Jay Anthony Gach | Rain Worthington | Marga Richter | Phillip Rhodes | George gershwin | Steven Winteregg | Douglas Anderson | Bruce Babcock | Stephen Lias
Jay Anthony Gach
Jay Anthony Gach’s original concert music has been critically acclaimed as "witty, virtuosic and accessible", "so exuberant and so characterful", "a natural crowd pleaser", "vibrant textures", "multi-layered, whirling and propulsive". Summarized by the composer Lukas Foss during his tenureship as conductor of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, "Gach’s writing for orchestra is brilliant beyond words". The composer Hugo Weisgall wrote of him, "a composer... of extraordinary technical command and intellectual grasp of what music is all about".
Gach's music has been performed, recorded and broadcast internationally by ensembles including the Millennium Symphony Orch./Robert Ian Winstin, St. Paul Chamber Orch./Enrique Diemecke, Brooklyn Philharmonic/Lukas Foss, American Composers Orchestra/Paul Dunkel, National Italian Youth Orchestra/Vinko Globokar, City of London Sinfonia, Haydn Chamber Orchestra of London, the Britten Sinfonia Soloists, Vox Juventus Poland, the Gregg Smith Singers, New York Treble Singers and by solo artists including British pianist Ronan Magill, American clarinettist Richard Stoltzman, Canadian cellist Soo Bae and the soprano and tenor duo Grace Hart & Enzo Citarelli.
He has received commissions and awards in over thirty national and international competitions including the American Lyric Theatre Poe Opera Project, Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University, Astral Foundation (Pew-Bandy) of New York and Philadelphia, Frederick P. Rose Prize, Valentino Bucchi Concorsi Internazionale, Third British Contemporary Piano Music Competition, Delta Omicron Composition Prize, Dr. J. Howland Auchincloss Society for New Music Composition Prize, New York Foundation for the Arts, MacDowell Colony, Tanglewood Music Centre (Bruno Maderna Fellowship), National Endowment for the Arts, et al. Between 1981 and 1999 he resided and worked in European capitals returning to New York in 2000.
His foreign fellowships include the American Academy in Rome, Italy Music Composition Fellowship; the Dartington, England International Summer School Fellowship, and a Research Assistantship from State University of New York to Universitat Tubingen & the Hochschule fur Musik Stuttgart, Germany. Gach has written and conducted many arrangements and original scores for the educational and commercial media, including: The Selfish Giant, a children’s musical; Legends from Bodmin Moor, a film; British Rail “Mind the Doors”, an advertisement campaign; and The Hurlers, an animation film. His biography has appeared in Marquis ‘Who’s Who in America’ since 2006. Mr Gach currently serves as Secretary of the Long Island Composers Alliance.
scoreexchange.com/profiles/jgach
Rain Worthington
Rain Worthington has a distinct voice within the field of contemporary music. As noted in MusicWeb-International, “… she writes music which speaks to the senses, is packed with real emotion and, most important of all in contemporary music, really communicates.”
World music, minimalism and romanticism have influenced Worthington’s compositional style. Her music has been performed in a wide variety of venues from loft performance spaces and dance clubs in New York City, to chamber concerts in Spain, Belgium, Italy, Brazil, Iceland, and India.
Using the palette of chamber and orchestra instrumentations, Worthington’s emotionally evocative work is nuanced, delicate, powerful, and transporting. Her music takes “…ideas of American musical style to a new place – like a walk in a familiar, yet very different park… And isn’t afraid to come up with its own startling conclusions.”
– Kyle Gann, Chamber Music magazine
PARMA Recordings has released a full-length solo album of Worthington’s orchestral music, DREAM VAPORS, on Navona Records.
Eva Ingolf, Miolina, Ricochet Duo, North/South Chamber Orchestra, SEM Orchestra, and the Missouri State University Symphony have premiered Worthington’s music. Her compositions have been featured at the PARMA Music Festival, Hartford Festival of Women Composers, the SCI National Conference, and she was Composer-in Residence at the 2016 MSU Composition Festival.
She has been awarded grants from Meet The Composer, ASCAP, the American Music Center, NYFA, and the American Composers Forum. In addition to composing concert works, Worthington serves as Artistic Administrator/Composer Advocate for the New York Women Composers.
Marga Richter
Midwest-native composer Marga Richter grew up in Wisconsin and Minnesota prior to moving to New York, where she earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in composition from The Juilliard School. Her compositional output consists of over 150 works encompassing virtually every genre of classical music. Her orchestral music has been played by more than 50 orchestras including the Atlanta and Milwaukee Symphonies and the Minnesota Orchestra, and recorded by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Polish Radio National Symphony Orchestra, the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, and the Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra.
Richter's music seeks to represent musically the visual and emotional. Says the composer, "Composing is my response to a constant desire to transform my perceptions and emotions into music. Everything that touches me, everything I become aware of as beautiful, or mysterious, or painful, or joyful, or unknowable becomes an immediate or eventual source of inspiration. Music is the way I speak to the silence of the universe."
