FREE Courtroom Concert featuring the Music of Edie Hill

[two_thirds] 

Thursday, April 26, 2018, 12pm

Featuring the Music of Edie Hill

Program:

About the Artists:

From solo to orchestra, epigram to epic, Edie Hill’s music unfolds seamlessly in all spaces and idioms. A widely acclaimed composer, Hill’s music has been performed around the world in such diverse venues as Lincoln Center, the LA County Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, Minneapolis’ Walker Arts Center, St. Paul’s The Schubert Club, The Cape May Festival (NJ), The Downtown Arts Festival (NYC), Liviu Cultural Center (Romania), Feszek Müvészklub (Budapest), as well as venues in Bangkok (Thailand), Dublin (Ireland), Iceland, Great Britain, Germany, The Netherlands, the Minnesota State Fair, classrooms and cafes, and basilicas and back yards.

Photo credit: Anne MarsdenHill’s career as a professional composer of instrumental music began with a commission from flutist Susan Rotholz and cellist Eliot T. Bailen of the budding Sherman Chamber Ensemble (1985). It was the group’s first concert and Hill’s first commission. Land Meeting Sky for flute and cello has since been performed throughout the U.S. and was most recently performed by the Taos Chamber Music Group in Taos, New Mexico – the state and landscape that inspired the piece. After “cutting her chamber music teeth” with the Sherman Chamber Ensemble, and gaining her “orchestral chops” with High Plains Revelry – a fanfare commissioned for the Amarillo Symphony Orchestra – her instrumental music has been commissioned/performed by groups including New Jersey’s Cape May Festival Orchestra, the Intergalactic Contemporary Ensemble, members of the The Charleston Symphony and the Lexington (KY) Philharmonic, the Mixed Flock Orchestra Project, the Minneapolis Guitar Quartet, the Tantalus Guitar Quartet, the Taos New Music Group, and Zeitgeist. Commissioning soloists include flutists Linda Chatterton, Susan Rotholz, keyboardists Susan Billmeyer, Dean Billmeyer, and Stephen Self; guitarists Kenneth Meyer and Joseph Hagedorn; cellists Eliot T. Bailen and Thomas Rutishauser; clarinetist Andrew Lamy; and percussionist Heather Barringer.

Her choral career took off in 1996 when she won the Dale Warland Singers Choral Ventures Program commission with Poem for 2084 (text by Joan Wolf Prefontaine). Since then, her choral music has been widely performed by renowned ensembles such as Cantus, the Rose Ensemble, VocalEssence, The Singers: Minnesota Choral Artists, Valborg Ensemble (The Netherlands), and Harmonium Choral Society, The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Nederlands Kamerkooras well as by many collegiate choirs throughout North America. Her imaginative text choices – which include excerpts from Ailm Travler’s Run-Off (Splash! Leap!), and excerpts from Newton’s Opticks with words of Monet (An Illuminated Transience) – and her “masterful facility for setting words and exploiting the richness of texts keeps her in demand as a choral composer.”

In 2006, Hill’s love of chamber music and vocal music came together with the commissioning of A Sound Like This which can be heard on the Cantus album While You Are Alive. Working from a broad color palate to create atmosphere, motion, and drive within the confines of strong structure, she creates a signature “sustained intensity” and sense of urgency. Hill beckons, dares – almost demands – that the audience “listen!” Her most recent recording project is her CD, Clay Jug. Hill worked with PARMA Recordings and The Crossing directed by Donals Nally to create and album of her choral work spanning 15 years time. The album will be released on February 10, 2017.

It is vital for Hill that she actively cultivate the talents of young composers and musicians as well as educate and engage the public in the music of today. She has been a guest lecturer at such institutions as Syracuse Univeristy, Tufts University, Normandale Community College, Rock Valley Community College, the American Composers Forum, the Iowa Composers Forum Nuts N’ Bolts Festival, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Delft University of Technology and Conservatory at Arnhem (The Netherlands.

A three-time McKnight Artist Fellow and a two-time Bush Artist Fellow, Hill has received grants and awards from the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, Meet The Composer, ASCAP, and Chamber Music America. Commissions come from such diverse sources as elite professionals to community and amateur groups. One of Hill’s strengths as a composer is the ability to write well for musicians of all skill levels. Whether she is composing a virtuosic piece to show off a soloist’s expertise or a work that leads a choir of untrained voices through a gratifying and meaningful musical experience, for Hill the music comes from the same place. Writing music is always an opportunity for her to research, learn, muse, reach down deep, and allow inspiration to come from the stuff of life.

