degrees in music from Swarthmore College, SUNY Stony Brook, and the University of Washington. She studied composition and analog electronic music with electronic music pioneer Bulent Arel at Stony Brook. During her doctoral composition studies at the University of Washington, she began using computers for musical ends. Elizabeth Hoffman's recognition includes awards from the Seattle Arts Commission; American Composers Forum Jerome Foundation; Bourges International Competition Residence prize; and Prix Ars Electronica Mention. She is currently Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Science, Department of Music at New York University, where she also directs the Washington Square Computer Music Studio.

Wayne Peterson was born in Albert Lea, Minnesota and has lived in San Francisco since 1960. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in music in 1992, crowning a distinguished career which began in 1958, with the Free Variations premiered and recorded by the Minnesota Orchestra under Antal Dorati. His catalog of more than 60 works included works for orchestra, chorus and chamber ensembles. Peterson has been professor of music at San Francisco State University for more than three decades and from 1992-94 was a guest professor of composition at Stanford University. He studied at the University of Minnesota and the Royal Academy of Music in London. Eric Moe writes: "Listening to Wayne Peterson's music is awfully rewarding. Luscious on the surface, it amply repays the most intensive listening. It's a little like taking a journey through a gorgeous Alpine landscape - you soon lose passivity and are drawn into expectation, anticipating the view of the waterfall around the bend in the road, the unfolding of the mountain's shape as it is gradually revealed, the surprise of the robin's egg blue color in the pool of melt water at the bottom of the snowfield. As with all great music, you become less of a somnolent passenger and more of a backseat driver as the music unfolds. And with repeated listenings, you can privately partake of the delight small children have in telegraphing details of the narrative to those around them."

Edwin London's music, sometimes literary or sacred, often theatrical, and at times humorous, is the product of his broad experience in diverse styles. London has been a major figure in the field of new music for more than 40 years. Best described as "a champion of new American music" he has formed two highly acclaimed ensembles: Ineluctable Modality, a new music choral ensemble in 1968, and the Cleveland Chamber Symphony in 1980. As a composer, conductor, teacher, administrator and persuasive advocate for the value of music as a civilizing force, his influence has been extraordinary. Born in Philadelphia, he began his career with characteristic disregard of rigid musical categories, as a horn player in both symphony orchestras and the Oscar Pettiford jazz band. Everything London has done in his long career has reflected his ability to move easily between the worlds of "concert hall" and "popular" music - with occasional stops at places in between.

For seven years, the New York-based contemporary music ensemble Sequitur has been re-defining the concert by finding new contexts for new music. Through staging events incorporating theater and dance, or producing tantalizing cabarets on themes like lust and greed, Sequitur turns the traditional sanctimonious contemporary music experience upside down. On this disc, they re-examine the contemporary American concerto. Although it dates back to Baroque composers in the late 17th century, the concerto reached its artistic pinnacle with Romantic composers of the 19th and early 20th century. But what does the concerto mean in the United States at the beginning of the 21st century, when personal freedoms are threatened both by indiscriminate acts of terrorism and by responses that many find necessary in order to preserve safety and stability? For starters, the paradigm of “us versus them” – the message behind the concertino and ripieno of the Baroque concerto grosso as well as the heroic romantic solo concerto – seems outmoded. We shun the model of a group controlling an individual, just as we shun this model turned inside out. And our view of an individual now is rarely one of hero, or anti-hero, or even of complete self-determination. All of these ideas affect the concerto of today, where the role of the soloist is not always clearly defined, where other players may rise as soloists at times and then disappear again into the fabric, where sub-groups may compete with the soloist and with each other for prominence, where the soloist may not be poised to interact and hopefully to triumph. Even the word “concerto” may be suspect: Only Elliott Carter’s work among the four on this disc employs the word “concerto” in its title.

