The Phoenix Concerts - The Phoenix Commissions

Eric Moe (1954- ), (www.ericmoe.net) composer of what the NY Times calls "music of winning exuberance", has received numerous grants and awards for his work, including the Lakond Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship; commissions from the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Fromm Foundation, the Koussevitzky Foundation, and Meet-the-Composer USA; fellowships from the Wellesley Composer's Conference and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; and residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Bellagio, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, the Montana Artists Refuge, the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, and the American Dance Festival.

His sit-trag/one-woman opera Tri-Stan was hailed by the New York Times in 2005 as “a blockbuster” and “a tour de force”, a work of “inspired weight” that “subversively inscribe[s] classical music into pop culture”. In its review of the piece, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette concluded, “For an audience, it is one of those rare works that transcends the cultural divide while still being rooted in both sides.” The work will soon be available on a Koch International Classics compact disc. Other all-Moe CDs are available on Albany Records (Kicking and Screaming, Up & At ‘Em), Koch (Sonnets to Orpheus and Siren Songs), and Centaur (On the Tip of My Tongue), and two new ones are in preparation.

Also a pianist and keyboard player, Moe has performed works by hundreds of composers, from Anthony Davis to Stefan Wolpe. His playing can be heard on the Koch, CRI, Mode, and AK/Coburg labels in the music of John Cage, Roger Zahab, Marc-Antonio Consoli, Mathew Rosenblum, and Felix Draeseke. His solo recording The Waltz Project Revisited - New Waltzes for Piano, a CD of waltzes for piano by two generations of American composers, was recently released on Albany. Gramophone magazine says in its review of the CD, “Moe’s command of the varied styles is nothing short of remarkable.” A founding member of the San Francisco-based EARPLAY ensemble, he currently co-directs the Music on the Edge new music concert series in Pittsburgh.

Moe was educated at the University of California at Berkeley (M.A., Ph.D.) and at Princeton University (A.B.) He is currently Professor of Composition and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh, where he directs the graduate program in composition and the department's electroacoustic music studio.

Composer Eric Moe

Faye-Ellen Silverman (www.newschool.edu) began her music studies before the age of four at the Dalcroze School of Music. She first achieved national recognition by winning the Parents League Competition, judged by Leopold Stokowski, at the age of 13. She holds a BA from Barnard, cum laude and honors in music, and an AM from Harvard and a DMA from Columbia both in music composition. She spent her junior year at Mannes College. Her teachers have included Otto Luening, William Sydeman, Leon Kirchner, Lukas Foss, Vladimir Ussachevsky, and Jack Beeson. Seesaw Music, a division of Subito Music Corp., publishes about 75 of her compositions. Zigzags is available on Crystal Records, and Passing Fancies, Restless Winds, and Speaking Alone are on New World Recordings.

Silverman's awards include the selection of her Oboe-sthenics to represent the United States at the International Rostrum of Composers/UNESCO, resulting in international radio broadcasts (1982); winning the Indiana State [Orchestral] Composition Contest, resulting in a performance by the Indianapolis Symphony (1982); a Governor's Citation (1982); and having September 30, 1982 named Faye-Ellen Silverman Day in Baltimore by Mayor Donald Schaeffer. Additionally, she has been the recipient of the National League of American Pen Women’s biennial music award (2002), yearly Standard Awards from ASCAP since 1983, several Meet the Composer grants, and an American Music Center grant. She was a resident scholar at the Villa Serbelloni of the Rockefeller Foundation (1987), a Composers' Conference Fellow (1985), a Yaddo Fellow (1984), and a MacDowell Fellow (1982). She is currently a Founding Board Member of the International Women's Brass Conference (for which she served as composer-in-residence), and a founding member of Music Under Construction, a composers’ collective.

The Baltimore Symphony, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Greater Bridgeport Symphony, the New Orleans Philharmonic, the International Experimental Music Festival in Bourges, ISCM - Korea section, Nieuwe Oogst (Belgium), Grupo Musica Hoje (Brazil), the Monday Evening Concert series (L.A.), and the Aspen Music Festival have performed Dr. Silverman’s works. She has received commissions from Philip A. De Simone (in memory of Linda J. Warren), Larry Madison, Thomas Matta, the International Women’s Brass Conference for Junction, the Monarch Brass Quintet, the Sylvia and Danny Kaye Playhouse, the Great Lakes Performing Artist Associates, the Con Spirito woodwind quintet, the Greater Lansing Symphony Orchestra, the Fromm Music Foundation, the Chamber Music Society of Baltimore, and a joint commission from the American Brass Quintet, the Catskill Brass Quintet, the Mt. Vernon Brass Players, and the Southern Brass quintet (under the National Endowment for the Arts Consortium Commissioning Program). She has also had commissions from flutist Nina Assimakopoulos and the Corona Guitar Quartet of Denmark.