Phillip Rhodes
Phillip Rhodes was born in Forest City, North Carolina in 1940 and received degrees from Duke University and the Yale University School of Music. His principal teachers have been William Klenz, Iain Hamilton, Donald Martino, and Mel Powell.
Rhodes has been the recipient of numerous commissions and composition awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Fund for Music, a citation and award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Tanglewood Orchestra Prizes, two McKnight Foundation Fellowships, two Fromm Foundation Commissions (Harvard), and a Bush Foundation Fellowship for Artists. Rhodes’ compositions are published by C. F. Peters, E.M.I., Theodore Presser, Earthsongs, and Schott.
His music is recorded on labels including CRI, Centaur Records, First Edition (Louisville), Innova, and New World Records. Major performances of his works include those by the Atlanta Symphony at Carnegie Hall, the Cleveland Orchestra at the Blossom Festival, the National Symphony at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra.
He is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities Emeritus at Carleton College and served as the Composer-in-Residence there from 1974 to 2007. Prior to coming to Carleton, he taught at Amherst College and served as Composer-in-Residence for the City of Louisville and for the State of Kentucky under the auspices of the Ford Foundation, the Courier-Journal and Louisville Times Foundation and the Kentucky State Arts Commission.
George Gershwin
George Gershwin (September 26, 1898 – July 11, 1937) was an American composer and pianist. Gershwin's compositions spanned both popular and classical genres, and his most popular melodies are widely known. Among his best-known works are the orchestral compositions Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and An American in Paris (1928) as well as the opera Porgy and Bess (1935).
Gershwin studied piano under Charles Hambitzer and composition with Rubin Goldmark and Henry Cowell. He began his career as a song plugger, but soon started composing Broadway theatre works with his brother Ira Gershwin, and Buddy DeSylva. He moved to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger, where he began to compose An American in Paris. After returning to New York City, he wrote Porgy and Bess with Ira and the author DuBose Heyward. Initially a commercial failure, Porgy and Bess is now considered one of the most important American operas of the twentieth century.
Gershwin moved to Hollywood and composed numerous film scores until his death in 1937 from a malignant brain tumor-- glioblastoma multiforme.
Gershwin's compositions have been adapted for use in many films and for television, and several became jazz standards recorded in many variations. Many celebrated singers and musicians have covered his songs.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gershwin
Steven Winteregg
Steven Winteregg is a Professor of Music at Cedarville University. He has also served as Principal Tubist with the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra and Tubist with The Carillon Brass Quintet. Holding degrees in music from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, Wright State University and The Ohio State University, he studied composition with William Steinhort, Gregory Proctor and Thomas Wells.
Winteregg has received dozens of awards in composition. Among his awards are First Prizes in the New Louisville Brass Quintet Composition Competition, the "Joy of Life" Composition Competition, the International Horn Society's Composition Competition and the International Trumpet Guild’s Composition Competition. He is a recipient of the Raymond Hubble/ASCAP Award and has received awards from the Montgomery County Arts and Cultural District, and the Ohio Arts Council. He was given a Music Citation from the Ohioana Library Association and has received an Ohio Senate Resolution commending him for his contribution to the arts in Ohio.
Winteregg's compositions have been performed throughout the world, including North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia. These performances have included multiple International Horn Symposiums, multiple International Tuba and Euphonium Conferences, the Keystone Music Festival, the Now Music Festival, the International Brass Festival in Narbonne, France, the national convention of the Music Educators National Conference and the International Trumpet Guild Conference.
He is the composer of four ballets, and his orchestral pieces have been performed by orchestras such as the Cincinnati Symphony, the Columbus Symphony, the Czech Radio Symphony, the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony, the Milwaukee Symphony, and the Orchestra of Augsburg. His compositions have been recorded by The Carillon Brass, the Czech Radio Symphony, Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra, the Kiev Philharmonic Orchestra, the Iceland Symphony and the United States Air Force Singing Sergeants.
Winteregg's compositions are published by Edition Musicus, Pasticcio Music, The Hornist's Nest, Integra Music, Lauren Keiser Music Publishing, Prairie Dawg Press, Roger Dean Music, Southern Music and The Tuba Press.
Click here to view Winteregg's 2016 release "The Journeyman's Songs: The Music of Steven Winteregg."
For more information about Steven Winteregg and his compositions, visit sites.google.com/site/slwinteregg
Douglas Anderson
Douglas Anderson is a composer, conductor, educator, and producer who has been active in the New York area for 45 years. He studied music and psychology at Columbia University, where his three degrees culminated in a doctorate in music composition in 1980. His professional career began as a jazz musician at the age of 12, and he performed widely in the Eastern U.S. before moving to New York to attend college. He made his professional conducting debut at the Beacon Theater on Broadway, leading the Boston Ballet in a run of Peter and the Wolf (1973).
