Liza White, composer
© David Gottlieb 2011
News:
April 28, 2012: Incredibly, my first year in Chicago is already starting to wind to a close. It's been a fast and insane one. These days, I'm wrapping up excellent experiences as a first-year teacher at the Merit School of Music and People's Music School, gearing up for the last weeks of the quarter at Northwestern, and planning an amazing summer. I'll be attending the June in Buffalo festival, where my piece Groove III will be performed, and I will also hold residencies at the Virginia Center for the Arts in Amherst, Virginia, the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, and the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts in Laramie, Wyoming! In the midst of all this, for three weeks in July and August, I'll be back in Chicago running a session of the High School Composer's Workshop at Access Contemporary Music.
I'm also pleased to announce a recently-completed new work for string quartet! Loosely inspired by Mos Def's improvisatory flow at the end of the song "Double Trouble" by the Roots, Zin zin zin zin riffs more generally on heterophonic group speech in hip hop. The piece will be read by the unparalleled JACK Quartet at Northwestern University's Regenstein Hall of Music on May 8th at 11 AM. This is a public reading, so I hope to see you there! New pieces by composers Ben Hjertmann, Pablo Chin, Jivin Misra, Katherine Young, Alex Temple, Dave Reminick, and Joan Arnau Pamies will also be read. Contact me for the full schedule if you are interested.
My piece Step!, which was performed by Alarm Will Sound last summer, is now posted on the AWS SoundCloud page. Check it out! The piece can also be heard on the Music page of this website. It's gotten a bit of press attention, as well: click here to read an article by Marc Wiedenbaum about the piece on disquiet.com, and click here to see the shout-out that Wiedenbaum awarded the piece in his recent NewMusicBox post about SoundCloud. Additionally, I was mentioned in the recent NewMusicBox article "A Helpful List" by Rob Deemer, which responds to the underrepresentation of female composers on most new music concerts.
February 19, 2012: Wow, has it really been four months since I blogged here? A lot has been going on. Some of the most exciting recent news is that production is currently underway for an animated video project featuring my Ballad of the Mean Angry Jazz Hater Monster!, which was commissioned by the amazing, superhuman pianist/ percussionist Danny Holt in 2010. Danny gave the piece a fantastic premiere performance at REDCAT in Los Angeles last March, playing piano and many different percussion instruments at the same time. We have since received an American Composers' Forum Subito grant to make the video. The first shoot was last week in LA and, by all accounts, went very well. I can't wait to post the final product here! In the meantime, here is an article about Danny that mentions the project near the end. Thanks so much to Raffaello Mazza, our producer, and to everyone else who is working on this really fun project.
In other news, mezzo-soprano Jennifer Beattie and pianist Adam Marks have agreed to perform the song cycle that I'm currently working on! Details are still being fleshed out, but the performance will happen in Chicago during the 2012-2013 concert season. I met Jen and Adam at the New Music on the Point festival last summer, where they were on faculty, and I couldn't be more excited to be working with them again. Adam is the pianist for Chicago's Fifth House Ensemble, and Jen lives in Philadelphia and maintains a busy career there and in the surrounding area.
Last December, San Francisco's brand new Wild Rumpus New Music Collective included my piece Groove III on their debut concert and gave it a wonderful performance. Listen to it on the Music page! It was a blast meeting and working with the Wild Rumpus musicians and getting to hang out with Jen Wang and Dan VanHassel again. Thanks, also, to all of my Bay Area friends who came to see the show.
And, finally, I am excited to be on faculty for the Access Contemporary Music High School Composers' Workshop in Chicago this summer! The dates are July 16 - August 1st. This workshop has been in operation for six years now and is becoming well-known as an excellent program for high-school age students with an interest in composition. I am honored to be a part of it and looking forward to meeting these students and hearing their music!
October 22, 2011: Life in Chicago is underway! I am working on my DM at Northwestern and teaching aural skills there, and having a great experience. I'm also active in the city, teaching composition at Access Contemporary Music and music theory at People's Music School and the Merit School of Music. As for composing, I'm currently working on a song cycle with poetry by David Harris Ebenbach, Erika Meitner, Shenandoah Sowash, and Jeremy Schmidt - all friends of mine and fantastic poets. I'll also be working on a string quartet for a reading with the internationally acclaimed JACK Quartet in April.
