Featured Composers

Pietro Dossena
Ensemble for Contemporary Music — Wednesday, April 22
Pietro Dossena

Pietro Dossena began training as a pianist at age nine. He studied with Biancamaria Piantelli and won several national piano competitions, including “Città di Gorgonzola” (1995), “Carlo Vidusso” (1995), "Città di Sesto S. Giovanni” (1998), and “Il pianoforte d'oro” (2000). After graduating from the Conservatorio “A. Boito” in Parma (2000), he attended the International “Tullio Macoggi” Piano Courses, and also improved his jazz technique with the Italian pianist Mario Piacentini.

A student in musicology at the Milan University, Pietro graduated in 2005 with full marks. In 2003, thanks to the Erasmus exchange project, he received instruction in cinema (Michel Chion) and theatre (Georges Banu) at the University of Paris III. A passionate film lover, he wrote and performed the soundtracks of various short movies and documentaries, and even made some short films of his own, including “12th” (selected and screened at the International Film Festival “Inventa un film” 2008).

In 2006, Pietro was granted a scholarship by the Padua University, where he is currently completing a Doctorate in Musicology: his main research pertains to the manuscripts of the French composer Erik Satie. Additionally, Pietro has studied composition since 1998 with various teachers. In 2004 he entered the Milan Conservatoire to study with Sonia Bo, and he is currently an exchange graduate student at UCSB in both composition (Joel Feigin, Clarence Barlow) and musicology (Patricia Hall).

The piece Eglantina for ensemble won second prize at the 2006 “Egidio Carella” International Composition Competition; the president of the jury was Luis De Pablo.

Linda L. Holland
Ensemble for Contemporary Music — Wednesday, April 22

Linda L. Holland has been a faculty member of Santa Barbara City College since 1999. She is an internationally recognized composer whose works have been performed in London, Spain, New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, Hawaii, Washington D.C., and many other locations. Her works have won awards from the Corwin Foundation, the International Festival of Women Composers, the Festival of New American Music, the National Flute Association, and ASCAP. Recently the group ZAWA! took several of Dr. Holland’s works on tour and received an enthusiastic response from audiences everywhere. Other works of hers have been premiered/performed by ZAWA! at Carnegie Hall and Wigmore Hall, Schola Cantorum, the Ojai Camerata, the Santa Barbara Youth Symphony, Current Sounds New Music Consortium, Dr. Betty Oberacker, and Interplay. In Fall 2007 the Aeron Flute Ensemble played PicCalypso at their debut concert at Carnegie Hall.

As a flutist Dr. Holland has been a guest soloist/lecturer at the National Flute Convention in Dallas, the Southern California Bach Festival, the Northern California Bach Festival, the Society of Composers Incorporated, and the International Festival of Women Composers. She has appeared with the Ojai Camerata, Santa Barbara Civic Light Opera, the Santa Barbara Dance Alliance, the Santa Barbara Choral Society, the Santa Barbara Children’s Chorus, Channel Islands Symphony, Ojai Camber Music Series, and the Cabrillo Theatre Company. She is one of the founding members of the Current Sounds New Music Consortium. In addition to her work at Santa Barbara City College Dr. Holland is also the Director of the MERIT (Music Education Reinforces Intellect and Talent) program at the Music Academy of the West and an active chamber music coach and private teacher in the Santa Barbara area. Dr. Holland is also a resident artist for the Ojai Music Festival’s BRAVO! Outreach Program. Dr. Holland received her BM in flute and saxophone performance from California State University Sacramento, her MM in composition from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, her MM in flute from the University Of California Santa Barbara, and her PhD in composition from the University of California Santa Barbara. Her most recent commission is Flute’n’Boots for acclaimed soloist Jill Felber.

