Scott Solak

Scott Solak (b. 1961) has written works in a wide variety of genres, including solo piano, orchestral, and chamber music.  The bulk of his output has been in the realm of vocal and choral music, both sacred and secular. Choral commissions include two full-length oratorios for church performance (Healing of the Blind Man and Welcome to Thy World, O King [Chevy Chase Concerts and Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church]; Velvet Shoes and This Music [Reston Chorale]; and The Day of Pentecost [private commission]. Instrumental commissions include Canzona for Oboe and Orchestra [Reston Community Orchestra]; Sonata di Gloria for two violins and piano [commissioned for the Chamasyan Sisters]; Slant of Light [Washington Saxophone Quartet]; and Sicilienne for viola and piano [private commission].

 

The Washington Post has called his music “inspiring.” His works have been performed throughout the United States and at various venues around the Washington D.C. metropolitan area, including the Washington National Cathedral and the Kennedy Center.

 

Solak holds a degree in Music Composition from the Catholic University of America.  His teachers have included Alice Parker, George Thaddeus Jones, and Frank Wilhoit.

 

In addition to his compositional activities, Solak has been active as a pianist, church musician, piano instructor, and youth choir director in the greater Washington D.C. area. Score samples and recordings of his works, as well as information about how to procure the sheet music for individual use or concert performance, can be found at scottsolak.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

JONATHAN DAVID LITTLE

The atmospheric and evocative music of Jonathan David Little is notable for its mystical beauty, intensity, and richness of material. After initial studies at the University of Melbourne, where he won the Lady Turner Exhibition, he completed a Doctoral degree researching the development of 'exotic' orchestration in 19th and 20th-century music. Interviewed in the Sept-Oct 2012 issue of American Fanfare, Little's musical style was defined as 'ecstatic minimalism.' Italian and other European critics have preferred the more general terms 'antique futurism' or 'picturesque archaism.'

 

Little was the first Australian-born composer to be awarded the prestigious Collard Fellowship of the UK’s Worshipful Company of Musicians (est.1500), and also the first composer to receive a Professional Development Award from the UK music business’s own charity, the Musicians’ Benevolent Fund. In 2016 he won a Royal Philharmonic Society "ENCORE Choral" Award (UK), in 2017 Special Distinction for his orchestral music in the ASCAP Rudolf Nissim Prize (USA) – and in January 2018 his polychoral Kyrie was nominated for "Best Classical Music Recording" at the inaugural RoundGlass Global Music Awards (USA-INDIA). His entire body of polychoral music was also nominated for the 2018 AUSTRALIA PRIZE – the nation’s premier and most distinguished award in the Arts and Humanities.

 

Little’s most recent choral album, WOEFULLY ARRAYED (2017) – featuring three choirs from the US & UK – has been praised by leading record review magazines worldwide. Fanfare called it “a masterpiece … radiant … a superb disc,” Gramophone thought it “masterly” and “luminous,” while Audiophile Audition felt it to be “fantastically beautiful … a delight on all fronts.” Choir & Organ (UK) reported of his choral music that "Little writes very much in the manner of the renaissance masters, creating what a modern sensibility would identify as ‘immersive’ music of strongly mystical aspect." www.jonathanlittle.org

 

 

 

 

HELEN MACKINNON

Composing from a young age, Scottish composer Helen MacKinnon studied music at The University of Glasgow, specializing in composition and graduating with a Bachelor of Music First Class Honours in 2002. Her most notable work during her studies was Crossing the Domain, a setting of Scottish poet Edwin Morgan’s poem From the Domain of Arnheim for female voices and percussion. MacKinnon cites her compositional influences as being her Scottish heritage, faith, a musical upbringing immersed in choral singing and orchestral playing, and an insatiable appetite for film scores.

 

Throughout an early career in management in the charity sector, MacKinnon composed and arranged music for choirs and ensembles in Scotland. In 2015, MacKinnon received an award in the 2nd International Choral Competition of Choral Composition Ennio Morricone for her sacred choral music. The award was a catalyst for MacKinnon to refocus her professional career on composing.  Commissions then followed from Perth Festival of the Arts and The University of Oxford which saw MacKinnon’s work explore gender, voice, and authority as part of a Women and the Canon international conference in Christ Church.

 

Since 2016, MacKinnon has produced a large portfolio of sacred choral music, which is performed by choirs across the UK, Europe, and Asia. Extensive works include a full Mass in Latin - Mass for the Spirit - and The Rhinns of Islay, an orchestral work celebrating the Scottish island that is part of MacKinnon’s heritage. MacKinnon’s work has gained the support of Florence Choral Festivals and is performed by international choirs during the Italian festivals each year.

 

For more information on MacKinnon, visit www.helenmackinnon.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

 

L PETER DEUTSCH

L Peter Deutsch is a native of Massachusetts, now living in Sonoma County CA. His early music education included performance and composition for voice, piano, and recorder. After a long detour through a distinguished career in Computer Science, he returned to composition part-time in 1986 and full-time in 2003, including a M.A. degree under Frank La Rocca at CSU Hayward.

 

Deutsch's strengths as a composer include sparkling counterpoint and polyphony, lyrical melodies, fluent text setting, and the use of a large harmonic palette centered around modal scales. He writes primarily for small instrumental or a cappella vocal ensemble, spanning styles from devotional to romantic to jazzy, and from Renaissance to early 20th Century. Scores of his music are distributed commercially through J.W. Pepper and Sheet Music Plus. His work to date includes three choral commissions in 2008-2010, and several recording releases through PARMA Recordings from 2016 onward, including music for chorus, string quartet, and piano trio.

