Performance by Mizzou New Music Ensemble
The Mizzou New Music Ensemble will offer new music from Missouri, South America, and more in concert at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, November 17 at Whitmore Recital Hall on the University of Missouri campus in Columbia. The concert is free and open to the public.
From close to home, the Ensemble (pictured) will perform the two winning works written for the 2019 Missouri Association of Departments and Schools of Music (MADSM) Collegiate Composition Competition.
“Cadencia” was composed by Truman State University student Samuel Tillman, the 2019 winner in the undergraduate category winner, and “Hitt Street Harangue” is by Daniel Vega, a master’s student in composition at Mizzou and this year’s graduate winner. Both works were selected in a competitive judging process open to all student composers enrolled at MADSM member institutions.
The concert also will include two works from South American composers that will be featured when the Ensemble tours that continent in May, 2020. “I come from afar” was composed by Sofia Scheps, who teaches at the Escuela Universitaria de Música in Montevideo, Uruguay; and “Expansion” is by Patricia Martínez, a composer, pianist and professor of composition at the National University of Quilmes in Buenos Aires, Argentina. During the tour, both composers will host concerts by the Ensemble at their respective institutions.
In addition to those four compositions, assistant conductor Yoshi Onishi will lead the Ensemble in a performance of “Talea” by French composer Gérard Grisey. Considered a late-20th-century classic, it alternates “between ferocity and quietude,” so as to – in the composer’s words – “express two aspects or, more precisely, two auditory angles of a single phenomenon.”
Two more new pieces of music from Missouri will complete the program. “Love Is Love, The Pedro Zamora Story” was composed by Daniel Vega originally for a film soundtrack; and “Pentatonic Sonata” is by Harry Tyrer, a retired Mizzou engineering professor now studying composition with Mizzou’s Carolina Heredia.
I - Expansion
(2019, for chelo, clarinets, percussion and piano, US Premiere)
Composition by Patricia Martínez
Illustration by Ana Lignelli
November 27th, 2019
The New Music Initiative
University of Missouri
The Mizzou New Music Initiative seeks talented performers dedicated to promoting new music. The Mizzou New Music Ensemble, under the direction of faculty composer and Alarm Will Sound member Dr. Stefan Freund, collaborates with MU’s faculty and student composers, performs frequently on and off campus, and works with some of the world’s leading composers and interpreters of new music. Seven Graduate Assistantships are available for New Music Ensemble members.
For 2018-19, the ensemble members are:
Ann Mozina, flutes
Austin Wright, clarinets
Pedro Ramiro, violin
Cameron Tubbs, violoncello
Elisabeth Roberts, piano
Hannah Hutchins, percussion
Brianna Trainor, percussion
Over the last six years, the ensemble has performed regularly in St. Louis through MNMI's Sound of Art partnerships, in such venues as the Sheldon Concert Hall, Shoenberg Theatre at the Missouri Botanical Garden, Contemporary Art Museum, World Chess Hall of Fame, St. Louis Science Center, and collaborating with visual artists at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. The Ensemble has been coached by prestigious guest composers and performers that have visited the campus as a result of the New Music Initiative, including Steven Stucky, Tod Machover, Matt Haimovitz, eighth blackbird, the Verdehr Trio, and others.