Featured Composers

Clarence Barlow
ECM — Wednesday, April 28
Clarence Barlow

Professor Clarence Barlow is the Corwin Endowed Chair of Composition at the University of California-Santa Barbara. 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.

 

Scott Cazan
RedBlack—Friday, April 30
Scott Cazan

Scott Cazan is a performer and sound artist specializing in the composition of works for chamber ensembles and the performance of live electronic music where he explores human relations with technology, the act of listening and the physicality of sound. Scott has performed and shown his installation work in various parts of the United States, France and Germany, most recently acting as an artist in residence with the CENTQUATRE (France), PACT Zollverein (Germany) and CalArts. Scott holds a BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. He has studied with Mark Trayle, Michael Pisaro, Sara Roberts, Ulrich Krieger, Clay Chaplin, Jeremy Haladyna, Julio Estrada, and Zbigniew Karkowski, among others. He currently teaches and performs regularly in the Los Angeles area. His music can be heard on Khalija Records.

Leslie Hogan
ECM — Wednesday, April 28
Leslie Hogan In Milan

Leslie A. Hogan (b. 1964) 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, Splinter of Hope (2004) and Matisse (2005) for solo cello, and Graffiti (2008) for mixed chamber ensemble. The last composition is the first segment of a large-scale collaboration with choreographer Valerie Huston on a new work for contemporary ballet. Some of her music is featured on the Lyric Media documentary, Villa Montalvo: The Evolution of an Arts Center, released in the fall of 2008.

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.

Hogan's work has been performed throughout the United States and in Chile by performers including the Rackham String Quartet, the Onyx String Quartet, Alaska Pro Musica, the St. Clair Trio, Alternate Currents Performance Ensemble, the Robin Cox Ensemble, the Empyrean Ensemble, the California State University-Fresno Wind Ensemble, the University of Wyoming-Laramie Wind Ensemble, UCSB’s Ensemble for Contemporary Music, the University of Texas New Music Ensemble, Arizona State University’s New Music Ensemble, the University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra, and the Chicago Civic Orchestra. Dr. Hogan has taught composition in the College of Creative Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara since 1995.

Robert Morris
CREATE Concert — Thursday, April 29
Robert Morris

Robert Morris, born in Cheltenham, England in 1943, received his musical education at the Eastman School of Music (B.M. in composition with distinction) and the University of Michigan (M.M. and D.M.A. in composition and ethnomusicology), where he studied composition with John La Montaigne, Leslie Bassett, Ross Lee Finney, and Eugene Kurtz. At Tanglewood, as a Margret Lee Crofts Fellow, he worked with Gunther Schuller. Morris has taught composition, electronic music, and music theory at the University of Hawaii and at Yale University, where he was Chairman of the Composition Department and Director of the Yale Electronic Music Studio. He was also Director of the Computer and Electronic Studio, Director of Graduate (music) Studies, and Associate Professor of Music at the University of Pittsburgh. In 1980 Morris joined the faculty of the Eastman School of Music where he presently teaches as Professor of Composition. (He was chair of the Composition Department from 1999-2005 and before that a member of both the composition and music theory departments.) Other teaching posts have included positions at the Philadelphia College of the Performing Arts, the Governor's School for the Arts held at Bucknell University, the University of Pittsburgh Computer Music Workshop, and the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood.

Morris has written music for a wide diversity of musical forms and media. He has composed over 160 works including computer and improvisational music. Much of his output from the 1970s is influenced by non-Western music and uses structural principles from Arabic, Indian, Indonesian, Japanese, and early Western musics. While such influences are less noticeable in his more recent works, the temporal and ornamental qualities of Eastern music have permanently affected Morris's style. Moreover, Morris has found much resonance among his musical aesthetics, his experiences in hiking (especially in the Southwestern United States), his study and appreciation of Carnatic Music of South India, and his reading of ancient Indian, Chinese, and Japanese Buddhist texts. Among his present compositional projects is a series of the works to be played outdoors in a natural setting.

Scott Perry
ECM — Wednesday, April 28

Composer Scott Perry likes to sit around and do his best to "think non-thinking." He is currently attending graduate school at the University of California at Davis. He holds a BA in music composition from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara and a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. His teachers include Beverly Grigsby, Jeremy Haladyna, Kurt Rohde, Wolfgang von Schweinitz, Ulrich Krieger and David Rosenboom. He was a principle participant in a master class with Roger Reynolds. He has had intensive short encounters and workshops with Mario Davidovsky, Julio Estrada, and Pauline Oliveros.

Curtis Roads
CREATE Concert — Thursday, April 29
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
RedBlack—Friday, April 30

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.

Justin Weaver
ECM — Wednesday, April 28

Justin Weaver (b. 1978) received degrees in Music Composition (BA, 2000) and Linguistics (MA, 2003) from UC Santa Barbara, studying music composition with Jeremy Haladyna and William Kraft during his time as an undergraduate at the College of Creative Studies. He has served as Concert and Publicity Manager for Community Arts Music Association (CAMA) of Santa Barbara since 2002 and also volunteers with the Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse’s Fighting Back Mentor Program and at Sarah House (a social-model hospice for low income residents).

College of Creative Studies

© The Regents of the University of California — Terms of Use

Image credits—Header image: Graham Wakefield.