Dr. Anderson's compositions include chamber works, orchestral works, concerti, vocal music (including synthesized voice), electronic music, radio drama, jazz, film, and musical theater, as well as many choral arrangements. Important categories of works include song cycles (My Year, My Life and Cassandra Songs), chamber symphonies (released on Douglas Anderson Chamber Symphonies 2, 3, & 4 on Ravello), and a series of engaging works for solo instruments.
His music has been heard around the world for decades, notably on Voice of America radio abroad, and nationally in radio dramas broadcast on NPR's The Radio Stage: "Romance Concerto," "The Sound of Fear Clapping," and “The King of Jazz”. He composed music for an Internet ‘opera of blood’ on SCIFI.com entitled "The Moon Moth." Theater works include four operas to librettos by Andrew Joffe: "Faust Triumphant, Medea in Exile, Through/In, and Antigone Sings."
In 1991 his music was presented in a retrospective concert by the New Renaissance Chamber Artists. His chamber opera "Faust Triumphant" was premiered in 1995 at the International Faust Festival. In 2009 he was a guest composer at the Bar Harbor (Maine) Music Festival. For 2011 he was a featured composer on eightstringsandawhistle.com. For the 2012-13 season he was composer-in-residence for A Potpourri of Song, in Brooklyn, NY.
A conductor equally adept with theatrical, vocal, and instrumental music, Anderson has since his debut conducted a great variety of ensembles and over 75 premieres, including the first electronic music opera and the first concerto for steel drum and orchestra. His repertoire includes standard operas, symphonic and choral music, and a wide range of unusual works from all eras. His operatic repertoire alone consists of over 100 complete operas conducted in over 400 performances. He is currently Conductor of the Downtown Symphony, Director of the Putnam Chorale, and Conductor of the American Chamber Opera Company.
In 1984 he founded the American Chamber Opera Company, a professional company that performs new and old chamber operas in English. To date the ACOC has presented 65 productions, including 26 premieres. The company has been featured on local, national, and international radio, including National Public Radio, the Pacifica network, and Voice of America.
He is on the faculty of the Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY, where he is Professor of Music and was for 14 years Chairman of the Music and Art Department.
Composition teachers include Mario Davidovsky, Harvey Sollberger, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Chou Wen-chung, and Charles Wuorinen.
Bruce Babcock
Applauded by Aaron Copland, inspired by Desmond Tutu, and mentored by Hugo Friedhofer, Paul Glass, and Earle Hagen, Bruce Babcock has spent his working life composing music for the musicians of Los Angeles. Successful in both film and television, and the concert hall, Gramophone, in reviewing his 2015 Navona CD Time, Still described Bruce as a “musician who blends superior craftsmanship with a colourful, expressive sense of narrative.”
Babcock holds Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in music composition from California State University, Northridge (CSUN). While at CSUN, Bruce’s Impasse was performed for Aaron Copland during his 1975 residency. Copland’s comments on the piece, recorded for posterity, include “an impression of musicality which is very pleasant, indeed...a convincing sense of an overall mood...knows what he wants...sure of what he’s doing.”
Babcock won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Music Composition for a Series in 1992, one of eight total Emmy nominations in a ten-year period, as well as eight TV/Film awards from BMI. He has also collaborated as an orchestrator and conductor with some of the biggest names in film scoring, including James Newton Howard, Michael Kamen, and Christopher Young.
In the concert music world, Babcock has received commissions from Pacific Serenades Artistic Director Mark Carlson, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Hollywood Bowl Orchestra saxophonist Doug Masek, UCLA Professor of Voice Juliana Gondek, Director Rick Todd and the USC Horn Ensemble, and Dan Kepl, Artistic Director of the Santa Barbara Chamber Music Festival. His works have performed by The Donald Brinegar Singers, the Young Musicians Foundation Orchestra of Los Angeles, and the Haga Motettkör of Göteborg, Sweden, Mikael Carlsson, Music Director. All Unto Me, inspired by and dedicated to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, was performed at All Saints Church, Pasadena, with the Archbishop in attendance in 2011.
Stephen Lias
The music of adventurer-composer Lias is performed regularly around the world by soloists and ensembles including the Boulder Philharmonic, the Oasis Quartet, the Ensamble de Trompetas Simon Bolivar, and the Russian String Orchestra. In 2011 his work Mélange of Neumes was voted Best New Published Work by the National Flute Association, and his pieces are regularly featured at major national and international conferences including the International Trumpet Guild, the North American Saxophone Alliance, and the ISCM World Music Days. 2016 will see performances by the Shreveport Symphony, the Fairbanks Symphony, the Anchorage Symphony, and the Ariana Quartet; and in 2017 a newly-commissioned orchestral work will be premiered at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
Lias’s passion for wilderness and outdoor pursuits has led to a growing series of compositions about the national parks of the United States. He has served as Artist-in-Residence at Rocky Mountain, Glacier, Denali, Glacier Bay, and Gates of the Arctic National Parks, and has written over a dozen park-related pieces that have been performed in such far-flung places as Alaska, Texas, Sydney, and Taiwan. He is the founder and leader of Alaska Geographic’s annual “Composing in the Wilderness” field seminar.
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