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  • LAPA
  • LA PHIL ANNOUNCES COMPOSERS SELECTED FOR THE NEXT ON GRAND: NATIONAL COMPOSERS INTENSIVE
  • Apr. 28, 2015
  • Ten Collegiate Composition Students Will Create Works for wild Up and Attend Three-Day Immersive Program in Conjunction with LA Phil’s Next on Grand: Contemporary Americans Festival

    Los Angeles (April 28, 2015) – The Los Angeles Philharmonic today announced the winners of the Next on Grand: National Composers Intensive, a three-day program that offers the opportunity for selected American composition students to develop their craft through an immersive experience that includes creating new works for wild Up, and working side-by-side with today’s most esteemed composers, including Steven Mackey, Julia Wolfe, Michael Gordon, Caroline Shaw, and Steve Reich. The National Composers Intensive takes place in Los Angeles, May 28 – 30, 2015, in conjunction with the LA Phil’s Next on Grand: Contemporary Americans festival.

    After a national search open to collegiate composition students, nearly 200 applications were received and ten winners were chosen by a panel of composers and musicians: Missy Mazzoli, Ted Hearne, James Matheson, and Andrew McIntosh.

    The Next on Grand: National Composers Intensive winners are:

    Daniel Allas
    USC Thornton School of Music

    Allas (b. 1993) is a composer based in Los Angeles working to change the popular perception of contemporary classical music. He seeks to propel new music into the public eye through live performance and music education. In 2009, Daniel entered the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Composer Fellowship Program, an intensive two‐year educational program taught by James Matheson and A.J. McCaffrey. The program included two orchestral premieres of Daniel's music by the LA Philharmonic. In 2011, he began studies at the USC Thornton School of Music, studying music composition with Stephen Hartke. In the fall of 2015, he plans to begin graduate composition studies at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA with David Rakowski.

    Emily Cooley
    Curtis Institute of Music

    Cooley (b. 1990) is a composer of orchestral, chamber, and vocal music that ranges from delicate intensity to a pulsing, energetic sound described as "dramatic, forceful and filled with reverberation" (Sioux City Journal). In 2015, Emily was awarded a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Emily has received commissions and performances from ensembles including the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, the Sioux City Symphony Orchestra, the JACK Quartet, and Music from Copland House. A native of Milwaukee, WI, Emily is a recent graduate of the USC Thornton School of Music and Yale University. Emily currently holds the Milton L. Rock Composition Fellowship at the Curtis Institute of Music, where she studies with David Ludwig.

    Natalie Dietterich
    Yale School of Music

    Dietterich is an American composer from Harleysville, Pennsylvania. Her music has been performed at the 21st Annual Young Composers Meeting (Apeldoorn, the Netherlands), the highSCORE Festival (Pavia, Italy), the Charlotte New Music Festival (North Carolina), and Spectrum (New York), and was recently featured on Q2 Music (WQXR, New York). She is a winner of two Philadelphia Composers' Ink call for scores, and will be attending the So Percussion Summer Institute this July. Natalie is currently an M.M. candidate at the Yale School of Music, studying with Christopher Theofanidis. She holds a dual degree in violin performance and composition from West Chester University of Pennsylvania, where she ran the NOW Music Society new music concert series, coordinated Danza Symbiotica, a dance and composer collaboration, and was a member of the West Chester Laptop Ensemble.

    Guo Wei
    Peabody Conservatory

    Wei was born in 1990 in China's Shandong Province, in the city of Qingdao. She started learning the piano at age five and the cello at age 11. She played cello in the Qindao Youth Orchestra and also participated in the high school orchestra for the school's anniversary celebration. In elementary school she started learning music theory and taking ear‐training classes, and in the sophomore year of high school she started learning composition and conducting with professors from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. In 2009, she was admitted to the Shanghai Conservatory of Music to study composition. In 2014, she was admitted to the Peabody Conservatory to study composition for her Master study. Her professor is Dr. Oscar Bettison.

    Jennifer Hill
    University of North Texas

    Hill is a composer, cellist, and sound enthusiast earning her B.M. in Composition at the University of North Texas. She is an active member of the Composers Forum of North Texas and the UNT Steel Band. During her time at UNT, Jennifer has studied with Drs. Panayiotis Kokoras and Andrew May and has had her music performed across the United States. Jennifer also writes and performs pop music with her Denton‐based band, *~~. Her recent compositions explore the formal and conceptual dichotomy between the individual (event) (self) (isolation) and the whole (ecosystem) (society) (engagement).

    José Martinez
    University of Missouri

    As a composer and percussionist, José’s music incorporates a wide range of influences from Colombian folk tunes to avant‐garde Western art music, while borrowing from Latin music, heavy metal, and progressive rock. All these sounds find a place to interact in his music and create his personal sound palette. His body of works includes pieces for a variety of ensembles including orchestra, string quintet, saxophone quartet, Pierrot ensembles, and solo and electronics. Notable recent collaborations include works for the celebrated chamber orchestra Alarm Will Sound at the Missouri International Composer Festival 2014 and the Spanish ensemble Taller Sonoro. He graduated from National University of Colombia as both a percussionist and a composer; he is currently pursuing a double MM in these areas at the University of Missouri.

