1632 C Market St.
San Francisco, CA 94102
Friday, October 28, 2011 – 8pm
Tickets are $15, however, no one is turned away for lack of funds.
The program will include pieces by:
Ian Dicke, Per Bloland, Joao Pedro de Oliveira, Anna Belle Armstrong and Jon Russell
Ian Dicke
The music of American-born composer Ian Dicke (b. 1982, Trenton, NJ) includes works for orchestra, wind ensemble, chamber ensembles, and electronic media. Heralded by the San Francisco Classical Voice as "colorful, well-designed, and deftly scored," Dicke's works often explore contemporary social-political culture through a mixture of pungent and triadic harmonies, dance-like rhythms, and intricately layered textures.
Dicke's music have been performed by many ensembles and festivals around the world, including the ISCM World New Music Days, the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, Music X, Redshift, the Atlantic Coast Center Band Director's Association, and the SCI National Conference. Dicke has received awards and recognition from the Meet the Composer Foundation, ASCAP, BMI, and the New York Youth Symphony, among others. He was recently awarded the 2013 Hoefer Prize from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The award includes a commission from the Conservatory's New Music Ensemble and a week-long residency prior to the premiere.
In 2010, Dicke co-founded and directed Fast Forward Austin, an all day new music festival in Austin, TX. The festival pairs local and international cutting-edge artists in a "welcomingly relaxed venue…[that] taps into what is so great about the Austin vibe: a community of people who are artistically curious, non-doctrinaire, and unpretentious" (NewMusicBox).
Dicke holds degrees from the University of Michigan and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He is currently pursuing a doctoral degree at The University of Texas at Austin. Dicke has studied composition with David Conte, Dan Becker, Bright Sheng, Michael Daugherty, Dan Welcher, Donald Grantham, and Russell Pinkston.
Per Bloland
Per Bloland is a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music whose works have been described as having an "incandescent effect" with "dangerous and luscious textures." His compositions range from short intimate solo pieces to works for large orchestra, and incorporate video, dance, and custom built electronics. He has received awards and recognition from national and international organizations, including SEAMUS/ASCAP, Digital Art Awards of Tokyo, ISCM, and SCI/ASCAP. Performers of his work include the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, the ICE Ensemble, Bent Frequency, Insomnio, the Callithumpian Consort, Linea Ensemble, ECCE, and Inauthentica, among others. His music can be heard on the TauKay (Italy), Capstone, Spektral, and SEAMUS labels, and through the MIT Press.
Bloland is also the co-creator of the Electromagnetically-Prepared Piano, about which he has given numerous lecture/demonstrations and published a paper. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Computer Music at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and serves as the founding director of OINC, the Oberlin Improvisation and Newmusic Collective. He received his D.M.A. in composition from Stanford University and his M.M. from the University of Texas at Austin.
For more information, please visit: www.perbloland.com
João Pedro Oliveira
João Pedro Oliveira is one of the most prominent Portuguese composers of his generation. He began his music studies at the Gregorian Institute of Lisbon where he studied organ performance. From 1985 to 1990 he moved to the US as a Fulbright student, with a fellowship from Gulbenkian Foundations, where he completed a PhD in Music at the University of New York at Stony Brook. His music includes one chamber opera, several orchestral composition, a Requiem, 3 string quartets, chamber music, solo instrumental music and electroacoustic music. Recently he has been exploring the possibilities of interaction between instrumental and electroacoustic sounds, and most of his recent works use both media. He is Senior Professor at Aveiro University (Portugal) and Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil). Teaches composition, electroacoustic music and analysis. He contributed to the development of a new generation of Portuguese composers, and many of his students already received national and international awards. He published several articles in journals, and has written a book about analysis and 20th century music theory.
Anna Belle Armstrong
Anna Belle Armstrong completed her Bachelors and Master of Music degrees in music composition at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance. During her time at the UMKC Conservatory, she studied with Drs. James Mobberley, Paul Rudy, Chen Yi, and Zhou Long, and participated in the composer mentorship program, Composers in the Schools, and the Composers Guild. Recent performances include the A.J. Konefal Collaboration, New Impressions at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art as part of Conservatory Connections, and the 9th Annual Festival of Contemporary Music in San Francisco, CA. Anna Belle is currently employed at UMKC and is pursuing a Master of Business Administration degree at the UMKC Bloch School of Management.
Jonathan Russell
Jonathan Russell is a composer, clarinetist, conductor, and educator who is active in a wide variety of music, from classical to experimental to klezmer to church music. His work stretches the boundaries of contemporary classical music, opening it up to the sounds and attitudes of the other musical traditions surrounding it. Especially known for his innovative bass clarinet and clarinet ensemble compositions, his works for bass clarinet duo, bass clarinet quartet, bass clarinet soloists, and clarinet ensembles have been performed around the world and are radically expanding the technical and stylistic possibilities of these genres.
Jonathan has received commissions from ensembles such as the San Francisco Symphony, Empyrean Ensemble, ADORNO Ensemble, Classical Revolution, Woodstock Chamber Orchestra, Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, and Imani Winds, and performances from numerous other ensembles and performers, including the Berkeley Symphony, San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra, the BluePrint Project, the Great Noise Ensemble, the new music bands FIREWORKS, Capital M, and Oogog, pianist-percussionist Danny Holt, and pianists Sarah Cahill, Lisa Moore, Lara Downes, and Matthew McCright. Upcoming projects include compositions for the violin duo DoubleTake, the guitar-percussion duo The Living Earth Show, the woodwind quintet DZ4, the new music ensemble REDSHIFT, and a new Bass Clarinet Concerto commissioned by the Bass Clarinet Commissioning Collective.
An avid performer on clarinet and bass clarinet, Jonathan is a member of the heavy metal-inspired Edmund Welles bass clarinet quartet and the Sqwonk bass clarinet duo, which has commissioned numerous new works and released two CDs of new American bass clarinet duets. Jonathan has also appeared as clarinetist with the Marin Symphony, Ensemble Parallele, the Great Noise Ensemble, and the klezmer bands Zoyres and Machaya. He is co-director of the Switchboard Music Festival, an annual eight-hour marathon concert that brings together the San Francisco Bay Area's most creative and innovative composers and performers.
Jonathan frequently conducts his own compositions and has appeared as guest conductor of his work with the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, the Switchboard Music Festival, the Johns Hopkins Clarinet Choir, the Los Angeles Clarinet Choir, and the Claremont Clarinet Festival, where he was the 2011 Composer in Residence. He has also conducted over 30 readings and premieres of works by student and emerging composers.
A dedicated educator, Jonathan has served on the Music Theory Faculty at San Francisco Conservatory and on the Composition Faculty at the Conservatory's Adult Extension and Preparatory Divisions. He has also taught private lessons in Composition, Music Theory, and Clarinet. With Sqwonk and Edmund Welles, he has given workshops at San Francisco Conservatory, Princeton University, Catholic University, UCLA, Berkeley High School, and the Vandoren Clarinet Ensemble Festival.
He has been Music Director for two dance producitons with choreographers Janice Garrett and Charles Moulton, and has served as Music Director at First Congregational Church, San Francisco. He has also worked as General Manager of the BluePrint new music series, and has written concert reviews for the San Francisco Classical Voice. He has a B.A. in Music from Harvard University and an M.M. in Music Composition from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. His composition teachers have included Dan Becker, Elinor Armer, Eric Sawyer, John Stewart, and Eric Ewazen. He is currently a student in the Composition PhD program at Princeton University.