Paul Seiko Chihara was born in Seattle, Washington and received his DMA from Cornell University in 1965 as a student of Robert Palmer. He also studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, Ernst Pepping in Berlin and Gunther Schuller at Tanglewood. With Toru Takemitsu, Chihara was composer-in-residence at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont in 1971, and was the first composer-in-residence with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (Neville Marriner, conductor). He is currently on the music faculty of UCLA. Chihara's prize-winning concert works have been performed in most major cities and arts centers in the United States and Europe. Perhaps due to the extraordinary color sensitivity of his music, he has had an illustrious parallel career composing for stage, TV and film. He has composed the scores for over 90 motion pictures and television series including the film Prince of the City and the television series China Beach. He has also worked on Broadway, serving as music consultant and orchestrator for Duke Ellington's hit musical Sophisticated Ladies, and as composer for Shogun the Musical. He was composer-in-residence with the San Francisco Ballet from 1973-1986. While there, he composed many trailblazing works, including the first full-length American ballet The Tempest.

Bernard Stevens was born in London and studied at Cambridge and the Royal College of Music in London, where he gained the highest awards. After his army service he came briefly to national prominence in 1946 with a highly acclaimed performance in Albert Hall of his deeply considered and utterly un-jingoistic Symphony of Liberation, which won a competition sponsored by the Daily Express newspaper for a "Victory Symphony " to celebrate the end of World War II. Stevens spent much of the rest of his career lecturing at the RCM (also, latterly, at the University of London), and was a tireless champion of contemporary music, an indefatigable examiner, and that rare being, a born teacher - whose warmth, encouragement and intellectual stimulation is remembered with gratitude and respect by his many pupils. In the 1950s and 60s, as Britain strove to catch up with the Continental avant-garde, his robust independence of fashion hardly helped to gain his works prestige. Nor did his politics endear him to the establishment. Occasionally, wryly, he spoke of himself as one of an "almost lost generation" of British composers; yet as a craftsman and a musical mind he must be judged one of that generation's leading figures. Since his death in 1983, there has been a remarkable upsurge of interest in Stevens's output. His music impresses the hearer immediately by its warmth and imaginative logic, its firm architecture and commitment to the traditional crafts of counterpoint and variation. His works include an opera on J.M. Synge's The Shadow of the Glen (recorded on Albany TROY 418), two symphonies, three concertos, cantatas and other choral pieces, piano music, songs, and other compositions for instruments as diverse as natural trumpet and guitar. Stevens was especially drawn to the chamber medium, for its possibilities of vigorous dialectical argument and intimate expression; and in it he produced several of his most characteristic and important scores. His two string quartets and the Lyric Suite for string trio are available on Albany TROY455. This recording presents five more chamber works spanning almost his entire working life.

Eric Moe, composer of what the New York Times calls "music of winning exuberance," was educated at the University of California at Berkeley and at Princeton University. He is currently Professor of Composition and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh, where he directs the graduate program in composition and the department's electro acoustic music studio. As a pianist and keyboard player, Moe has performed works by hundreds of composers from Anthony Davis to Stefan Wolpe. A founding member of the San Francisco based EARPLAY ensemble, he currently co-directs the Music on the Edge new music concert series in Pittsburgh.

A native of Oklahoma, George Quincy celebrates his Choctaw heritage. He holds two degrees from the Juilliard School where he later taught. He served as musical advisor to Martha Graham before going on to compose, orchestrate and conduct music for theater, dance, film, opera, television and concert. The composer writes: "When I was a boy in Oklahoma, the nights were magical, the stars incredibly bright. I used to lie in the grass and wonder. Jupiter was so bright, it invited all kinds of images. It surely was inhabited, I thought. I used to mix up myths of the West (Greece) with those of the Choctaw which surrounded me." Nina da Vinci Nicholas writing in Theater Scene writes: "Choctaw Nights sails by its own star into luscious harmonies. Melody floats above rhythmic base. Jupiter has a long lyrical line that sings and sings above a repeating rhythmic figure in the piano. Voices from Ground Zero contains a moving elegiac strain picked up by each of the instruments. A romantic yearning breaks through."