In other news, I just found out that I'll be back in San Francisco in early December, because my recent piece Groove III, for violin, cello, flute, clarinet, and piano, was chosen in a call for scores by the brand new group Wild Rumpus for their first concert on December 10th! Wild Rumpus has the talent, creativity, and overall potential to become one of the most impressive contemporary music ensembles in the Bay, and I can't wait to hear them play Groove III. Bay Area friends, I hope to see you there!
July 20, 2011: Three days ago, I arrived in Chicago! I have moved here in order to start a Doctor of Music degree at Northwestern University's Bienen School of Music this fall. At Northwestern, I will have the opportunity to work with composition faculty members Lee Hyla, Hans Thomalla and Jay Alan Yim, as well as lots of top-caliber performing musicians, and to participate in one of the most exciting regional new music scenes in America. It's great to finally be in my new home city!
Before coming here, I spent the past week at the Mizzou New Music Summer Festival, which was held at the University of Missouri, Columbia. As a resident composer at this festival, I enjoyed the great privilege of having a piece performed by Alarm Will Sound! In addition to being one of the world's pre-eminent new music ensembles, AWS are also an amazing bunch of people. They were extremely generous with their time and energy and lots of fun to hang out with. Their performance of the new piece that I wrote for them, Step!, was incredible, and it was truly inspiring to spend a week with them. I also got to work with guest composers Anna Clyne and Roger Reynolds, as well as seven other resident composers. Check out this New Music Box blog post by resident composer Kari Besharse if you'd like to learn more about the festival.
June 22, 2011: I have just returned from two weeks at the New Music on the Point Festival, on beautiful Lake Dunmore in Leicester, VT! It was a really fantastic experience. I got to work with performing musicians Fifth House Ensemble, Jennifer Beattie, and Jillian Zack, study composition with Davy Rakowski and Kathryn Alexander, and become friends with a great group of fellow emerging composers, singers, and instrumentalists. We presented two concerts to enthusiastic audiences in Salisbury and Middlebury, VT, which included premieres of my works Groove III and Labor Day. It was sad to leave! If any NMOP-ers are reading this, I hope we keep in touch. Lots of photos, videos, and commentary on the experience can be found on the Fifth House Ensemble blog and on their facebook page. (There may or may not be a clip of me performing "Ice, Ice Baby" on toy piano...)
Also, yesterday's edition of the Springfield, MA Republican included an article about me! Click here to read it.
April 28, 2012: Incredibly, my first year in Chicago is already starting to wind to a close. It's been a fast and insane one. These days, I'm wrapping up excellent experiences as a first-year teacher at the Merit School of Music and People's Music School, gearing up for the last weeks of the quarter at Northwestern, and planning an amazing summer. I'll be attending the June in Buffalo festival, where my piece Groove III will be performed, and I will also hold residencies at the Virginia Center for the Arts in Amherst, Virginia, the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, and the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts in Laramie, Wyoming! In the midst of all this, for three weeks in July and August, I'll be back in Chicago running a session of the High School Composer's Workshop at Access Contemporary Music.
I'm also pleased to announce a recently-completed new work for string quartet! Loosely inspired by Mos Def's improvisatory flow at the end of the song "Double Trouble" by the Roots, Zin zin zin zin riffs more generally on heterophonic group speech in hip hop. The piece will be read by the unparalleled JACK Quartet at Northwestern University's Regenstein Hall of Music on May 8th at 11 AM. This is a public reading, so I hope to see you there! New pieces by composers Ben Hjertmann, Pablo Chin, Jivin Misra, Katherine Young, Alex Temple, Dave Reminick, and Joan Arnau Pamies will also be read. Contact me for the full schedule if you are interested.
My piece Step!, which was performed by Alarm Will Sound last summer, is now posted on the AWS SoundCloud page. Check it out! The piece can also be heard on the Music page of this website. It's gotten a bit of press attention, as well: click here to read an article by Marc Wiedenbaum about the piece on disquiet.com, and click here to see the shout-out that Wiedenbaum awarded the piece in his recent NewMusicBox post about SoundCloud. Additionally, I was mentioned in the recent NewMusicBox article "A Helpful List" by Rob Deemer, which responds to the underrepresentation of female composers on most new music concerts.
February 19, 2012: Wow, has it really been four months since I blogged here? A lot has been going on. Some of the most exciting recent news is that production is currently underway for an animated video project featuring my Ballad of the Mean Angry Jazz Hater Monster!, which was commissioned by the amazing, superhuman pianist/ percussionist Danny Holt in 2010. Danny gave the piece a fantastic premiere performance at REDCAT in Los Angeles last March, playing piano and many different percussion instruments at the same time. We have since received an American Composers' Forum Subito grant to make the video. The first shoot was last week in LA and, by all accounts, went very well. I can't wait to post the final product here! In the meantime, here is an article about Danny that mentions the project near the end. Thanks so much to Raffaello Mazza, our producer, and to everyone else who is working on this really fun project.
