Composer's Studio

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Stephen Downing is a North Carolina based composer currently earning his PhD in music composition at Duke University. Stephen's music travels from the traditional to the absurd. Though Stephen draws from more traditional compositional sounds, he utilizes the material in modern and decidedly untraditional ways - inviting the listener to travel through a sonic world that is both familiar and delightfully surprising. 

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In this episode of Composer's Studio, composer and Duke professor Anthony Kelley takes us on a tour through his musical family tree. From Ghanaian dance music to Bach, Scott Joplin to Aaron Copland, Kelley’s music is defined by a constant push and pull, a blending and a breaking apart. His piano concerto, Africamerica, begins on a slave ship and takes us on a journey punctuated by moments of jarring contrasts–the violence of a whip and dancing rhythms of Ghanaian percussion along with the elegant structure of European orchestral music, all rolling together on a tempestuous sea of virtuosic jazz-classical improvisation. Out of this terrible chaos comes a new musical language, a new culture scarred by its past,  but beautiful in moments of harmony and consonance. Ultimately, Anthony’s music is about seeking  peaceful repose, where the noise recedes and everything suddenly becomes clear and simple, leaving us pensive but hopeful about the world we are building together.

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Mark Engebretson, composer and professor out of Greensboro, NC, writes music that is driven by  a desire for fresh, engaging forms and modes of musical expression in which performers are asked to face and overcome novel technical and musical challenges. Listen as Mark explains and performs his piece The Outside,  live in the WHUP studio. Based on a poem by Greensboro, NC poet Brian Lampkin, the computer listens, responds, suggests, interrupts, and challenges the saxophone and poet much like a regular collaborator might, revealing the opportunities and questioning the implications of our increasingly close relationship with computer technology, especially artificial intelligence. We discuss what Mark means when he says he is a recovering modernist in a piece based on Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. Finally, we close out the show with Luminous, a work inspired by the light filled art installations of artists like Olafur Eliasson, that uses the audience’s smartphones as sound sources, revealing new possibilities for the relationship between the composer, performers, and the audience. We barely scratched the surface on this one! Mark left us all wishing we had a two hour show.

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Composer Kenneth Frazelle has had work commissioned and performed by such prominent artists as Yo-Yo Ma, Jeffrey Kahane, Dawn Upshaw, jazz vocalist Cassandra Wilson, and now the Triangle’s own Andrea Edith Moore. On CS this week, we are treated to a sneak preview of Ken Frazelle’s new song cycle, Through the Window, drawing inspiration from his mother’s life and the music of his native North Carolina. The work, performed by Andrea Edith Moore with the Mallarme Players will premiere online June 20th. This is a rare treat!

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Take a step into nature, into the love of a wife and mother, and the strength of a young woman. Be inpsired by the tenacity of young trees. Award winning composer Jenni Brandon’s optimistic music explores the small things–often the things that really matter. Jenni’s music appears on over 20 albums, and has been awarded the Sorel Medallion, American Prize, Paderewski Cycle, Women Composers Festival of Hartford International Composition Competition, and Bassoon Chamber Music Composition Competition among others.

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On the Composer’s Studio this week, Tarik and Amy take a deep dive into composer Jesse Ayers’ opera Beneath Suspicion, based on historical accounts of the friendship between two abolitionist women in Virginia during the civil war–one an emancipated slave, the other a white former slave owner. Their powerful story encourages us to have faith in the face of adversity, choose right in the face of opposition, and to lean into one’s destiny even when that destiny involves great risk. Closing with Jericho, an epic tour de force of percussion and brass, we are left triumphant and optimistic about the future we are planning to build together.

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In this powerful episode, Tarik and Amy discuss music and American history with Brent Michael Davids, composer and co-director of the Lenape Center in Manhattan. An American Indian citizen of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of the Mohican Nation, his heritage is a major influence on his work. Brent experiments with traditional Native American singing and instruments, always pushing boundaries. In his music, we hear an Apache violin played with bows strung with unsual materials like silk and leather, and a flute made of quartz crystal, which was fabricated at a scientific glass blowing workshop.  To cap it all off, we are treated to a moving preview of his work in progress, Requiem for America, featuring traditional and Native American choirs.

Brent Michael Davids has received awards and commissions from ASCAP, National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Smithsonian Institution, Emmy Awards, US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission, Joffrey Ballet, Park City Film Music Festival, Kronos Quartet, National Museum of the American Indian, School for Advanced Research, Chanticleer, Meet-The-Composer, Miró Quartet, National Symphony Orchestra, Bush Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Jerome Foundation, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from prestigious Indian Summer Festival.

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Marianna Filippi, a bright young composer from Maine, is at her core, a storyteller. Composing for theater and film as well as chamber groups and solo artists, Marianna’s music is proving popular with performers and audiences alike. Beginning with improvisation to form her initial melodic and harmonic material, she lets her work evolve organically, like a good piece of prose. Rich with celtic and japanese folk influences, and inspired by stories and abstract images, Marianna’s tone painting draws you in to a poetic world full of oracles, falling feathers, heroic trials, jeweled beetles with shimmering wings, and planets coming into alignment. We feel like the planets must have been in lucky alignment to bring Marianna Filippi to the Composer’s Studio.

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Award winning virtuoso pianist and composer Lucia Caruso’s musical journey has taken her across four continents, and through over a dozen countries with performances in such renowned landmarks as the Versailles Palace, the Louvre Museum, and Jardin des Tuileries in Paris, France. She has graced the stages of Lincoln Center, Weill Recital Hall in Carnegie Hall,  and the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. Her most recent project is a feature documentary, “Forte”, a film about three groundbreaking women in the arts. As part of the documentary,  Lucía is followed during the process of writing music for the film. We at the Composer’s Studio, can’t wait to see it.