Silverman is also the author of several articles, record reviews for The Baltimore Sun, and the 20th century section of the Schirmer History of Music. She has taught at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center, the Aspen Music Festival, and the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University, Goucher College, and several branches of the City University of New York and at Columbia University. She has been a member of the Mannes College The New School for Music faculty since 1991, and of its Extension Division since 1995. She also teaches at the Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts. An accomplished pianist as well, former student of Irma Wolpe and Russell Sherman, she has recorded for Radio Cologne (WDR), and has performed at the International Festival of Experimental Music in Bourges, the Library of Congress, and as soloist with the Brooklyn Philharmonic.

Slavko Krstic (born in Yugoslavia in 1975) attended Matematicka Gimnazija. Immersed from earliest childhood in mathematics, he was inspired by the sense of wonder he found in astrophysics. Music came to inspire him more comprehensively in the late 1980’s. In 1992, the military draft and an epiphany about music as a life-long pursuit prompted him to leave Belgrade to pursue his musical studies at the University of Connecticut. After graduation, he moved to New York to compose and sing for a progressive rock band, touring the U.S. and recording two CD’s before his music’s aesthetic could no longer be contained by the rock genre and the group disbanded in 2005. He began studying composition privately with Daron Hagen shortly thereafter; he studies piano with Marc Peloquin. By day he supports his musical composition as a software engineer. His song cycle, Sphinxes, was premiered in New York City by Gilda Lyons and Marc Peloquin in June, 2007 as part of the Tobenski-Algera Concert Series.

Composer Hayes Biggs

Hayes Biggs — Care-charmer Sleep
premiered Friday, April 27, 2007 — The Phoenix Concerts

Hayes Biggs (www.hayesbiggs.com) was born in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1957 and raised in Helena, Arkansas. He holds a doctor of musical arts degree in composition from Columbia University, a master of music degree from Southern Methodist University, and a bachelor of music degree in piano performance from Rhodes College. His teachers have included Mario Davidovsky, Jack Beeson, Fred Lerdahl, Donald Erb, and Don Freund. Biggs has been a fellow in composition at the Composers Conference and Chamber Music Center at Wellesley, at the Tanglewood Music Center, at Yaddo, and at the MacDowell Colony. In 1995 he was the recipient of a Fromm Foundation Commission to compose a work for Parnassus, When you are reminded by the instruments, which was premiered by that ensemble in March 1997. He was named a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for the academic year 1998–99. Recently he was honored by an entry in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd Edition, and he was named as one of five composers to receive a 2001 Aaron Copland Award. This award carries with it the opportunity for a residency at the Aaron Copland House in upstate New York for several weeks next year, where he will be free to devote himself entirely to composition. From 1991-2001 he was associate editor at C. F. Peters Corporation, and since 1992 he has been on the faculty of Manhattan School of Music. Most recently he has been awarded a commission by the American Composers Forum and the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust to compose a group of haiku settings for the vocal quartet Kiitos.

In 1993 his Mass for All Saints won a second prize in the 5e Concours International de Musique Sacrée (Festival de Musique Sacrée) in Fribourg, Switzerland. On July 3, 1994, this work received its first complete performance in Fribourg by the Choir of the North German Radio (Hamburg) under the direction of Horst Neumann. Biggs’s choral works have been performed by such distinguished ensembles as the Gregg Smith Singers, the New Calliope Singers, the New Amsterdam Singers, the New York Virtuoso Singers, Kiitos, and the Florilegium Chamber Choir. His solo vocal, instrumental, orchestral, and chamber music has been heard throughout the United States, in Europe, and in Latin America in performances by, among others, the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, the Riverside Symphony, the Memphis Symphony, Voices of Change, Musicians’ Accord, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Empyrean Ensemble, Parnassus, the Washington Square Contemporary Music Society, and the League of Composers/ISCM. Biggs is currently at work on his first string quartet. His music is published by C. F. Peters Corporation and Margun Music, Inc. He is a member of BMI.

