Recent Awards (list from the past decade)
Archive of previous newsletters
September 2023 Newsletter
Department News |
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‘NEW VOICES’ COMPOSERS SELECTED It is our pleasure to announce that composers Justin Graff, Shuyu Lin, Alexey Logunov, Pablo Martinez Teutli, and ChunWai Wong have been selected for the 6th Annual New Voices Orchestra Concert. Their pieces will be premiered Sunday, Nov. 12 at 3:00pm in the Musical Arts Center and conducted by David Dzubay. We would like to commend all the participants who submitted scores for the incredibly high quality of their work. |
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JACOBS COMPOSERS FEATURED AT MIZZOU Congrats to our emeritus faculty Claude Baker and alums Texu Kim and Chen Yihan on premieres of their pieces composed for Alarm Will Sound during the Mizzou International Composers Festival. Here’s links to the two AWS Concerts – Thursday guest composers (Tania León, Marcos Balter, Claude Baker, Texu Kim); Saturday — 8 “Resident Composers” including Chen Yihan. |
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Alumni News |
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Alex Tedrow (BM ’21, MM ’23) Wins ASCAP Award Alex Tedrow has received a 2023 ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Award for his work Jeat (for alto saxophone duo with electronics). |
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Matthew Schultheis (BM ’20) Receives EIC Commission, Paris Premiere Last March, Matthew Schultheis’s piece interferer, was premiered by Ensemble intercontemporain as part of their second Tremplin de la Création project. The piece, his third for sinfonietta, was one of seven commissions the Ensemble awarded to student composers based the US, France, and Germany for this program, directed by British-Australian conductor Toby Thatcher. The entire concert can be viewed here. |
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Miggy Torres (MM ’19) New Work Premiered by Mivos The Mivos Quartet premiered Travels in Hyperreality by Miggy Torres this past July at the VIPA Festival in Valencia, Spain, to great acclaim. The three-movement work for amplified string quartet draws from an eponymous essay by novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco (1932-2016) that explores situations in which in which the representation of reality seems to become more real than reality itself—what Eco termed “hyperreality.” Video and audio recordings of the premiere performance will be available soon on the composer’s website. |
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Nicole DiPaolo (DM Minor ’13) Publications Pianist, composer, and arranger Nicole DiPaolo will be published with EVC Music in August 2023 after her Nocturne in G# minor, written to prepare late-intermediate pianists for the challenges of Chopin’s music, was chosen for inclusion in the forthcoming volume 22 Nocturnes for Chopin. This volume brings together the work of 22 women composers chosen through a worldwide Call for Scores seeking pieces inspired, in some way, by Chopin’s Nocturnes. The book will be available on Amazon and through Hal Leonard Europe as well as on www.evcmusic.com, and a selection of the book will be performed by Rose McLachlan on September 18th at Steinway Hall in London. In addition to this Nocturne, Nicole has self-published other pedagogical works tailored to adult piano students’ unique learning needs, including the multi-key volumes Venturing Beyond (20 early intermediate pieces in keys of 3+ sharps/flats) and Opening Doors (elementary level, 2+ sharps/flats, in progress). Nicole also publishes Accessible Accompaniments, a series of playable and musically accurate piano reductions and audition/solo recital cuts for opera’s most difficult public domain arias. The intensive training in engraving and score proofreading that Nicole received during her time in the IU composition department pays off every day in these pursuits. |
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Seare Farhat (MM ’22) JACK Quartet Performance Seare Farhat’s work Ka Spoojmai Shwa Poh Hala Ke was performed by JACK Quartet at the TIME:SPANS Festival on August 14. The performance took place at DiMenna Center for Classical Music in New York City. |
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Walker Smith (BM ’23) Makes International Headlines, Wins Fulbright Award in Music Composition Walker Smith made international headlines for his research “Designing an Interactive Musical Periodic Table,” which he presented at the Spring 2023 Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in Indianapolis. The press release and video published by the ACS was picked up by over 50 news outlets across the US, including New York, California, Texas, Kansas City, Miami, as well as popular online news outlets like Phys.org, Syfy, and somehow Yahoo Sports. He also received international attention in Brazil, Spain, and the UK. Following this press, he was invited to speak and perform his “Sound of Molecules” show at several summer events, including the International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD) in Sweden, the Project Fibonacci Foundation STEAM Leadership Conference in Rome, New York, and the Fall Meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Francisco. He also returned to his hometown of Knoxville, TN, to perform several shows, and he was featured on a WBIR TV news segment. Walker won a 2023-24 US-Netherlands Fulbright award in Music Composition to continue his ‘musical chemistry’ research at the Institute of Sonology, a computer and electronic music center affiliated with the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. After completing his Fulbright project, he will begin a Ph.D. in Computer Music at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) in Fall 2024. At CCRMA, he will continue pursuing interdisciplinary projects combining science, music, and public-oriented science education. |
