Mark Dal Porto | Richard Campanelli | David Nisbet Stewart | Paula Diehl | Jason R. Lovelace | Mel Mobley
Mark Dal Porto
Dr. Mark Dal Porto has had his works performed by such ensembles as the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, Kiev Chamber Choir, Kiev Philharmonic Orchestra, Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra, Kühn Choir of Prague, National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, Texas Christian University Symphony Orchestra, Kronos String Quartet, Boston Metro Opera, Vanguard Voices and Brass (Dearborn, Michigan), Wichita Falls (Texas) Chamber Orchestra, and many University Wind Ensembles. His recorded works available on CD include Galactica for Symphonic Wind Ensemble, Song of Eternity for Orchestra, Song of the Night for Oboe, Voice and Piano, Spring, the Sweet Spring for Mixed Choir and Piano, and When Your Song Rang Out to Me for Mixed Choir and Piano. His many commissions include those from the Orchestra of Southern Utah, the College Orchestra Directors Association, the Santa Fe Community Orchestra, and the Pemigewasset Choral Society of New Hampshire.
Dal Porto serves on the faculty of Eastern New Mexico University as professor of music and coordinator of Music Theory and Composition and can be seen as a frequent guest composer and conductor. A former student of Donald Grantham, Dal Porto received degrees from California State University, Sacramento (B.A. Piano Performance, M.A. Theory/Composition), and the University of Texas at Austin (D.M.A. Composition). His past teaching assignments have included serving on the faculty at Texas State University, Northern State University, and Texas Woman’s University.
In 2015, Dal Porto was awarded certificates of excellence in band, choral, and orchestral composition from The American Prize organization. He was also awarded first prize (from over 140 entries from around the world) in the CODA (College Orchestra Director’s Association) 2013 International Composition Contest for his orchestral work Song of Eternity. (click here to return to menu)
Richard Campanelli
Richard Campanelli was born in Hartford CT. When he was seven years old the family moved to Springfield, MO. There were not a lot of opportunities for an artistic education of any sort there, but he was able to finally talk his parents into getting a piano and started taking lessons from local piano teachers.
As a youth he was fascinated by the piano sonatas of Beethoven, and wanted to be a composer from a fairly early age. It wasn’t until he attended that Conservatory of Music in Kansas City that he finally was able to explore that possibility. He graduated with a BMA in composition.
He then attended the Hartt Conservatory of Music in Hartford, Ct, where he studied with Donald Harris. During the following summer he was a Nikos Skalkottas Tanglewood Fellow where he studied with George Perle.
Richard completed his academic musical education by receiving a DMA from the University of MI where he studied with Leslie Bassett and William Bolcom.
Some of the awards he has won include the Holtkamp Prize for new organ music, a Ludwig Vogelstein grant, yearly ASCAP awards, a Marimolin prize for a new work for violin and marimba, a Charles Ives Scholarship and a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and several Michigan Council for the Arts grants.
Richard currently lives in Ann Arbor, MI and is working on a piano concerto. (click here to return to menu)
David Nisbet Stewart
David Nisbet Stewart is a composer, pianist and organist. His career began in academia and migrated into computer technology from 1979 onward. His style of composing also changed as he pursued a new occupation.
From 1969 to 1979, he taught music theory, composition, and electronic music at Eastern Michigan University and then Kent State University. His last academic post was adjunct professor in the Technology in Music and Related Arts (TIMARA) program at Oberlin College. His style of composition during this period was assiduously twelve-tone and aleatoric. Living in Ohio from 1975 to 1985, he was a member of the Cleveland Composers Guild which provided many performances of his chamber music.
A self-taught computer programmer, he began studying computer-generated sound in 1969. He produced electronic music both by Moog synthesizer and by computer using the seminal MUSIC4 program on Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11’s.
From 1979 until retirement in 2013, Stewart worked as a computer systems professional. Having been a church musician most of his adult life, he is currently organist at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Ferndale, Michigan.
After leaving college teaching Stewart’s aesthetic changed. He wanted to write more spontaneously the sounds from his imagination – music that was accessible to the performer and audience, while maintaining his stylistic integrity. He became more tonal yet still used twelve-tone and aleatoric techniques when justified.
David Daniels, music director of the Warren (Michigan) Symphony, premiered three of Stewart’s works in recent years. Two of these works have subsequently been recorded. “Cindy, O Cindy” Variations on an Appalachian Civil War Folksong for Orchestra and Youth Chorus was released by ERMMedia in 2009. Concerto for Piano and Orchestra was released by Navona Records in 2012. Petr Vronsky conducted the Moravian Philharmonic with Martin Levicky as piano soloist. That album, titled Convergence, also included Suite for Piano-Brass Quartet. Navona released Foundations in 2014 with five of Stewart’s organ compositions.
Premieres in 2015 include Fantasy for viola solo, performed by Peter Sulski in Worcester, Massachusetts. Mr. Sulski recorded this piece last year for inclusion in the present album. Fanfare for Organ, Brass and Timpani and Come Down O Holy Love for SAATB chorus were premiered in Worcester by conductor and organist Will Sherwood.
Stewart was born 1941, in Miami, Florida, and has a B.Mus. degree from Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, 1965, and a M.A. degree from Smith College, 1969. His principal teachers were Bower Murphy, William Klenz, Joseph Wood, Walter Aschaffenburg, and Alvin Etler in composition; David Pizarro on organ; Arthur Dann on piano, all of blessed memory.
