Press Room

April 14, 2009

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Laura Grant, Grant Communications, 978.208.0552
Sevan Melikyan, Director of Marketing, 817.738.6536

THIRTEENTH VAN CLIBURN INTERNATIONAL PIANO COMPETITION PIANISTS SELECT NEW WORKS FOR SEMIFINAL PROGRAMS

COMPOSERS: Mason Bates, Derek Bermel, Daron Hagen, John Musto

FORT WORTH, TEXAS April 14, 2009--The competitors of the Thirteenth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition have selected four new works by American composers to be included in their Semifinal Round programs.

The final 2009 American Composers Invitational composers and their works are:
Mason Bates (White Lies for Lomax)
Derek Bermel (Turning)
Daron Hagen (Suite for Piano)
John Musto (Improvisation & Fugue)

Twenty-eight composers submitted works for this year's Invitational. A jury of eminent composers and musicians reviewed the compositions in New York City this past February, and narrowed the field to the final group.

The jury consisted of Sebastian Currier (winner of the Foundation's second American Composers Invitational in 2005), composers Samuel Adler and Melinda Wagner, and noted pianist Ursula Oppens. Under the guidance of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Corigliano, and assisted by pianist John Root, the jury carefully reviewed each score. The final selections were sent to the thirty competitors in late February, and each one has chosen a piece to perform in his/her Semifinal Round program.

Every composer whose work is performed by one of the twelve semifinalists will receive a cash prize of $2,500, and the composer of the piece that is performed by the largest number of semifinalists will receive the grand prize of $5,000.

The Invitational begins with the selection of a nominating committee of noted composers, artists, administrators, and other music professionals. These committee members then recommend American composers to be invited to submit solo piano scores for performance during the competition. Nominees may send a new work or an existing work that has not received significant attention. A professional jury of industry peers reviews the submissions and selects up to five works eligible for performance at the competition. The final scores are sent to the competitors several weeks prior to the competition with the request that each artist choose one work to perform during his/her Semifinal Round recital. In order to allow the jurors and pianists to select their preferred pieces without bias, all composers' names are withheld until competitors have made their selections.

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In 2001, Lowell Liebermann received the first American Composers Invitational grand-prize award for his Three Impromptus. Sebastian Currier won in 2005 with his Scarlatti Cadences + Brainstorm.

The Cliburn Competition has always supported music by American composers. From its inception in 1962 until 1997, the Van Cliburn Foundation commissioned new works from distinguished American composers to be performed by semifinalists during each competition. Among these noted composers are Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, William Bolcom, Aaron Copland, John Corigliano, Norman Dello Joio, Morton Gould, Lee Hoiby, William Schuman, and Willard Straight.

The American Composers Invitational was initiated at the 2001 Cliburn Competition, and is supported, in part, by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Mason Bates (White Lies for Lomax)
Recipient of a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts, Mason Bates moves fluidly between the worlds of classical concert music and electronica. He earned a master's degree from Juilliard and at the age of twenty was appointed a fellow in composition at the Tanglewood Music Festival. Subsequent honors have included fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy in Rome, and the American Academy in Berlin.

Mr. Bates has received numerous commissions from the National Symphony, the Koussevitsky Foundation, and the New Juilliard Ensemble, among others. Although his recent compositions employ the interplay of acoustic and electronic sounds, his love of music has its roots in his experiences as a member of the all-boys' choir and glee club at St. Christopher's School in Virginia. Mr. Bates lives in San Francisco, where he frequently works as a DJ. His works have been performed in such varied venues as Carnegie Hall, the San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Roter Salon in Berlin.

Of White Lies for Lomax, the composer notes: "It is still a surprise to discover how few classical musicians are familiar with Alan Lomax, the ethnomusicologist who ventured into the American South (and elsewhere) to record the soul of a land. Those scratchy recordings captured everyone from Muddy Waters to a whole slew of anonymous blues musicians.

White Lies for Lomax dreams up wisps of distant blues fragments--more fiction than fact, since they are hardly honest re-creations of the blues--and lets them slowly accumulate to an assertive climax. The seemingly recent phenomenon of sampling--grabbing a sound bite from a song and incorporating it into something new--is in fact a high-tech version of the very old practice of allusion or parody, and the inclusion of "Dollar Maime" at the end is a nod to that tradition."

Derek Bermel (Turning)

Composer and clarinetist Derek Bermel has composed works that draw from a rich variety of musical genres, including classical, jazz, pop, rock, blues, folk, and gospel. Currently serving as Music Alive composer-in-residence with the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, Bermel has received commissions from the National Symphony, Saint Louis Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, WNYC Radio, eighth blackbird, Guarneri Quartet, Tanglewood Music Center (Aspen), violinist Midori, and electric guitarist Wiek Hijmans, among others. His many awards include the Rome Prize, Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, the Alpert Award in the Arts, the Trailblazer Award from the American Music Center, and the Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Highlights this past season included the premiere of The Good Life, an oratorio for the Pittsburgh Symphony and Mendelssohn Choir, and a return to Carnegie Hall for two premieres: a Koussevitzky Commission for the American Composers Orchestra, and the world premiere of Fang Man's clarinet concerto, as soloist. Mr. Bermel holds degrees from Yale University and the University of Michigan and has traveled throughout the world studying indigenous music and instruments of disparate cultures. His works are published by Peermusic and Faber Music. More information can be found www.derekbermel.com.