 

 

 

JULI NUNLIST

Juli Nunlist (1916 – 2006) received a B.A. in English Composition from Barnard College in 1940, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa. In 1957, at the age of 40, she entered Manhattan School of Music as a composition major, and received her Bachelor’s degree in 1961 and her Master’s in 1964, studying with Vittorio Giannini, Ludmila Ulehla, and Nicholas Flagello. Her Spells is a choral setting of six poems by the English poet Kathleen Raine and was chosen for performance by the University of Kansas Concert Choir (Clayton Krehbiel conducting) at the Sixth Annual Symposium of Contemporary American Music, April 1964. In addition to Spells, her works include this string quartet, piano, choral, and chamber music, and a symphonic tone suite after Juan Ramon Jimenez’ prose poems, Platero and I.

 

 

 

Mrs. Nunlist was a member of ASCAP, the American Music Center and the American Women Composers, Inc., and was for fifteen years a member of the Cleveland Composers Guild. Much of her career was devoted to the teaching of music to dancers, dance teachers and choreographers in connection with the National Association for Regional Ballet at numerous Craft of Choreography conferences and workshops throughout the United States and Canada. She worked with Pauline Koner, Bella Lewitzky, Fernand Nault, Todd Bolender, Alexandra Danilova and Barbara Weisberger, and was personally commended for her work by the late George Balanchine. She designed and taught special courses in Music for Dancers and Dance Composition for the University of Akron’s first dance major program, which was initiated by Heinz Poll, and edited both Ann Hutchinson’s definitive work on movement notation, Labanotation (1970) as well as her published works, Your Move and A Teacher’s Guide to Your Move. She was a Trustee and faculty member of the Performing Arts School of Worcester, Massachusetts, and a part-time faculty member of Clark University.

 

 

 

This album is a commemoration of the musical life and works of Juli Nunlist, including music in the MMC recordings, and a modern recording of Spells and her string quartet.

 

 

 

DANIEL MORSE

Born in Honolulu HI, Daniel Morse was raised on every sort of music from Bob Marley to Beethoven and Paul Simon to Prokofiev. Combined with the pervasive multiculturalism of Hawaii, his background has given him a truly egalitarian outlook towards music, through which he sees that all styles and genres are somehow valid and worthwhile.

 

After spending high school playing electric bass in heavy metal and blues bands, he went on to receive his bachelor's degree in music with College Honors from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he studied with Richard Billingham. Returning home to Hawaii, he had an extended stint as a SCUBA instructor before returning to school to obtain a master's degree in Music Composition at the University of Hawaii, studying with Takeo Kudo, Donald Reid Womack, and Byron Yasui. Morse completed his PhD in music composition at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland, where he studied with Piers Hellawell and Michael Alcorn.

 

His compositional interests encompass both electroacoustic and instrumental music. He is particularly interested in the use of musical contexts, both created and inherited. His compositional process is driven by a dialectic between logic and emotion. He also has an abiding interest in cross-cultural composition, and strives for true synthesis when utilizing elements of non-western musics. Notable achievements include: the release of Tsuki no Uta (aka Reflection), recorded by Izumi Fujikawa, on Healing Fugu Records; the broadcast of Nachtlied (written for the Ulster Youth Choir) on BBC Radio 3; the scoring of Predestination (predestinationgame.com), a space strategy computer game which enjoyed a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign and is close to full release.

 

Morse lives in the mountains of the Inland Northwest, where he enjoys the peace and tranquility of the woods with his family.

 

dancomposer.com

 

 

 

 

PETER GREVE

Peter Greve was born in 1931 in The Hague (Netherlands). He received musical training in The Hague from Jean Antonietti and Léon Orthel (piano), Theo Laanen (trumpet), Dr Marcus van Crevel (music theory), and later from Willem Frederik Bon (Amsterdam), Myers Foggin (UK), and Terence Lovett (UK) in orchestral conducting. At the same time, he studied at the State University of Leiden (Netherlands), where he obtained M.Sc. (1957) and Ph.D. (1959) degrees in chemistry.

 

After his studies, he worked as a scientific researcher for Philips-Duphar Pharmaceutical Industry and for the Dutch Ministry of Public Health and Environmental Hygiene, but remained active in music on a part-time basis. From 1981 to 2002, he worked as a consultant for various national and international organizations in East Asia, Eastern Europe, Central America and Arab countries. Since his retirement in 2002, he is fulfilling a wish felt since his early youth and working as a full-time musician: a composer, arranger, conductor, and pianist. He is a member of the Society of Dutch Composers (Nieuw-GeNeCo) and of BUMA/Stemra (Dutch organisation in charge of the collection of music copyrights).

 

Peter Greve lives in Graveland, a village about 20km southeast of Amsterdam. A more detailed biography and a survey of his compositions and arrangements are given on his website http://petergreve.nl

 

 

Scores and audio- or videorecords of his works can be downloaded free of charge via this website as well. Parts for performances are for sale through the Foundation "Peter Greve, componist & arrangeur"; contact: pagreve@outlook.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

WHITMAN BROWN

Composer Whitman Brown has received awards and commissions from organizations such as ASCAP, BMI, the Yaddo and Millay artist colonies, the Bedford Springs and Stroud Festivals, and the Warebrook Festival of Contemporary Music. Ensembles such as the Arden, Everest, and Lydian String Quartets, Kalliope Trio, Arcadian Winds, Bala Brass, and the Master Singers have performed his compositions. He is currently Head of Theory and Composition at Walnut Hill School for the Arts and has taught at Brandeis University, Boston University, Longy School of Music, and the Powers School of Music.