Dorothy Chang's piece Streams for solo viola received its world premiere at the XXXIV International Viola Congress in Montreal, Canada on June 9, 2006. Details available here.
Streams will also receive its U.S. premiere at the Max Aronoff Viola Institute in Kenmore, Washington on Sunday, June 25, 2006 at 8:00 p.m.
Parting for solo viola, by Daniel Ott received its premiere June 30, 2005 at the Max Aronoff Viola Institute (which graciously underwrote the commission) in Kenmore, Washington.
Sara Graef's piece is done! It will receive its premiere in the fall of 2006.
I am currently looking for a recording location and engineer and will add details as the are finalized.
Dorothy Chang
Described as "evocative and kaleidoscopic", the music of composer Dorothy Chang (b. 1970) is characterized by tightly concentrated expression with an emphasis on lyricism, rhythmic energy and dramatic intensity. Dorothy's music has been widely performed by ensembles including the Albany Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony, Queens Symphony, Seattle Symphony, Aspen Concert Orchestra, Chicago Civic Orchestra, Collage New Music, eighth blackbird, North/South Consonance, the Kylix New Music Ensemble and TONK. She has also received commissions from Chamber Music America, the Barlow Endowment, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, Columbus State University Wind Ensemble and the Chicago Saxophone Quartet, among others. Her music has been featured at music festivals including Aspen, Banff, Bowdoin, Norfolk, Scotia (Halifax), the Ernest Bloch Festival, and the Are You Brave, Too? New Music Festival. As composer and co-founder of the Riverbed Theatre Company, Dorothy has collaborated on original image-based productions in Boston, Chicago, Santa Barbara and Taipei, Taiwan .
For the 2003-2004 season, Dorothy was selected to be the Music Alive composer-in-residence of the Albany Symphony Orchestra in Albany, New York. She has also been recognized through honours and prizes including a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, awards from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, the International Alliance for Women in Music, Mu Phi Epsilon, the National Society of Arts and Letters, Meet the Composer and the Jacob Druckman Orchestra Prize from the Aspen Music Festival. She has held residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts, MacDowell Colony, Ragdale Foundation, Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Lancaster Music Festival.
Born in Winfield, Illinois, Dorothy received degrees in composition from the University of Michigan (B.M., M.M.) and the Indiana University School of Music (D.M). She has served on the music faculty at Indiana State University and is presently Assistant Professor of Music at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada .
Sara Carina Graef holds DMA and MM degrees in composition from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and BM degrees in composition and flute performance from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. In 2003, she was awarded the first prize in the inaugural year of the Northridge Composition Prize for her orchestral score, night shows to my eyes the stars, and in 2002, she won the Premio Citta’ di Pescara Composition Competition in Italy for her piano solo, Nottanosti. Other composition awards include the Sadye J. Moss Endowed Musical Composition Prize, the Hans J. Salter Award for Composition, and the Phi Kappa Phi Student Recognition Award, and she has been a regional winner in the SCI/ASCAP Student Composition Competition and an alternate for the Minnesota Orchestra/American Composers’ Forum Reading Session Competition. She has held residencies at Yale’s Norfolk Chamber Music Festival Contemporary Music Seminar, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Ernest Bloch Music Festival Composers’ Symposium, the Czech-American Summer Music Institute in Prague, and the A.S.K Theater Projects/Nautilus Music-Theater Playwright-Composer Studio; and has twice been a special invited guest artist at the Lincoln Center Directors’ Lab West.
Her recent premieres include Ode on Solitude and Declaration, both for a capella SATB choir, "U.S. Patent No. 821, 393. FLYING MACHINE. O.& W. Wright." for the Vanderbilt University Symphonic Wind Ensemble (commemorating the 100th anniversary of flight), and her song cycle, Prayers from the Long History of Happiness, written for Los Angeles soprano, Susan W. Kane.
Her primary composition instructors were James Hopkins, Morten Lauridsen, and Erica Muhl, and through seminars and master classes, she has worked with such composers as Joan Tower, Chen Yi, David Del Tredici, Aaron Jey Kernis, Stephen Hartke, Bernard Rands, and Chinary Ung. Dr. Graef is currently an Assistant Professor of Music and Chair of Theory and Composition at California State University, Los Angeles, and has also taught at USC and Whittier College. She has also worked on various film, television, and theatrical projects, including her score for the feature film Without a Map and the upcoming short film, The Basement.
She is currently in collaboration with Los Angeles playwright Steven Totland and director Andrew Sachs on a play in which the music plays a central role. In addition to composing and teaching, Dr. Graef dedicates her summers to volunteering for the Alaska Whale Foundation on the R/V Evolütion in Southeast Alaska, assisting and learning from biologists studying the social feeding ecology and the communications of the humpback whale.
Quickly gaining acclaim both nationally and abroad, composer Daniel Ott has received recent commissions from the National Symphony, the New York City Ballet's New York Choreographic Institute, and the Northwest Sinfonietta, where he served as Composer-in-Residence for the 2000-01 season and was the recipient of an N.E.A. grant. An award-winning composer, Ott's honors include the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the ASCAP Foundation's Morton Gould Young Composer Award, of which he is a three-time recipient. Ott has been selected for such residencies as the Seaside Institute's Escape to Create, the Kyoto International Music Students Festival, the Aspen Music Festival, and the Max Aronoff Viola Institute, where he is currently Composer-in-Residence.
Ott's growing catalogue of music includes works for orchestra, assorted chamber, vocal, and choral pieces, an opera, as well as several ballet scores, for which he has an ongoing critically-acclaimed collaboration with choreographer and New York City Ballet Principal Dancer Benjamin Millepied. Among these ballets are Double Aria, which will receive upcoming performances on tour in Europe with Millepied's Danses Concertantes, as well as during New York City Ballet's Spring 2005 season, and Singular Motion, a new work that incorporates Ott's Pieces of Reich, to be premiered in London at Sadler's Wells.
Ott received his B.M. from The Curtis Institute of Music, where he was a student of Ned Rorem, and both an M.M. and D.M.A. from The Juilliard School, where his teachers included John Corigliano and Robert Beaser, and where he currently serves on the faculty. The son of a U.S. Army Colonel and a professional violinist, Ott was raised in the Pacific Northwest, having spent his early childhood years living in many parts of the United States and in Germany. He now resides with his wife, oboist Erin Gustafson, in New York City.