Distinguished by the Star Tribune as a local star, Hill’s music has been broadcast internationally. She has been the subject of Matt Peiken’s 3 Minute Egg and Richard Zarou’s No Extra Notes. She has been profiled on WNYC in New York, Minnesota Public Radio, KCSC’s “The Composer Next Door,” “Alive and Well” with Anthony Cheung in Boston, and featured on Michigan Public Radio with host Foley Schuller and on NPR’s All Things Considered with the Harmonium Choral Society.

Hill earned a B.A. in music composition and piano performance at Bennington College where she studied with Vivian Fine, and then went on to earn her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Minnesota with principle composition teacher Lloyd Ultan. She has also studied extensively with Libby Larsen.

Her home, studio, and publishing business – Hummingbird Press – are based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Hill is proud to be a member of Independent Music Publishers Cooperative.

Praised for her “imaginative …profound and mystical” playing as well as her enthusiastic teaching, pianist Ann DuHamel serves as Head of Keyboard Studies at the University of Minnesota, Morris, where she coordinates and teaches solo, collaborative, and group piano, as well as piano pedagogy.  She recently earned a DMA in Piano Performance and Pedagogy from the University of Iowa under the tutelage of Ksenia Nosikova. Prior to her time at UI, she was Assistant Director to Paul Wirth at the Central MN Music School.

In 2013 Ann received the MTNA-PTG Performance Study scholarship to work with Lowell Liebermann on his solo piano nocturnes. In collaboration with saxophonist Preston Duncan as the duo Kairos, she commissioned and premiered a new work at the 12th Annual International Saxophone Conference in Mexico City, where her playing and teaching was described as “…a delight for the ears and the soul.” A founding member of new music group ensemble: Périphérie, she returned to Carnegie Weill Recital Hall in New York City with the ensemble under the auspices of DCINY (Distinguished Concerts International New York) in the fall of 2013; reviews from this performance include “… they are all superb musicians as individuals and have a musical rapport as an ensemble…” and “… the exceptional performance from EP.” Past performances include venues in Argentina, Bulgaria, Canada, Italy, Mexico, and across the U.S., including the San Francisco Festival of Contemporary Music; upcoming performances include venues in Minneapolis, Seattle, and Sweden.

J. David Moore (b. 1962) has been in love with a cappella singing and the romance of word and melody ever since high school. Since then, he has written over two hundred arrangements of vocal jazz, spirituals, barbershop quartet, Celtic mouth music, Civil Rights marching songs, early American hymn tunes, sixteenth-century madrigals, and folk music in Ukrainian, Gaelic, Austrian, Brazilian Portuguese, French, and Latin. His own compositions are shaped by his voracious appetite for music of every era and style. He has written art song, oratorios, music for percussion ensemble, string quartet, wind ensemble, baroque orchestra, and tuned wine glasses. He has written music for worship, dance, and the stage, including the outdoor spectacle Solstice River, performed on the Stone Arch Bridge in Minneapolis every summer since 1997.

David is the founder and music director of the First Readings Project, a chamber choir that acts as a resource for composers in the development of new work.

He has won numerous grants, awards, and residencies from many organizations such as ASCAP, the Jerome Foundation, the American Composers Forum, and was the recipient of the 2001 McKnight Fellowship for Performing Musicians, along with his a cappella group Dare To Breathe. He has twice been awarded the Forum’s Faith Partners residency, during which time he collaborated with consortia of congregations in the creation of twelve new liturgical works. He has been commissioned by many varied organizations such as The Alchemy Project The Arizona Master Chorale, The Choral Arts Ensemble of Rochester, The Minnesota Opera (for whom he wrote a 20-minute opera about alien invasion with a group of fourth-graders), MUSE Women’s Choir, The Sapphire Chamber Consort, Shawn Womack Dance Projects, The South Bend Chamber Singers, The Venere Lute Quartet, and the Cheng-Gong High School Choir in Taiwan.

