new music concert: featured composers
Supported by the Dr. C. W. Bixler Family Foundation, the Research & Innovation Office (RIO), the Center for Humanities and Arts, and the College of Music
David Conte has received commissions from Chanticleer; the San Francisco, Dayton, Oakland, and Stockton Symphonies; the Raymond Brock Commission from the American Choral Directors Association; and for four conventions of the American Guild of Organists. He has been named Composer of the Year by the AGO for their 2024 National Convention. Since 1985 he has been Professor of Composition and since 2014 Chair of the Composition Department at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Conte is the composer of over 150 works published by E.C. Schirmer Music Company. He was one of the last students of Nadia Boulanger, studying with her from 1975-78 in Paris and Fontainebleau on a Fulbright Scholarship; a Ralph Vaughan Williams Fellow, and an Aspen Music Festival Conducting Fellow. He earned a B.M. from Bowling Green State University and an M.F.A. and D.M.A. from Cornell University where he studied with Karel Husa. In 1982 Conte worked with Aaron Copland preparing a study of his manuscript sketches. He has taught at Cornell, Colgate University, Fontainebleau, and Interlochen. He has served on the board of the American Composer's Forum, as Composer in Residence for Cappella SF, and on the composition faculties of EAMA in Paris, and Choral Chameleon Institute in New York. His opera The Gift of the Magi has received over 40 productions in the U.S, Canada, Europe, and Russia. In 2005 he co-composed the score for the documentary Ballets Russes shown at the Sundance Film Festival; in 2007 he composed the score for the PBS American Masters documentary Orozco: Man of Fire. In 2016 he won the National Association of Teachers of Singing Art Song Composition Award for his cycle American Death Ballads.
Dr. Stacy Garrop is a freelance American composer and lecturer whose music is centered on dramatic and lyrical storytelling. Her catalog covers a wide range of genres, with works for orchestra, opera, oratorio, wind ensemble, choir, art song, and various sized chamber ensembles. Dr. Garrop has received numerous awards and grants including an Arts and Letters Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Fromm Music Foundation Grant, Barlow Prize, and three Barlow Endowment commissions. Notable commissions include The Battle for the Ballot for Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, Goddess Triptych for St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, The Transformation of Jane Doe for Chicago Opera Theater, In a House Besieged for The Crossing, Give Me Hunger for Chanticleer, Glorious Mahalia for Kronos Quartet, Rites for the Afterlife for the Akropolis and Calefax Reed Quintets, and My Dearest Ruth for voice and piano with text by the husband of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Theodore Presser Company publishes her works. Her music is frequently recorded by Cedille Records, with works commercially available on several additional labels. In 2022, Dr. Garrop was the featured composer of the Bowling Green State University New Music Festival and Indiana State University Contemporary Music Festival, as well as a mentor composer for the Cabrillo Conductors/Composers Workshop, LunART Festival Composers Hub, and Chicago a cappella’s HerVoice Emerging Women Choral Composers Competition. She was the inaugural Emerging Opera Composer for Chicago Opera Theater’s Vanguard Program (2018-2020), and served as Composer-in-Residence with the Champaign-Urbana Symphony Orchestra (2016-2019).
Composer/pianist/educator Amanda Harberg’s music has been presented at major venues including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Verizon Hall, and Symphony Center. In 2021, Maestro Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducted the premiere of her Piccolo Concerto with soloist Erica Peel and the Philadelphia Orchestra, calling it "an extraordinary addition to the limited repertoire." A widely commissioned composer, her music is published by Presser and has been recognized by a Fulbright Hays Fellowship, Juilliard's Peter Mennin Prize, two New Jersey Council on the Arts Fellowships, a New York State Council on the Arts fellowship, a MacDowell Colony summer residency, and nine NFA Newly Published Music awards. In 2021 she was the International Clarinet Association’s “Composer of the Month”, and her Clarinet Concerto was premiered at the gala concert of ClarinetFest® 2022 by the Reno Philharmonic with soloist YaoGuang Zhai. Harberg's woodwind works are regularly used as required repertoire for national and international competitions. Her Concerto for Viola and Orchestra was recorded on Naxos American Classics in 2017 to critical acclaim. In the 2023/24 season, Harberg will appear as a guest with the Phoenix Symphony, the Ridgewood Symphony, the Flute Center of New York, the University of Colorado Boulder, Coastal Carolina University, Arizona State University, Eastern Michigan University, and the New Jersey Flute Society.
Dr. Harberg lives with her family in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, where she is the Composer-in-Residence with the Ridgewood Symphony Orchestra. She teaches at Rutgers University and Interlochen Center for the Arts. To find out more, please visit https://amandaharberg.com/
Dr. Harberg lives with her family in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, where she is the Composer-in-Residence with the Ridgewood Symphony Orchestra. She teaches at Rutgers University and Interlochen Center for the Arts. To find out more, please visit https://amandaharberg.com/
Composer/pianist Carter Pann has written for and worked with musicians around the world, with performances by the London Symphony and City of Birmingham Symphony, the Tchaikovsky Symphony in Moscow, many radio symphonies around Europe, the Seattle Symphony, National Repertory Orchestra, the youth orchestras of New York and Chicago, and countless wind ensembles. He has worked with Richard Stoltzman, the Antares Ensemble, the Capitol Saxophone Quartet, the West Coast Wind Quintet, the River Oaks Chamber Ensemble, the Takács Quartet and many concert pianists. Awards include a Charles Ives Fellowship, a Masterprize seat in London and five ASCAP awards over the years. His numerous albums encompass solo, vocal, chamber, orchestral and wind ensemble music. Pann was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2016. He loves a good game of chess or poker with his students and friends, and currently teaches and conducts the Boulder Altitude Directive contemporary music ensemble at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Charles Shadle (b.1960 Ardmore Oklahoma) teaches composition, music theory, and music history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he serves as a Senior Lecturer in Music, and as Theory Coordinator. He is the 2016 recipient of a SHASS Levitan Teaching Award. Major recent works include the song cycles Primordia for Jeremy Huw Williams and Five Songs of the American West for Marcus Deloach, a Missa Brevis Sanctii Oswaldi for the Schola Cantorum of St Stephen’s, Providence, Chahta Aiasha (oboe quartet) for the Radius Ensemble, and Three Chardin Fantasies for fortepiano trio, as part of “On Beethoven’s Piano” a residency cosponsored by MIT and The Handel and Haydn Society. In the past seasons his choral setting of poems by the Mvskoke/Creek poet, Alexander Posey, The Far Blue Hills, and the Symphony No.4 received first performances.
A 1982 graduate of the University of Colorado, he went on to receive his Ph.D. in Composition and Theory from Brandeis University, and counts among his teachers Cecil Effinger, Richard Toensing, Yehudi Wyner, Harold Shapero, and Eloise Ristad. Dr Shadle is an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. This heritage is reflected in works ranging from the large-scaled Oklahoma Choctaw Cycle (Limestone Gap, Red Cedar, and The Old Place) for chamber ensemble, to the short and accessible Choctaw Animals piano pieces, recently made available by MIT.
A 1982 graduate of the University of Colorado, he went on to receive his Ph.D. in Composition and Theory from Brandeis University, and counts among his teachers Cecil Effinger, Richard Toensing, Yehudi Wyner, Harold Shapero, and Eloise Ristad. Dr Shadle is an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. This heritage is reflected in works ranging from the large-scaled Oklahoma Choctaw Cycle (Limestone Gap, Red Cedar, and The Old Place) for chamber ensemble, to the short and accessible Choctaw Animals piano pieces, recently made available by MIT.
