2024 Featured Composers
Courtney Bryan
Courtney Bryan, a native of New Orleans, Louisiana, is “a pianist and composer of panoramic interests” (New York Times). She is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow, and currently serves as composer-in-residence with Opera Philadelphia. Recent accolades include the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (2018), Samuel Barber Rome Prize in Music Composition (2019–2020), United States Artists Fellowship (2020), and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship (2020–2021). She is the Albert and Linda Mintz Professor of Music at Newcomb College in the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University. Bryan holds a doctorate in composition from Columbia University, where she studied with George Lewis. She also holds degrees from Oberlin Conservatory (BM) and Rutgers University (MM). Bryan completed postdoctoral studies in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. She is currently the Albert and Linda Mintz Professor of Music at Newcomb College in the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University. Recent accolades include the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (2018), Samuel Barber Rome Prize in Music Composition (2019–2020), United States Artists Fellowship (2020), and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation Sheree Clement
With intricate shimmering colors over fragments of tunes, composer SHEREE CLEMENT builds surprising narratives. She upends the listener’s expectations with politically charged texts, found sounds and unusual structures, all to wake us up to the upheaval, conflicting truths, and possibilities of now. Her works have been performed in New York at Merkin Hall and Miller Theatre, at the Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and at the Temple du Luxembourg, Paris, France. The New York Times has described her work as ‘intriguing’… ‘fascinating in its explorations of instrumental color’ [with] ‘arresting moments of calm’. Winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Sheree has had her works performed by Speculum Musicae, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and the Canyonlands Ensemble in Salt Lake City. Among her honors are grants from NYSCA and a Goddard Leiberson Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Ryan Harrison
Dr. Ryan Harrison, a New Orleans native, is a graduate of Duke University’s music composition program. His artistic output, be it musical or through other mediums, seeks to communicate and evoke sentiments and emotions universal to the human condition: e.g., loss, triumph, dread, hope. Through the years, he has been fortunate to study under composers and educators such as Jerry Sieg, Barbara Jazwinski, Edward Dulaney, Rick Snow, Scott Lindroth, John Supko, and Stephen Jaffe. He has collaborated with a variety of ensembles and performers, including JACK Quartet, Mivos Quartet, Lunar Ensemble, Imani Winds, the New Orleans Chamber Orchestra, Horszowski Trio, and members of the Louisiana Philharmonic. He holds degrees in music composition from the University of New Orleans (Bachelor of Arts), Tulane University (Master of Fine Arts), Duke University (Master of Arts and Ph.D.). Dennis H Miller
Dennis H. Miller received his Doctorate in Music Composition from Columbia University and recently retired from the Music faculty of Northeastern University in Boston after 38 years of service. His mixed media works, which illustrate principles drawn from music composition applied to the visual domain, have been presented at numerous venues throughout the world, most recently the London Experimental Film Festival, the Hong Kong Arthouse Film Festival, the Punta y Raya Festival (Karlsruhe, Germany), the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, the Festival 2 Visages Des Musique Électroacoustiques (Brussels), the Free Spirit Film Festival (Himachal Pradesh, India) and the Largo Film Awards screening (Lahksa, Tibet). Exhibits of his 3D still images have been held at the Boston Computer Museum and the Biannual Conference on Art and Technology and are published in Sonic Graphics: Seeing Sound (Rizzoli Books) and Art of the Digital Age (Thames and Hudson). Christopher Trapani
Christopher Trapani weaves American and European stylistic strands into a personal aesthetic that defies easy classification. Snippets of Delta Blues, Appalachian folk, dance band foxtrots, shoegaze guitar effects, and Turkish makam can be heard alongside spectral swells and meandering canons. As in Christopher’s hometown of New Orleans, diverse traditions coexist and intermingle, swirled into a rich melting pot — an effect described by Paul Griffiths as “a music of routes without roots, or one where the roots lift into the air, and we do not know whether what lies below them is New Orleans or Istanbul.” Christopher earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, then spent most of his twenties overseas: a year in London, working on a Master’s degree at the Royal College of Music with Julian Anderson; a year in Istanbul, studying microtonality in Ottoman music on a Fulbright grant; and seven years in Paris, where he studied with Philippe Leroux and worked at IRCAM. Christopher earned a doctorate in 2017 from Columbia University in New York City, where he studied with Tristan Murail, George Lewis, Georg Friedrich Haas, and Fred Lerdahl. He is currently Assistant Professor of Electronic Music and Digital Media at Louisiana State University. Christopher Trapani maintains an active career in the United States, the UK, and in Continental Europe. Recent commissions have come from Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Modern, JACK Quartet, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and Radio France, and his works have been heard at Carnegie Hall, Southbank Centre, Wiener Konzerthaus, Festival Présences, Ruhrtriennale, Ravenna Festival, Ultraschall Festival, IRCAM, and Wigmore Hall. Christopher is a Guggenheim Fellow (2019) and a winner of the Rome Prize (2016). He has held fellowships at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Camargo Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation. Christopher is the winner of the 2007 Gaudeamus Prize, the2020 Barlow Prize, and has been awarded commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Fromm Foundation, the Ernst von Siemens Foundation, and Chamber Music America.Waterlines, his debut portrait CD, featuring performances by Talea Ensemble, JACK Quartet, and others, was released on New Focus Recordings in 2018. A second recording of Waterlines by the Brussels ensemble ICTUS was released in 2020. Christopher splits his time between New Orleans and his European base in Palermo, Sicily. Andrew Waggoner
Andrew Waggoner was born in 1960 in New Orleans. He grew up there and in Minneapolis and Atlanta, and studied at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, the Eastman School of Music and Cornell University. Called “the gifted practitioner of a complex but dramatic and vividly colored style” by the New Yorker, his music has been commissioned and performed by ensembles across the U.S. and Europe, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Academy of St. Martins in the Fields, Ensemble Accroche Note, and the Lark, JACK and Lydian Quartets. He is the recipient t of awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Fromm Foundation. He is Co-Artistic Director, with his wife, cellist Caroline Stinson, of the Weekend of Chamber Music, and teaches composition and improvisation at Duke University. His music is available through Subito Music, and at andrewwaggoner.com. Morris Rosenzweig
Morris Rosenzweig was born October 1, 1952 in New Orleans, where he grew up among the tailors, merchants, and strong-willed women of an extended family which has lived in southern Louisiana since the mid 1890s. His catalog of over 85 entries features works for orchestra, various chamber ensembles, compositions for live instruments and electronics, two song cycles, two piano cycles, solo pieces, and one opera, Box and Cox. These works have been widely presented throughout the United States and Europe as well as in Japan, Argentina, Mexico and Israel. Mr. Rosenzweig’s recordings include 6 CDs on Albany Records (Troy 907, Troy 710), Centaur (2103), New World/CRI (705), and New World/CRI (787). His honors include those from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Koussevitzky, Argosy, and Fromm Foundations, Chamber Music America have commissioned several of his works, and he has received support from the Alice M. Ditson Fund. Having previously taught at New York University and Queens College, he is now Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of Utah. |