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Student News |
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Hippocrates Cheng Lectures and Masterclasses in Asia Hippocrates Cheng was invited to give lectures and masterclasses to students in music schools in Japan, China, Vietnam, and Thailand this summer. Besides teaching, he also conducted fieldwork on traditional music and learned traditional instruments in these countries. He collaborated with and interviewed composers, ethnomusicologists, and musicians of traditional music. He taught and visited Senzoku College of Music (Japan), Peking University (China), Central Conservatory of Music (China), Shanghai Conservatory of Music (China), Mahidol University (Thailand), Suan Sunandha Rajabhat University (Thailand), Naresuan University (Thailand), Chiang Mai Rajabhat University (Thailand) and Ho Chi Minh City Conservatory (Vietnam). |
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Kian Ravaei Receives Commissioning Grants Kian Ravaei has received a Barlow Endowment Commission to compose a new work for Abeo Quartet, as well as a New Music USA Creator Fund Award to support a collaboration with choreographer Annie Kahane and Los Angeles-based ensemble Bridge to Everywhere. |
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Nate Sassoon: Recent Creative Ventures in the South of France and off Broadway Nate Sassoon is the composer and music producer for “Baudelaire’s Passion,” a new play by Henry Keen, premiering on September 21, 2023 at the American Theatre of Actors, John Callum Theatre in NY. More info and tickets. Additionally, Nate recently returned from an August 2023 concert tour in the south of France with The Glyme Valley Singers (Oxford, UK), where he performed organ recitals, sang with the chamber choir, and premiered his piece Inspiration for cello and choir. |
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Xinyuan Deng Commission and Premiere at Lake George Music Festival Xinyuan was selected as one of this year’s composer fellowship at the Lake George Music Festival. And the festival commissioned Xinyuan to write a new string quartet work for The Rhythm Method Quartet at this year’s festival in August. Xinyuan Deng’s piece Notturno, world premiered in Festival’s composer institute concert on August 17th, 2023. In this piece, Xinyuan wants to take listeners on a journey through the enchanting realm of night. The piece is divided into four distinct sections, each portraying a different facet of the nocturnal experience. |
Faculty News |
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Chi Wang’s Recent Activities and Upcoming Performances Chi Wang was invited as the featured artist at the University of Oregon in March and at Zhejiang Conservatory in China in May, where she delivered lectures, master classes, and concert. Chi’s Transparent Affordances was performed at the New Interfaces for Musical Expression in Mexico City in June, the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival in July and this piece is selected for the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS) CD together with Professor John Gibson’s In Summer Rain. The CD is scheduled to be released on the SEAMUS Records imprint of New Focus Recordings on May 2024. Chi’s Impression of the Pagoda was presented at the Sound and Music Computing Conference in Stockholm. She will perform Impression of the Pagoda at the International Computer Music Conference in Shenzhen and Action-Reaction will be presented at the Australasian Computer Music Conference in Sydney in October. |
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Eugene O’Brien CD Release New Focus Recordings has released a CD / digital download of Professor Emeritus Eugene O’Brien’s large-scale song cycle Algebra of Night and his instrumental ensemble piece Elegy to the Spanish Republic, both performed by the 21st Century Consort in Washington, D.C. Further information about the CD is available here. |
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John Gibson presents In Summer Rain at festivals; and a software release John Gibson’s 8-channel fixed-media piece, In Summer Rain, is getting out there. Following performances last fall at the NYU / Ircam Forum in New York City and at eviMus in Saarbrücken, Germany, the piece has been making the rounds of conferences and festivals: Electronic Music Midwest in Kansas City, the SEAMUS National Conference in New York, the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, and the Sound and Music Computing conference at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, where Gibson presented a new Ambisonic mix in their 29-channel “sound dome.” Following the SEAMUS conference, the piece was voted by the membership to appear on the annual CD, Music from SEAMUS, along with a new work by Prof. Chi Wang. In Summer Rain will be on the program of the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) in Shenzhen, China in October. In other news, Cycling ’74 released Gibson’s Auzzie software in the Max Package Manager last March, with 3200 downloads so far. |
Upcoming Events(* Starred events are REQUIRED for IU composition students) |