Composition
Kathryn Alexander, Artistic Director of New Music On The Point - Kathryn Alexander is Professor of Composition and Music Technology at Yale University’s Department of Music. She was the 2009 winner of the Roger Sessions Memorial Bogliasco Fellowship in Music, for which she resided as Composer-in-Residence at The Liguria Study Center in Bogliasco, Italy during March and April, 2009. She was a 2007-08 winner of the Aaron Copland Award and a 2006 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. In addition, Alexander has been awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study at Harvard University, a Computerworld Laureate Award from the Smithsonian Institute, a Composer’s Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rome Prize. She has won numerous awards from ASCAP and has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony, The Millay Colony, The Virginia Center for the Arts, Yaddo, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, American Opera Projects, the Vermont Chamber Music Festival of the East, the Culture/Rockefeller Exchange, the Words and Music Festival at Indiana University, June-in-Buffalo, and The Tanglewood Music Center.
Performances and commissions include the JACK Quartet, The Aaron Copland Foundation, Hoff-Bartheslon Contemporary Music Festival, Southwest Chamber Music, counter)induction, the Williams Chamber Players, the Contemporary Music Forum, the NOW Ensemble, the Blue Elm Trio, the Yale Camerata and Pro Musica, the Interfaced Culture Conference, the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University, Trio Neos, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Women’s Philharmonic, The Center in San Diego, Future Music Oregon, the Hopkins Center for the Arts, the California E.A.R. Unit, the National Flute Association, the New Music Consort, Contemporanea Musicali Internazionale, the Old Stone Singers, Boston Musica Viva, League-I.S.C.M., First Monday Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, and the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, among others.
Her pieces draw upon a range of disciplines, including literature, the visual and plastic arts, the sciences, and technology to develop formal schema that distill from the abstract rather than from literal, programmatic meaning. This interdisciplinary approach has culminated in an extensive array of compositions, ranging from pieces for solo instrument and chamber ensemble, solo voice and orchestra, to technological presentations and multimedia works. When Alexander engages music with the other arts, whether for dramatic or abstract expression, or as sonic sculpture, she seeks to highlight the processes of transformation and the beauty of change. The result is a varied repertoire of solo, chamber and large-scale compositions described variously by critics as music in which “… the gestures were bolder, the moods more volatile, the climaxes more clearly marked and – most significant – the sounds enormously more colorful,” and where “… the instrumentalists out-Bartoked Bartok in their extramusical pursuits.”
A native Texan, Alexander comes from a musical family where she found it natural to be involved with music from an early age. She completed her Bachelor’s degree at Baylor University as a flutist, studying with Helen Ann Shanley, and then went on to The Cleveland Institute of Music to work with Maurice Sharp, principal flutist of the Cleveland Orchestra. While there she began to compose. Alexander studied with Donald Erb and Eugene O’Brien at The Cleveland Institute of Music and later earned her DMA in composition at the Eastman School of Music, working with Samuel Adler, Barbara Kolb, Allan Schindler and Joseph Schwantner, and pursued additional study with Leon Kirchner at the Tanglewood Music Center. She has taught at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music (1994/1987-1988), Dartmouth College (1990-1993), the University of Oregon (1995-1996), and currently teaches composition and music technology at Yale University, where she co-directs the Yale College Composition Seminar and Yale College New Music.
Laura Elise Schwendinger is a Professor of Composition at the University of Wisconsin Madison, and Artistic Director of the Contemporary Ensemble there. She was the first composer to win the American Academy in Berlin Prize Fellowship in 1999. Her music has been praised in most of the nation’s major newspapers and performed by many of the leading artists of our day, including Dawn Upshaw, the Arditti Quartet, Matt Haimovitz, the JACK Quartet, Jennifer Koh, Janine Jansen,Christopher Taylor, Julia Bentley, ICE, the Aspen Ensemble, Collage, The Theater Chamber Players, The Stony Brook Premiere Series, Boston Musica Viva, Voices ofChange, The Aspen Ensemble, the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra and the American Composers Orchestra; at venues including Carnegie Hall, Zankel Hall, The Kennedy Center, Miller Theater, Symphony Space,The Times Center, Merkin Hall, Wigmore Hall, The Berlin Philharmonic, The Théâtredu Châtelet and The Tangelwood, Ojai and Ravinia Festivals.
Her setting of in Just- spring, toured from 1997-2005 by Dawn Upshaw, is on Ms. Upshaw’s DVD, Voices of Our Time (TDK Naxos), her C’e la luna questa sera?” performed by the Lincoln Trio was just been released on Cedille’s Notable Women, and her work SHADINGS, commissioned by the AmericaComposers Orchestra for their UnSafe series and premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2011, received a glowing review in the New York Times. Schwendinger’s honors include those from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Fromm and Koussevitzky Foundations, Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the American Academy of Arts and Letter-including a Goddard Lieberson fellowship, given to “mid career composers of exceptional gifts and a Charles Ives Fellowship, The Copland House, The Harvard Musical Association and first prize of the ALEA III Competition, and residencies at the MacDowell and Yaddo Colonies, Bellagio and Liguria Conference Centers in Italy, Tyrone Guthrie center in Ireland, Virginia Center, and Land Salzburg-Austria. Recent performances and commissions include those from Boston Musica Viva, Miller Theater, the Aspen Ensemble, the Cygnus Ensemble, Voices of Change and the SanFrancisco Conservatory’s Blueprint Series. Upcoming commissions and performances include works for Matt Haimovitz’s Ucello Ensemble, the LincolnTrio, and a consortium of violinists including, Miranda Cuckson, DesireeRuhstrat, Curtis Macomber and Eleanor Bartsch. An entire evening of her works were featured on the Music Institute of Chicago’s Four Score Festival recently (with Augusta Read Thomas and Stacy Garrop), two CDs of her works are soon to be released on Centaur and Albany. Her entire works for solo piano have justbeen recorded by Christopher Taylor, and her Seven Choral Settings will beperformed at Zankel Hall in May by the Trinity Choir of NY.
