Clarence Barlow is the Corwin Endowed Chair of Composition. From its inception, the Corwin Chair has been an important post for promoting the creation and performance of contemporary music, for making regional, national, and international connections with other composition programs, for bringing noted composers to UCSB as guests to broaden students' horizons, and for attracting students to UCSB. Barlow's career achievements fulfill the Corwin's vision of fostering a link between continuing excellence in traditional approaches to composition while also recognizing the emerging role of music in the media arts and technology.
Barlow's past and current teaching posts include twelve years as Professor of Composition and Computer Music at the renowned biennial Summer Courses of the International Music Institute at Darmstadt (1982-1994); over twenty years as Lecturer in Computer Music at the Cologne Musikhochschule (1984-2005); four years as Artistic Director of the Institute of Sonology at The Hague's Royal Conservatory (1990-1994); and twelve years as Professor of Composition and Sonology at the Royal Conservatory (1994-2006). Other posts include Visiting Professor of Composition and Acoustic Art at the Folkwang University in Essen, Germany (1990-1991), and Visiting Professor of Composition at the ESMAE School of Music and Dramatic Arts in Porto, Portugal (2005-2006). Barlow, who studied composition under Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1968-1970) and Karlheinz Stockhausen (1971-1973), is a universally acknowledged pioneer and celebrated composer in the field of electroacoustic and computer music. He has made groundbreaking advancements in interdisciplinary composition that unite mathematics, computer science, visual arts, and literature. While he has been a driving force in interdisciplinary and technological advances, his music is nevertheless firmly grounded in tradition and thus incorporates much inherited from the past. His works, primarily for traditional instruments, feature a vocabulary that ranges from pretonal to tonal, nontonal, or microtonal idioms, and, further, may incorporate elements derived from non-western cultures.
In addition to his renown as a composer, Barlow has also attained high distinction as an interdisciplinary researcher, author, and software developer. His publications include numerous works, one of which is an extensive study on tonality and metricism, Bus Journey to Parametron (1980, 1984). Additional publications are the software that Barlow has written as aids for composing and notating music. He is currently collaborating with a German mathematician on algorithms for solving problems in music theory.
Joel Feigin (b. 1951) is a composer whose music has been heard across the U.S. and abroad, from France and Germany to Taiwan and Korea. His works have been widely praised for their "very strong impact, as logical in musical design as they are charged with emotion and drama." (Opera Magazine)
Feigin's many honors include a Senior Fulbright Fellowship at the Moscow State Conservatory in Russia (1998-1999) and a Guggenheim Fellowship to write his first opera, Mysteries of Eleusis, commissioned for Theatre Cornell and produced there in 1986. The complete opera was presented again in 1999 at the Moscow Conservatory, which requested a chamber version that it produced in 2000 as part of the Russian-American Festival of Operatic Art. Feigin's new opera, Twelfth Night, based on the play by William Shakespeare, was chosen by New York City Opera for its VOX 2003 series of readings: Showcasing American Composers.
Joel Feigin studied composition with Nadia Boulanger at Fontainebleau and with Roger Sessions at The Juilliard School, where he received his DMA degree. The recipient of a post-graduate Mellon Fellowship at Cornell University, he also holds an undergraduate degree from Columbia University. Early in his career, as an Aaron Copland-ASCAP fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center, Feigin received the Dimitri Mitropoulos Prize in Composition. Over the years he has been granted residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo and the Millay Colony.
An accomplished pianist and accompanist, Feigin was also a student of Rosina Lhevine, worked with Nico Castel at the Metropolitan Opera and Antonia Lavanne at the Mannes College of Music, and is often called upon to participate in performances of his own works. Among them have been Veranderungen with Juilliard Quartet violinist Ronald Copes in Santa Barbara, CA and Echoes From the Holocaust with members of the Czech Philharmonic in Prague.