Curtis Roads
CREATE Concert — Thursday, April 23
Curtis Roads

Dr. Curtis Roads is Professor of Media Arts and Technology and also Associate Director of the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE) at UCSB. He studied music composition and computer programming at California Institute of the Arts, the University of California, San Diego (BA Summa Cum Laude), and the University of Paris VIII (Doctorat «Très honorable avec félicitations du jury»). From 1980 to 1986 he was a researcher in computer music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the MIT Media Laboratory. He then taught at the University of Naples Federico II, Harvard University, Oberlin Conservatory, CCMIX (Paris), and the University of Paris VIII. He has led masterclasses at the Australian National Conservatory (Melbourne) and the Prometeo Laboratorio (Parma), among others. He is co-organizer of international workshops on musical signal processing in Sorrento, Capri, and Santa Barbara (1988, 1991, 1997, 2000). He has served on the composition juries of the Ars Electronica (Linz) and the International Electroacoustic Music Competition (Bourges, France).

At UCSB he developed the Creatophone, a system for pluriphonic spatial projection of sound in concert, and the Creatovox, an expressive instrument for virtuoso performance in collaboration with Alberto de Campo. Roads and de Campo also developed PulsarGenerator, a widely distributed program for sound particle synthesis. Together with David Thall, he developed EmissionControl (2005), a program for generalized granular synthesis.

His composition Clang-Tint (1994) was commissioned by the Japan Ministry of Culture (Bunka-cho) and the Kunitachi College of Music, Tokyo. His music is available on compact discs produced by Asphodel, MODE, OR, the MIT Media Laboratory, and Wergo. A cofounder of the International Computer Music Association in 1979, he was Editor of Computer Music Journal (The MIT Press) from 1978 to 1989, and Associate Editor 1990-2000. His writings include over a hundred monographs, research articles, reports, and reviews. Some of these have been translated and printed in Italian, French, German, Finnish, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. His books include Foundations of Computer Music (1985, The MIT Press), Composers and the Computer (1985, AR Editions), The Music Machine (1989, The MIT Press), Representations of Musical Signals (1991, The MIT Press), Musical Signal Processing (co-editor, 1997, Swets and Zeitlinger, Amsterdam), and Microsound (2002, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts).

His book, The Computer Music Tutorial (1996, The MIT Press) is the best-selling textbook in the field, and has been published in French as L’audionumérique (1998, Editions Dunod, Paris) and Japanese (2001, Denki Daigaku Shuppan, Tokyo). A Chinese edition is being published in 2007. His current book project is Composing Electronic Music (in progress).

His current research is focused on microsound synthesis (granular, pulsar, and related techniques), matching pursuit decomposition of audio signals, pluriphonic spatialization, notation and visualization of sound, and the history and aesthetics of electronic music composition.

Ron Sedgwick
Music for Spaces — Tuesday, April 21

Ron K. Sedgwick is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he received a five-year UC Regents Special Fellowship. Both his acoustic and electro-acoustic works have received numerous awards and have been performed in the United States and Europe. He has studied composition with Joel Feigin, Karen Tanaka, and Kurt Rohde; and computer music with Curtis Roads, Clarence Barlow, and JoAnn Kuchera-Morin.

David Wessel
CREATE Concert — Thursday, April 23

David Wessel studied mathematics and experimental psychology at the University of Illinois and received a doctorate in mathematical psychology from Stanford in 1972. His work on the perception and compositional control of timbre in the early 70’s at Michigan State University led to a musical research position at IRCAM in Paris in 1976. In 1979 he began reshaping the Pedagogy Department to link the scientific and musical sectors of IRCAM. In 1985 he established a new IRCAM department devoted to the development of interactive musical software for personal computers. In 1988 he began his current position as Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley where he is Director of CNMAT. He is particularly interested in live-performance computer music where improvisation plays an essential role. He has collaborated in performance with a variety of improvising composers including Roscoe Mitchell, Steve Coleman, Ushio Torikai, Thomas Buckner, Vinko Globokar, Jin Hi Kim, Shafqat Ali Khan, and Laetitia Sonami has performed throughout the US and Europe.

College of Creative Studies

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