Faculty Artist Series: Faculty Composers' Forum

Christopher Dietz composes music inspired by a wide variety of sources, both real and conceptual. Poetry, sound as sculpture and color, how toddlers play, deep time and the cosmos, rhythm as geometry, religion and politics, animal behavior, and the music of others are a few of the subjects that have informed his musical imagination. Christopher holds degrees from the University of Michigan, the Manhattan School of Music, and the University of Wisconsin.

www.christopher-dietz.com

John Eagle is a composer and musician active in a variety of performance, installation, and interdisciplinary contexts. His work often operates within ecological frameworks involving extended instrumental systems. These works explore performance practices such as tuning, microtonal just intonation, physical movement, and other techniques within social and environmental systems.

Eagle has performed and presented work throughout the US and internationally including the LA Phil’s Noon to Midnight festival, the CalArts Experiments in Electronic Sound Festival, EMPAC’s Reembodied Sound 2024, the Sound/Image Festival in London, Int-Act Festival in Bangkok, Heidi Duckler Dance’s Ebb & Flow festival, UC Irvine’s The Art of Performance, Hear Now Music Festival, Thailand New Music and Arts Symposium, Göteborg Art Sounds, Co-Incidence Festival, Live Arts Exchange, and the Dog Star Orchestra festival.

Eagle has worked with conceptual artist Charles Gaines as music director and/or arranger on many of his Manifestos series pieces. He has conducted performances in Times Square, MoMA, LA’s REDCAT Theater, the Art Institute of Chicago, and will conduct the west coast premier of Manifestos 6 at CAP UCLA’s Nimoy Theater in March. He has directed recordings of Gaines’s Manifestos 3, 4, 6, and 7 with producer Mads Falcone.

Other collaborative work includes Sound House, a performance installation developed with Janie Geiser and Cassia Streb. It features a sixteen-channel wireless sound instrument he designed (first versions with Eric Heep). He was a lead artist on two collaborative sound films (Sound House and transient flows) presented by Music for Your Inbox in 2022/23. A recording of his 2023 concert-length solo work for pianist Jack Yarbrough, erosion and growth, is available on Sawyer Editions.

Eagle holds degrees from Bennington College (BA), California Institute of the Arts (MFA), and Cornell University (DMA). From 2024-25, he taught at Cornell University as Teaching Associate and Studio Manager of the Cornell Electroacoustic Music Center. In Fall 2025, he joined Bowling Green State University’s College of Musical Arts as an Assistant Teaching Professor where he teaches composition and music technology. Also active as a French hornist, he performs his own music and other works of experimental music.

The music of composer Marilyn Shrude is characterized by its warmth and lyricism, rich timbre, multi-layered constructions, and complex blend of tonality and atonality. The result is a bright, shimmering and delicately wrought sound world that is at once both powerful and fragile (Natvig – New Grove). Her concentration on color and the natural resonance of spaces, as well as her strong background in Pre-Vatican II liturgical music, gives the music its linear, spiritual, and quasi-improvisational qualities.

Shrude earned degrees from Alverno College and Northwestern University, and has served on the faculty of Bowling Green State University since 1977. Among her more prestigious honors are those from the Guggenheim Foundation, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Rockefeller Foundation, Chamber Music America/ASCAP, Meet the Composer, Sorel Foundation (Medallion Winner for Choral Music 2011), and the National Endowment for the Arts. She was the first woman to receive the Kennedy Center Friedheim Award for Orchestral Music and the Cleveland Arts Prize for Music. She was named a Distinguished Artist Professor in 2001 and received BGSU’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014. Most recently, Shrude received an Honorary Doctorate from the West University of Timisoara, Romania (November 2024).

Active as a composer, pianist, teacher, and contemporary music advocate, Shrude has consistently promoted American music through her many years as founder and director of the MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music (1987-99), as chair of the Department of Musicology/Composition/Theory at BGSU (1998-2011) and as coordinator of the doctoral program in contemporary music (2006-2024). Together with saxophonist, John Sampen, she has premiered, recorded and presented hundreds of works by living composers both in the United States and abroad. Guest appearances as a pianist and composer include tours to the Soviet Union, China, Japan, Belgium, South America, the Netherlands, France, and Armenia, as well as numerous performances in the United States.