In other news, mezzo-soprano Jennifer Beattie and pianist Adam Marks have agreed to perform the song cycle that I'm currently working on! Details are still being fleshed out, but the performance will happen in Chicago during the 2012-2013 concert season. I met Jen and Adam at the New Music on the Point festival last summer, where they were on faculty, and I couldn't be more excited to be working with them again. Adam is the pianist for Chicago's Fifth House Ensemble, and Jen lives in Philadelphia and maintains a busy career there and in the surrounding area.
Last December, San Francisco's brand new Wild Rumpus New Music Collective included my piece Groove III on their debut concert and gave it a wonderful performance. Listen to it on the Music page! It was a blast meeting and working with the Wild Rumpus musicians and getting to hang out with Jen Wang and Dan VanHassel again. Thanks, also, to all of my Bay Area friends who came to see the show.
And, finally, I am excited to be on faculty for the Access Contemporary Music High School Composers' Workshop in Chicago this summer! The dates are July 16 - August 1st. This workshop has been in operation for six years now and is becoming well-known as an excellent program for high-school age students with an interest in composition. I am honored to be a part of it and looking forward to meeting these students and hearing their music!
October 22, 2011: Life in Chicago is underway! I am working on my DM at Northwestern and teaching aural skills there, and having a great experience. I'm also active in the city, teaching composition at Access Contemporary Music and music theory at People's Music School and the Merit School of Music. As for composing, I'm currently working on a song cycle with poetry by David Harris Ebenbach, Erika Meitner, Shenandoah Sowash, and Jeremy Schmidt - all friends of mine and fantastic poets. I'll also be working on a string quartet for a reading with the internationally acclaimed JACK Quartet in April.
In other news, I just found out that I'll be back in San Francisco in early December, because my recent piece Groove III, for violin, cello, flute, clarinet, and piano, was chosen in a call for scores by the brand new group Wild Rumpus for their first concert on December 10th! Wild Rumpus has the talent, creativity, and overall potential to become one of the most impressive contemporary music ensembles in the Bay, and I can't wait to hear them play Groove III. Bay Area friends, I hope to see you there!
July 20, 2011: Three days ago, I arrived in Chicago! I have moved here in order to start a Doctor of Music degree at Northwestern University's Bienen School of Music this fall. At Northwestern, I will have the opportunity to work with composition faculty members Lee Hyla, Hans Thomalla and Jay Alan Yim, as well as lots of top-caliber performing musicians, and to participate in one of the most exciting regional new music scenes in America. It's great to finally be in my new home city!
Before coming here, I spent the past week at the Mizzou New Music Summer Festival, which was held at the University of Missouri, Columbia. As a resident composer at this festival, I enjoyed the great privilege of having a piece performed by Alarm Will Sound! In addition to being one of the world's pre-eminent new music ensembles, AWS are also an amazing bunch of people. They were extremely generous with their time and energy and lots of fun to hang out with. Their performance of the new piece that I wrote for them, Step!, was incredible, and it was truly inspiring to spend a week with them. I also got to work with guest composers Anna Clyne and Roger Reynolds, as well as seven other resident composers. Check out this New Music Box blog post by resident composer Kari Besharse if you'd like to learn more about the festival.
June 22, 2011: I have just returned from two weeks at the New Music on the Point Festival, on beautiful Lake Dunmore in Leicester, VT! It was a really fantastic experience. I got to work with performing musicians Fifth House Ensemble, Jennifer Beattie, and Jillian Zack, study composition with Davy Rakowski and Kathryn Alexander, and become friends with a great group of fellow emerging composers, singers, and instrumentalists. We presented two concerts to enthusiastic audiences in Salisbury and Middlebury, VT, which included premieres of my works Groove III and Labor Day. It was sad to leave! If any NMOP-ers are reading this, I hope we keep in touch. Lots of photos, videos, and commentary on the experience can be found on the Fifth House Ensemble blog and on their facebook page. (There may or may not be a clip of me performing "Ice, Ice Baby" on toy piano...)
Also, yesterday's edition of the Springfield, MA Republican included an article about me! Click here to read it.