David lives in Minneapolis under the name David Ostenso Moore. He loves fresh bread, a good cup of tea with his beautiful wife Anna, the work of Andy Goldsworthy and U-Ram Choe, the books of Edward Gorey, and walking in the woods with his beautiful wife Anna.

Hailed for her artistry and “rich and radiant” voice (Urban Dial Milwaukee), Clara Osowski is an active soloist and chamber musician throughout the United States and Europe. Select opera credits include Ruth, (Pirates of Penzance), Venus (Venus and Adonis), Zita (Gianni Schicchi), Mother (Amahl and the Night Visitors), Dorabella (Cosi fan tutte), and Cavalier Ramiro (La finta giardiniera). She was a 2012 Metropolitan Opera National Council Upper-Midwest Regional Finalist, the winner of the 2014 Bel Canto Chorus Regional Artists Competition in Milwaukee, and recently named the runner-up in the 2016 Schubert Club Bruce P. Carlson Scholarship Competition. Clara received her Bachelor of Musical Arts degree with emphasis in Voice from North Dakota State University in 2008, and Master of Arts Degree in Voice from the University of Iowa in 2010.

Clara’s passion for contemporary music is exhibited in the song-cycles she has premiered by numerous composers with the Center for New Music at the University of Iowa, and her most recent collaborations with Linda Tutas Huagen (Gjendine’s Lullaby), Paul Rudoi (Midnight Songs) and James Kallembach (St. John Passion and Songs on Letters of John and Abigail Adams). As a recitalist, she recently completed the Vancouver International Song Institute, the International Workshop on the songs of Edvard Grieg in Bergen, Norway, and traveled to Tours, France to attend the Académie Francis Poulenc. She was also featured in the 2014 Baldwin-Wallace Art Song Festival, in Berea, Ohio and competed in the 2014 International Vocal Competition in s’Hertogenbosch, Netherlands. In 2015, she was the only American to reach the finals of the Das Lied competition under the direction of Thomas Quasthoff in Berlin, Germany. This past October Clara was a finalist in the Liederkranz Foundation in New York City.

Recent performances include a world premiere of James Kallembach’s Songs on Letters of John and Abigail Adams with the Lydian Quartet on the occasion of the Adams’ 250th wedding anniversary at their historic home in Quincy, Massachusetts, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion with the Bel Canto Chorus of Milwaukee, and a lieder recital for the Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concert series in Chicago. Highlights in the 2016-2017 season include several art song premieres, Dominick Argento’s A few words about Chekhov with the chamber orchestra of the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, and alto soloist in Bach’s St. John Passion.

In collaboration with pianist Mark Bilyeu and composer Libby Larsen, Clara serves as the Associate Artistic Director of Source Song Festival, a week-long art song festival in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This festival strives to create and perform new art song, and cultivate an educational environment for students of song, including composers, vocalists, and collaborative pianists. The festival will be in its third season August 8th-13th, 2016. In addition to her solo work and private teaching, she participates in a number of ensembles, including Consortium Carissimi, Lumina Women’s Ensemble, Rose Ensemble and Seraphic Fire. For more information, please visit www.claraosowski.com and www.sourcesongfestival.org.

[/two_thirds]

[one_third_last]

[icon color=”Accent-Color” size=”small” image=”icon-info-sign”] Concert Info

October through April
Thursdays from 12pm – 1pm
Courtroom 317, Landmark Center

FREE ADMISSION

Hosted by Abbie Betinis.

View the Frequently Asked Questions about the Courtroom Concerts.

Seating is limited and first come first served. Doors open at 11:30. Please call if you are attending as a group of 10 or more (651.292.3267).

Schedule & Programs Subject to Change

About the Host:
Composer Abbie Betinis writes music called “inventive, richly melodic” (The New York Times), “superb, whirling, soaring” (Tacoma News Tribune), and “the highlight” of the program (Boston Globe).  With over 50 commissioned works for ensembles such as Cantus, the New England Philharmonic, and The Rose Ensemble, Abbie has been awarded a McKnight Composer Fellowship, grants from the American Composers Forum, ASCAP, and Jerome Foundation, and was recently listed in NPR Music’s Top 100 Composers Under 40.  A resident of Saint Paul, she is adjunct professor of composition at Concordia University, and was composer-in-residence with the Schubert Club from 2005-2017.

[/one_third_last]