The composer notes: "Turning is a work in the form of theme and variations that I originally wrote at the Tanglewood Music Center. It is dedicated to French composer Henri Dutilleux for his 80th birthday, and to pianist Christopher Taylor (1993 Cliburn laureate), who gave the premiere at Studio Raspail in Paris. A simple hymn is followed by a pentatonic echo, a mirror of the musical duality--East vs. West-which I experienced when returning from studying Lobi gyil (xylophone) music in Ghana. In Nightmares and Chickens, the first variation, the hymn is pecked out, culminating in a schizoid frenzy of pointillistic clucking, and eventually evaporating into the top registers of the piano. Kowië at Dawn is a portrait of a small village in northwest Ghana. The third variation, Passage, harmonizes the pentatonic theme chromatically, and the hymn slowly reemerges, this time tinged with a gospel slant. In Carnaval Noir, Latin music mixes with the occasional ragtime twist. The carnival segues into the coda, in which an inverted rendition of the hymn returns in the top registers of the piano. The pentatonic echo returns as the work spirals backwards into a hazy reflection of the opening song."

A graduate of the Juilliard School and of the Curtis Institute of Music, Daron Hagen established his national reputation in the early eighties. He has enjoyed a steady stream of commissions from major orchestras (New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra), ensembles (Kings' Singers), and soloists (Gary Graffman, Jaime Laredo) over the past quarter-century. He remains active as a conductor, pianist, and stage director, and his work has been recorded by Albany, Arsis, Naxos, and CRI labels.

Mr. Hagen has received the Kennedy Center Friedheim and ASCAP-Nissim prizes, as well as awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer, and Opera America. His music is published by Carl Fischer, EC Schirmer, and Burning Sled. Currently composing operas for the Seattle and Sarasota Operas, Mr. Hagen will serve as a composer-in-residence during the 2009 season for the Seasons, Wintergreen, and Methow music festivals. He lives in New York with his wife, composer Gilda Lyons, and his son Atticus.

Regarding his Suite For Piano, he writes: "The first movement, Toccata, is a virtuosic rondo whose first theme is a fugue subject I wrote as a student at Juilliard during the early eighties and always wanted to have some fun with, as well as a jazzy little riff based on an octatonic scale. The second movement, Sarabande, is written in the spirit of Leonard Bernstein's Anniversaries and is a musical portrait of my mother. Aria began as the very first sketch for my opera Amelia; in the story a little girl sings this music as an apostrophe (ode) to the stars. The final Medley takes a fragment of the traditional Irish ballad "The Croppy Boy" and subjects it to some brutal compositional chiaroscuro as it is intercut with ideas from the previous movements. I am a pianist, so I set myself specific challenges for each movement: the first highlights touch and velocity, the second voicing, the third a long singing line and pedaling, and the last dramatic shifts in color, tempo, and dynamics."

John Musto (Improvisation & Fugue)

John Musto is regarded as one of today's most versatile musicians. He has garnered a Rockefeller Fellowship, the Lakond Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Mid-Atlantic Emmys, and two CINE Awards for scores written for public television. Also a noted pianist with an active performing schedule, Mr. Musto premiered and appeared as soloist in his Piano Concerto No. 2 at Columbia University's Miller Theater in 2006. During the same season, he premiered his Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Orchestra of Saint Luke's at the Caramoor Music Festival, where he was serving as composer-in-residence. In the past four years, Mr. Musto and librettist Mark Campbell have collaborated on three operas with a fourth to be premiered by the Opera Theater of St. Louis and Wolf Trap in 2010. John Musto earned degrees in piano performance at the Manhattan School of Music. He has been a visiting professor at Brooklyn College and is a frequent guest lecturer at Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music. His compositions have been recorded for Hyperion, harmonia mundi, MusicMasters, Innova, Channel Classics, Albany Records, and New World Records.

About his ACI submission, the composer writes: "The Improvisation is a rumination on the blues. Most of the musical material in this movement is generated by the first eight bars. It is cast in four progressively faster sections, finally returning to the theme. The Fugue subject is a fusion on several elements of the improvisation, ending in a brief recollection of the original blues motif. Improvisation and Fugue is dedicated to my friend Mark Horowitz, who participated in the Van Cliburn Foundation's third International Piano Competition for Outstanding Amateurs in 2002." 

Contact: Laura Grant
email: lgrant11@comcast.net
phone: 978.208.0552
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revised: 4-20-09