The Composer of the Year residency was established in 2001 in an effort to bring audiences and living composers closer together. This one-of-a-kind program places the composer in residence in the community, engaging them with young student composers. The 2011-2012 Composer of the Year is Pulitzer Prize-winner Steven Stucky. The PSO will perform these works by Stucky during the 2011-2012 BNY Mellon Grand Classics Season:
For more information about Mr. Stucky's music, writings, recordings and reviews, please visit http://www.stevenstucky.com/
Steven Stucky discusses his composition career
BIOGRAPHY
Composer Steven Stucky, whose Second Concerto for Orchestra won a Pulitzer Prize, has the unusual honor of two major premieres on the same day this season: September 18 saw the world premiere of his evening-length concert drama, August 4, 1964, by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, who commissioned it; and the US premiere in New York City of Rhapsodies, by the New York Philharmonic, which performed its world premiere three weeks earlier at London’s BBC Proms during a European tour. Stucky and his collaborator, librettist Gene Scheer, based August 4, 1964 on events of that date: the discovery in Mississippi of the bodies of three recently murdered young civil rights workers and a spurious “attack” on two American warships in the Gulf of Tonkin.
The composer, newly-appointed Chairman of the Board of the American Music Center, is the recipient of numerous commissions from orchestras, performing groups, individuals, and foundations both at home and abroad. The New York Times called the Second Concerto for Orchestra, commissioned and premiered in 2004 by the Los Angeles Philharmonic,
“an electrifying piece: three movements that explore an orchestra's potential in much the way Bartok's and Lutoslawski's concertos for orchestra do, but in ways that sound fresh and exciting. It alludes to works by other composers without losing its own focus, … stands apart from academic disputes about style and language, and strives for direct communication."
Stucky’s extensive catalogue of compositions ranges from large-scale orchestral works to a cappella miniatures for chorus, an eight-minute work for five percussionists, solo piano pieces, and music for such ensembles as piano quartet, string quartet, wind quintet, voice and piano, and saxophone and piano. He is also active as a conductor, writer, lecturer, and teacher, and for 20 years has been half of the longest relationship between a composer and an American orchestra: in 1988, André Previn appointed him Composer in Residence of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and today Stucky is the LAP’s Consulting Composer for New Music, working closely with Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen on contemporary programming, the awarding of commissions, educational projects for school children, and programming for nontraditional audiences.
The composer is host of the New York Philharmonic’s acclaimed “Hear & Now” pre-concert programs, introducing important works and premieres to Philharmonic audiences. This season includes Peter Lieberson’s orchestral song cycle, The World in Flower before the world premiere sung by Joyce DiDonato and conducted by the Philharmonic’s next music director, Alan Gilbert. Stucky also presents “Upbeat Live”, part of the LAP’s Green Umbrella concert series.
Stucky participates this season in residencies at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotà, Colombia; the Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing; National University of the Arts, Taipei; and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Manhattan School of Music Symphony Orchestra gives the world premiere of his orchestration of
Songs from Hugo Wolf's Spanisches Liederbuch.
Last season, Stucky hosted previews of the New York Philharmonic’s celebration of Luciano Berio, which featured performances of Sinfonia and the complete Sequenza series. He also introduced Marc Neikrug’s Symphony No. 2 (“Quintessence”) with the composer and conductor Alan Gilbert; and Tan Dun’s new piano concerto with the composer before Lang Lang’s premiere performances.
Two seasons ago, compositions by Steven Stucky were performed by such artists as Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Alan Gilbert and the San Francisco Symphony, Ludovic Morlot and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and Marin Alsop and the St. Louis Symphony.
Other highlights of recent seasons were world premieres of Stucky’s Spirit Voices, his percussion concerto for Evelyn Glennie, in Singapore; Jeu de timbres in Washington; and the Second Concerto for Orchestra in Los Angeles. Premiere’s three seasons ago included Emanuel Ax’s performance of the Sonate en forme de préludes at Carnegie's Zankel Hall with members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and Stucky’s own premiere of To Whom I Said Farewell – a song cycle with chamber orchestra – in Los Angeles.
Stucky’s compositions have been performed in recent years by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Dallas Symphony, Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony, New World Symphony, New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and others.
As an active teacher and mentor to young composers, Steven Stucky has sat on the Warsaw jury of the Witold Lutoslawski Competition for Composers. He is a world-renowned expert on the late composer's music and the recipient of the Lutoslawski Society’s medal. He has participated in residencies at the American Academy in Rome, Princeton University’s Composition Colloquium, James Madison University, and Grinnell College.
Stucky frequently conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group and Ensemble X, a contemporary music group he founded in 1997. With the former, he led the US premiere of his recorder concerto, Etudes, with Michala Petri, and conducted world and regional premieres by many of his contemporaries, among them Donald Crockett, Jacob Druckman, William Kraft, Witold Lutoslawski, Christopher Rouse, Joseph Phibbs, and Judith Weir.
Steven Stucky was Composer in Residence of the Aspen Music Festival and School in 2001 and director of the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble in 2005. There his interest in composers’ arrangements of each other’s works led him to direct a rare performance of Schoenberg’s arrangement of Mahler's Songs of a Wayfarer, originally written for Vienna’s fabled Society for Private Musical Performances. Stucky is Chairman of the Board of the American Music Center, and was the first annual Barr Institute Composer Laureate at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. Among his other honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Bogliasco Fellowship, the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the ASCAP Victor Herbert Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His first Concerto for Orchestra was one of two finalists for the 1989 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Stucky has taught at Cornell University since 1980, chaired the Music Department from 1992 to 1997, and now serves as Given Foundation Professor of Composition. He has been Visiting Professor of Composition at the Eastman School of Music and Ernest Bloch Professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Stucky, born November 7, 1949, in Hutchinson, Kansas, was raised in Kansas and Texas. He studied at Baylor and Cornell Universities with Richard Willis, Robert Palmer, Karel Husa, and Burrill Phillips.
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