A student of Zen Buddhism, Feigin is Professor of composition at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Peter Racine Fricker (1920-1990) was a composer of significant gifts, a leader in the post-war generation of British composers and an important force in the twentieth century renaissance of English music. A Londoner by birth, he was educated at the Royal College of Music in composition and organ. Following service with the Royal Air Force from 1941 to 1947, he began to attract international attention to his music, particularly with his first symphony, which won the Roussevitsky Prize. Further recognition followed at the Cheltenham Festival, at the Darmstadt Festival, and at the Edinburgh Festival among others. From 1952 to 1964 he served as director of music at Morley College, London, at the same time teaching at the Royal College of Music.
In 1964 he accepted a one-year appointment as visiting professor of music at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He found the circumstances there so congenial that in the next year he accepted a full-time appointment as professor of music. While maintaining strong ties with English musical life (e.g. serving as president of the Cheltenham Festival, 1984-6), he remained in Santa Barbara, as chairman of the music department (1970-74), faculty research lecturer (1980) and Corwin Professor of Composition (1988).
Jeremy Haladyna, Director of the ECM (and Associate Director of New Music Festivals II-X), holds prizes and academic qualifications from three countries. He is a diplòmè of the history-rich Schola Cantorum on Paris' Left Bank. He also holds the Master's degree with Distinction from the University of Surrey (U.K.). He has taught undergraduate composition at UCSB since 1991 and was awarded the Ph.D. in composition in 1993. In addition to his responsibilities with ECM, he teaches orchestration and is on the faculty of the College of Creative Studies, UCSB. As pianist, composer, conductor and organist, he has long been committed to the espousal of new music. Prizes from the Friends of Lili Boulanger and Britain's MCPS Ltd. bear witness to his creativity, and his own music has recently been heard at St. John's Smith Square, London; South Bank Centre, London; St. Paul's Cathedral, London; BMIC, London; and the National Museum of Art, Mexico City. His On The Mat of The Jaquar Priest, written for Jill Felber, appears on Neuma records.
Leslie A. Hogan studied composition at the University of Kansas, the University of Michigan, the Sandpoint Festival, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Bloch Composers' Symposium. She worked principally with Leslie Bassett and William Albright. Her music increasingly reflects a longtime fascination with other art forms and with the potential of music to reflect or respond to visual stimuli from the natural world, resulting in works such as Flight (1997), String Quartet #3: Dolphin (1996), Sonata for alto saxophone and piano: 'Thoughts that fit like air' (2000), and Praise (1992), an orchestral work based on some poetry of Robert Hass. Recent works include Sonata for violoncello and piano (2002), written for Virginia Kron, Questions of Travel (2003), a setting of the Elizabeth Bishop poem for mezzo-soprano and large chamber ensemble, and Splinter of Hope (2004) and Matisse (2005) for solo cello.
In 1999, she co-founded Current Sounds, a new music consortium based in Santa Barbara, California, and also serves on the board of the Chamber Music Society of Santa Barbara, an organization which promotes the performance and appreciation of chamber music repertory through sponsoring workshops, concerts, and outreach activities. She has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (Charles Ives Fellowship, 2002; Charles Ives Scholarship, 1993), the American Music Center, ASCAP, and the Chicago Civic Orchestra, among others. Dr. Hogan has taught composition in the College of Creative Studies since 1995.
Dr. JoAnn Kuchera-Morin is a composer, Professor of Media Arts and Technology and Music, and a researcher in multi-modal media systems, content and facilities design. She created, built, and designed the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology and is the Center Director since its inception in 1986. Her years of experience in digital media research led to the creation of a multi-million dollar sponsored research program for the University of California, the Digital Media Innovation Program. She was Chief Scientist of the Program from 1998 to 2003. In 2000 she began the creation, design, and development of a Digital Media Center within the California Nanosystems Institute. The culmination of her design is the Allosphere Research Laboratory, a three-story metal sphere inside an echo-free cube, designed for immersive, interactive scientific and artistic investigation of multi-dimensional data sets.
A composer of mixed media works, she received her Ph.D. in 1984 from the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester. Her current music research is focusing on a general purpose interface for control of digital information through natural performance gesture. A composer of primarily electro-acoustic works, her music has been performed throughout the United States, Europe and Asia.