He is a member of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP); American Composers Forum; Society of Composers Inc.; Conductors Guild; and the American Guild of Organists.
Stewart believes that leaving academia for the business world has been a great benefit to his art. Music is the business of entertaining. The composer has to satisfy, even delight, the paying audience. There must be an emotional connection. His compositions connect with the listener’s ear and heart.
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Paula Diehl
Paula Jespersen Diehl came to New Jersey from China as an infant with her Danish parents and older brother. From her time of awareness, she heard music in the home. She and each of her three brothers studied a musical instrument; her mother listened to opera and played Danish songs on the piano for the children to sing, and her father and an uncle sang Danish songs. Diehl soon hated piano lessons with a passion and begged her mother incessantly to let her stop, which she finally did. An about-face occurred twenty years later. It started with purchase of an old piano, the playing on it of simple Stephen Foster songs, other simple American songs, and simple Bach works, and ended with a decision to return to college to study music.
During semesters at American University in Washington, DC, while she was taking courses needed to enter a master's program, Diehl and two young male students fervently discussed the need to have a new composition system. Many months later, in 1978, Diehl came up with one. She named it "Separation."
Separation was barely acknowledged by the Temple University Music professors with whom Diehl studied for her master's. In spite of this, between homework and travel into the city of Philadelphia, she started writing pieces of music according to the strict regulations the system imposed. Before graduating in 1982 with an M.M., she formed the group SOUNDS to play pre-structured improvisations according to the Separation system.
A typical piece of separation music is divided into sections, each one of which has three different working intervals throughout, all of them perfect Fourths. The degree of interlock among the three Fourths decreases in each section, and the method of selecting them results in two possible sets; these differ from each other, but are of equal significance. The fifth section is one of discrete, closed Fourths.
Separation music calls for varied "orderings" of the working Fourths in all the phases of interlock; an open or closed state is designated for the first and last pitches of each Fourth. The resulting status, in conjunction with interlock, drives the music to an ending. Changed orderings are chosen for each new degree of interlock. All must be closed at the end of each section.
The goal of music written according to Separation principles is independence�that is, separation from all other intervals.
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Jason R. Lovelace 
A recipient of The Catholic University of America’s Furfey graduate fellowship and a member of the Pi Kappa Lambda music honors society, Jason R. Lovelace (b. 1980) currently serves as an adjunct instructor at Towson University in Towson, MD and Northern Virginia Community College in Alexandria, VA.
Lovelace’s compositions have been broadcast internationally and featured in a variety of regional, national and international venues. In June 2015, Lovelace performed the international premiere of Nocturne: Inversions at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki as part of the 2015 College Music Society International Conference. His notable commissions include: Echoes of Apollo 11 (Wayne State University Trumpet Ensemble), a piece for trumpet octet and electronics performed at the 2014 International Trumpet Guild conference, The Information Age (Alexandria Concert Band), a work celebrating the eponymous era premiered at Northern Virginia Community College’s Schlessinger Concert Hall, and Hodie nobis de caelo (The Catholic University of America), a fanfare for chorus and orchestra premiered in Washington, D.C. and televised internationally on the EWTN cable network.
A native of Pennsylvania, Lovelace completed his doctorate in composition at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. in 2009. Previously, he earned Masters degrees in composition and computer music composition from the Peabody Conservatory of The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD and a Bachelor of Musical Arts summa cum laude in piano and composition from the University of Oklahoma in Norman, OK. His teachers include Andrew Simpson, Steven Strunk, Bruno Amato, Geoffrey Wright, Marvin Lamb, and James Faulconer. For more information about Lovelace and his work, please visit www.jasonrlovelace.com (click here to return to menu)
Mel Mobley
A native of Texas, Mel Mobley (b. 1966) currently resides and teaches in Monroe, Louisiana. He holds degrees from the University of Texas, University of South Florida, and University of Illinois. Active as a performer, composer, and advocate of new music, Mel has been involved in new music festivals and performances all around the country. Performed here and abroad, his works include orchestral, band, chamber, choral, and electronic music. His largest work to date, a chamber opera titled Sylvan Beach, premiered in the spring of 2010. His percussion trio with piano titled [pleez], (plez), /pliz/ was released on the 2013 Revello Records compact disc, Piano Concerti with Percussion Orchestra.
Commissions include Tributaries (Louisiana Music Teachers Association), Concerto for Wood (Monroe Symphony Orchestra), [pleez], (plez), /pliz/ (Three-Headed Monster), and multiple individual commissions. His recent collaborations with dancer Tina Mullone have worked to break down the barrier between dancer and musician as well as between live and recorded performance. His compositions seek to inspire varied and new interpretations of the possibilities of music/art from both performers and audiences. Mel was the 2014 Louisiana Music Teachers Association (LMTA) commissioned composer of the year and has had recent premieres performed by the Monroe Symphony Orchestra, The Black Bayou Brass Trio, and the ULM Wind Ensemble.
Dr. Mobley is the head of music composition and theory at the University of Louisiana at Monroe where he currently holds the Biedenharn Endowed Professorship in Music. He is an active member of the Louisiana chapter of the National Composer’s Association, USA (NACUSA) as well as a member of the Louisiana Composers’ Consortium (LCC), the Southeastern Composers’ League (SCL), the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music (SEAMUS), and the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP).
More information about his music can be found at www.melmobley.com (click here to return to menu)
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