Composer Paula Kimper

Paula M. Kimper — Skinny Marys talk about faith
premiered Friday, April 27, 2007 — The Phoenix Concerts

Paula M. Kimper, (www.patienceandsarah.com) a 1979 graduate of the Eastman School of Music, is active in New York City as a composer for opera, theater, film, and dance. Ms. Kimper was commissioned by Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, of Deerfield Massachusetts, to compose the opera The Captivation of Eunice Williams for the 300th anniversay of the Deerfield massacre of 1704, with librettist Harley Erdman. The opera had its world premiere at Deerfield Academy's Reid Theatre in July 2004, and is now touring internationaly. Most recent performances were held at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian on October 13 and 14, 2006. The Pioneer Valley Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under the direction of Paul Phillips, premiered Suite from the Captivation of Eunice Williams. Kimper is at work on The Bridge of San Luis Rey, an opera based on Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize winning novel. The Suite from the Bridge of San Luis Rey will be performed by the Danbury Community Orchestra under the musical direction of Stephen M. Smith on May 6, 2007. Excerpts from BRIDGE were heard at OPERA America's "New Works Sampler" in Pittsburgh in June 2004. Her first opera, Patience and Sarah, with libretto by Wende Persons, had its world premiere in Lincoln Center 98, with further productions in Denver and Chicago in the 2000 season. The Act II duet, "I want to live," on CRI's release Lesbian American Composers won two 1999 GLAMA Awards. The European premiere is in the works in England and will be produced by OperaAmazons.

Ms. Kimper has composed music for theater since 1986, producing scores and sound designs for the Boston Post Road Stage Company, Westport Country Playhouse, Stamford Theatre Works, and The White Barn Theater. Douglas Moser's A Christmas Carol, featuring Kimper's score, won the 1992 Connecticut Critics Circle Award for Best Adaptation of a Classic. For the White Barn Theater in Westport, CT, and reknowned directed Burry Fredrik, Ms. Kimper created the music and sound design for Swansong, by Patrick Page, which permiered in August 2002. Washington Shakespeare Company's May 2002 production of Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Michael Comlish, featured two Kimper songs. She composed six new songs to poems by Heine for "Heinrich Heine: Doppelgänger," a 2001 AOP production, conceived and directed by Gabriele Jakobi.

Ms. Kimper appears as guitarist with singer Elaine Valby, dancer/choreographer Amy Pivar in an ongoing collaboration called Songs for Solo Dance and Voice April 2006 saw the premiere of (On Her Decision to Stop Wearing Clothes) commissioned by Pivar for performances at Dance New Amsterdam in New York City. 10 of 10,000: Mermaid Lullabys, scored for two voices and cello, setting haiku by Elaine Valby, was commissioned by Seraphim Trio and premiered in September 2005. Ms. Kimper's score for dancer/choreographer Richard Daniels, Bound Round, with text by Aaron Shurin, had its NYC premeire April 2-6, 2003 at the Connelly Theater, featuring Nurrit Tilles at the piano. The world premiere took place in the August 2002 Toronto Fringe Festival. Part 2, SKY PANELS, was presented at the 92nd Street Y in November 2001. She has received five commissions from the Walt Whitman Project for songs and fanfares. Broken Tale of Mouse a score for dancer Amy Pivar and playwright Freda Rosen, was produced at Wings Theatre in May 2000. Where Everything is Music, an SATB setting of Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks), was premiered at the GALA 2000 Festival of Choruses by SING OUT! PROUD BROOKLYN, and performed since by The Shrewbury Chorale and the Dalton Alumni Chorale under the direction of Stephen M. Smith, and by the Stonewall Chorale under the direction of Cynthia Powell.

Ms. Kimper has composed for films and television since 1987. A new film, Glacier Bay, directed by Douglas Moser, features music by Kimper and was released in the fall of 2006. Flight of the Harmonic Messenger, a one-hour meditation on Sacred Sites of the Earth, Ms. Kimper's 1993 CD release, has aired on New Age radio programs worldwide. Her music for film, documentaries and TV has been heard nationally on network, PBS and cable television.