Return to the MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music

The 29th Annual New Music Festival takes place October 23 –25, 2008. This year’s festival will feature John Harbison as special guest composer and will include performances by the innovative ensemble Flexible Music, the Eastman Triana, pianist Stephen Drury, percussionist Stuart Gerber and BGSU ensembles, faculty and students. Organized by the MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music and the College of Musical Arts, the festival has hosted John Adams, Samuel Adler, Milton Babbitt, William Bolcom, Anthony Braxton, John Cage, Chen Yi, John Corigliano, George Crumb, Mario Davidovsky, Anthony Davis, Philip Glass, Lou Harrison, Karel Husa, Joan La Barbara, Paul Lansky, Pauline Oliveros, Shulamit Ran, Bernard Rands, Terry Riley, Christopher Rouse, Frederic Rzewski, Gunther Schuller, Joseph Schwantner, Bright Sheng, Morton Subotnick, Joan Tower, Vladimir Ussachevsky and more than 300 other guest composers and musicians since 1980.

Guest Composer John Harbison is one of America's most distinguished artistic figures. Among his principal works are four string quartets, five symphonies, the cantata The Flight Into Egypt, which earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1987, and three operas, including The Great Gatsby, commissioned by The Metropolitan Opera and premiered to great acclaim in December 1999. Harbison's music is distinguished by its exceptional resourcefulness and expressive range. He has written for every conceivable type of concert performance, ranging from the grandest to the most intimate, pieces that embrace jazz along with the pre-classical forms. He is considered to be "original, varied, and absorbing - relatively easy for audiences to grasp and yet formal and complex enough to hold our interest through repeated hearings - his style boasts both lucidity and logic" (Fanfare). Harbison is also a gifted commentator on the art and craft of composition and was recognized in his student years as an outstanding poet (he wrote his own libretto for Gatsby). Today, he continues to convey, through the spoken word, the multiple meanings of contemporary composition.

Guest ensemble Flexible Music will perform on Friday, October 24 in Kobacker Hall. Because of its unique instrumentation - guitar, saxophone, piano, and percussion - Flexible Music is carving out its own repertoire, working with composers to commission and premiere new works. Their music blends the coordination and complexity of contemporary classical music with the rhythmic vitality of jazz and rock.

The Eastman Triana, an energetic new ensemble of violin, clarinet and piano, will open the festival with a special work combining live instruments and abstract animation by visual artist Jean Detheux with music by Michaela Eremiasova. They will also perform the world premiere of a composition by Jairo Duarte-Lopez.

A champion of twentieth-century music, pianist Stephen Drury's performances of music ranging from the piano sonatas of Charles Ives to works by John Cage and the music of John Zorn have received the highest critical acclaim. Named 1989 Musician of the Year by the Boston Globe, he has concertized throughout the United States and the world. He made a very successful New York debut at Carnegie Recital Hall in 1984 as the winner of the Concert Artists Guild International Competition and has since given solo performances at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, New York's Symphony Space and many other widely varied venues. Drury will appear on the afternoon of Saturday, October 25 in a concert celebrating the life and music of Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Percussionist Stuart Gerber is a passionate advocate for new music, with a particular interest in the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen. This past summer he gave the world premiere of Stockhausen's latest solo percussion work Himmels-Tür in Italy. In the summer of 2005 he gave the world-premiere of Mittwoch-Formel at the annual Stockhausen-Courses in Kürten, Germany. He has also given the U.S. and Australian premieres of Stockhausen's duo version of Nasenflügeltanz for percussion and synthesizer, and the U.S. premiere of his solo percussion work Komet. Since 2005 Gerber has been the faculty percussionist for the Stockhausen-Courses, and recorded two works for the Stockhausen Complete Edition CD 79. This fall he will record two more works for upcoming Stockhausen-Verlag releases. In addition to his work with Stockhausen, Gerber has worked with other notable composers including John Luther Adams, Michael Colgrass,
George Crumb, Tania Lèon, Tristan Murail, Steve Reich, Frederic Rzewski, Kaija Saariaho and Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon.

- A full schedule of events can be found below-