    Anna Meadors
    University of North Carolina at Greensboro

    Composer and saxophonist Meadors is one of the founding members of Baltimore-based ensemble Three Red Crowns, working with composer and bassist John Paul Carillo. She is also lead soloist in the jazz‐rock trio Joy on Fire, which tours actively along the East Coast. Upcoming projects include recording her piece World Systems at Mobtown Studios in Baltimore for Joy on Fire's second album, and composing a piece for So Percussion's Summer Institute at Princeton University, which she will attend in July 2015. She graduated from the Peabody Conservatory in 2011 where she studied saxophone with Gary Louie and composition with David Smooke. Anna is currently pursuing a MM in Composition at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she studies composition with Mark Engebretson, Alejandro Rutty and Steven Bryant.

    Patrick O’Malley
    University of Southern California

    O’Malley (b. 1989) is an emerging composer currently living in Los Angeles and completing his Master’s degree in composition at the University of Southern California. His work spans many of the contemporary mediums for classical music and often explores the musical interplay between emotion, color, energy, and landscape. Most recently, O’Malley has been recognized and/or performed by organizations including The American Prize, the Boston New Music Initiative, ASCAP’s Morton Gould Award, and Fulcrum Point New Music Project. He has spent summers the Aspen Music Festival, Bowdoin Festival, and FUBiS composition course in Berlin. He is gratefully indebted to his teachers: Andrew Norman, Samuel Adler, and Frank Ticheli.

    Laura Schwartz
    Illinois State University

    Schwartz is a composer and horn player who grew up in Southern California. She attended the University of California, Davis (B.A. in Music 2013) where she studied primarily with Laurie San Martin, Sam Nichols, and Ross Bauer. Laura is interested in action‐based music that explores visual movement as a foundation element of the compositional process. In 2014, her piece Disjunct was performed during the Oregon Bach Festival Composer’s Symposium. In 2014‐2015 she won the first ISU Large Ensemble Contest for her piece Fictions IV which will be premiered by the ISU Wind Symphony in their 2015 season. She is finishing her Master’s degree in Music Composition from Illinois State University. She studies with Martha Horst and Roy Magnuson. Laura lives in Bloomington, Illinois with her fraternal twin sister.

    Andrew Stock
    Cleveland Institute of Music

    Stock (b. 1994) is a composer and violist. His recent music displays minimalist influence along with outgrowths of an artistic engagement with improvisers, experimental musicians, and specialist performers of contemporary music. His work has been performed and commissioned by soloists and groups including the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, members of the St. Louis Symphony, cellist Sharon Robinson and violinist Jinjoo Cho. Andrew currently studies at the Cleveland Institute of Music with Jeffrey Irvine and Keith Fitch. Other guidance has come from a wide range of performers and composers including Garth Knox, Josh Levine, Ryan Wigglesworth, Chen Yi, Michael Finnissy, and Tatsuya Nakatani.

    The National Composers Intensive demonstrates the LA Phil’s ongoing commitment to new music by providing access and opportunity for today’s talented young musicians to further explore and hone their craft.

    Program Highlights Include:

    • Create new work for wild Up
    • Reading and recording sessions with wild Up
    • Attend LA Phil Next on Grand: Contemporary Americans concerts and observe dress rehearsals
    • Masterclasses with Next on Grand visiting composers Steven Mackey, Julia Wolfe, Caroline Shaw, and Michael Gordon
    • Q&A with composer Steve Reich
    • Reading session with Composer Fellowship Program fellows and the Calder Quartet
    • Public reading session at The Regent Theatre with wild Up in a program that includes newly-composed works by Intensive Winners; pieces written by Next on Grand visiting composers; and a piece from Andrew Moses, one of the current Composer Fellowship Program fellows.

     

    The Next on Grand festival embraces the theme of Contemporary Americans by focusing on the wildly creative music being made by American composers, both established (i.e., Reich, Glass, Wolfe, Lang, Gordon) and those with careers-in-the-making (Norman, Shaw, Dessner, etc.). Led by Gustavo Dudamel, the range of programs include 9 world premieres, including Pulitzer Prize-winning music, video installations, vocal, chamber and orchestral music, as well as such guest performers as the Labèque sisters and the Calder Quartet. For more information, please visit LAPhil.com/NextOnGrand.

    wild Up is the Los Angeles contemporary music ensemble heralded as “Searing. Penetrating. And thrilling” by Fred Child of Performance Today and “Magnificent” by Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times. Led by Artistic Director Christopher Rountree, the 24-piece group blurs the borders between classical music, rock and performance art, believing music is a catalyst for shared experience, and that a concert venue is a place to excite, challenge and provoke a community of listeners. Since forming in 2010, wild Up has collaborated with orchestras, rock bands and cultural institutions around the world.

    The LA Phil’s Composer Fellowship Program, was founded in 2007 by Pulitzer-Prize-winning composer Steven Stucky. A unique offering among American orchestras, this innovative two-year program, the only one of its kind, gives young composers ages 13-18 the tools and the freedom to shape the future of music through an intensive multi-year curriculum including individual and group instruction, access to world-class artists, and two LA Phil premieres.

    The Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, under the vibrant leadership of Music & Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel, presents an inspiring array of music from all genres – orchestral, chamber and Baroque music, organ and celebrity recitals, new music, jazz, world music and pop – at two of L.A.’s iconic venues, Walt Disney Concert Hall (www.laphil.com) and the Hollywood Bowl (www.hollywoodbowl.com). The LA Phil’s season at Walt Disney Concert Hall extends from September through May, and throughout the summer at the Hollywood Bowl. With the preeminent Los Angeles Philharmonic at the foundation of its offerings, the LA Phil aims to enrich and transform lives through music, with a robust mix of artistic, education and community programs.

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  • Contact:

    Sophie Jefferies, sjefferies@laphil.org, 213.972.3422
    Lisa Bellamore, lbellamore@laphil.org, 213.972.3689
    Photos: 213.972.3034