UCLA Faculty Composers Concert

Grammy-Award winning composer Richard Danielpour has established himself as one of the most gifted and sought-after composers of his generation. His music has attracted an international and illustrious array of champions, and, as a devoted mentor and educator, he has also had a significant impact on the younger generation of composers. His list of commissions include some of the most celebrated artists of our day including Yo-Yo Ma, Jessye Norman, Dawn Upshaw, Susan Graham, Emanuel Ax, Gil Shaham, Frederica von Stade, Thomas Hampson, Gary Graffman, Anthony McGill, the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, the Guarneri and Emerson String Quartets, the New York City, Pacific Northwest and Nashville Ballets, and institutions such as the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Maryinsky and Vienna Chamber Orchestras, Orchestre National de France, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and many more. With Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, Danielpour created Margaret Garner, his first opera, which premiered in 2005 and had a second production with New York City Opera. He has received two awards from the American Academy and Institute of Arts & Letters, a Guggenheim Award, the Bearns Prize from Columbia University, two Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, and The Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin. He served on the composition faculty of Manhattan School of Music from 1993 to 2017. Danielpour recently relocated to Los Angeles where he has accepted the position of Professor of Music at the Herb Alpert School of Music at UCLA. He is also a member of the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music where he has taught since 1997.

In July of 2018, Danielpour’s The Passion of Yeshua, a 100 minute passion oratorio in Hebrew and English, commissioned by the Oregon Bach Festival, the Buffalo Philharmonic, and the SDG Foundation, was premiered at the Oregon Bach Festival with JoAnn Faletta conducting. The work was then performed in December at Royce Hall in Los Angeles with the UCLA Philharmonia and Chorus led by music director Neal Stulberg and choral director James Bass. Finally, in April 2019, JoAnn Faletta lead the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus in performances of The Passion of Yeshua, where it was recorded by Naxos. The album was released in March of 2020 to critical acclaim and is currently considered for three separate GRAMMYs, including best contemporary classical composition. 2020 ended with the premiere of An American Mosaic with pianist Simone Dinnerstein. The piece, which consists of 15 miniatures, pays homage to groups effected by the pandemic in unique ways and was virtually premiered in connection with the Oregon Bach Festival. 2021 will once again see new and innovative works, the most significant of them being A Standing Witness, a series of 14 songs which are settings of poems written by celebrated poet Rita Dove. Composed for mezzo-soprano Susan Graham and Music from Copland House, this one-hour work which witnesses the last 50 years of our American history will be premiered in several cities beginning in the summer of 2021.

Danielpour is one of the most recorded composers of his generation; many of his recordings can be found on the Naxos of America and Sony Classical labels. Danielpour’s music is published by Lean Kat Music and Associated Music Publishers. For more information about Richard Danielpour, please visit his website at: www.Richard-Danielpour.com.

Kay Rhie (이규림) is a composer of contemporary classical music which often explores the issues of belonging and the science of acoustics. Born in South Korea, she grew up in Los Angeles and trained in both the West and the East Coast. Her immigrant experience since her teenage years has given her an artistic base as a hybridizer. She accesses a wide-ranging palette of inspiration from classical, film, European avant-gardes music as well as various literary and artistic traditions. In her choral work Tears for Te Wano, a 19th-century Maori chant and a 16th-century Renaissance motet are fused together while highlighting each distinct chant tradition. Her solo piano work Arirang uses a Korean folk tune as a descant, shrouds it in blues-infused harmony.

Rhie’s music in which “vehemence and reticence, intimacy and plainness co-exist” (American Academy of Arts and Letter) has found an increasing audience. Past highlights include performances by the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, the BBC Singers, the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, the Moscow Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, TM+, Ensemble X, Winsor Music, In Mulieribus, a commission by pianist Gloria Cheng, violinist Andrew Jennings among others.

Her current projects include a chamber opera Quake, a commission by Opera UCLA. A comedic reimagination of the ending of Odyssey, the opera asks two questions: what homecoming means for modern people and how one might break from fate. Featuring four soloists, four-member Greek Chorus and chamber orchestra, this 60-minute chamber opera is scheduled to open in 2022 by Opera UCLA in Los Angeles.

Another upcoming project is a commission from the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra: Five Petals is about displacement from home and a desire to belong. Using the text from Theresa Hak Kyoung Cha’s ground-breaking Dictee, three Korean poets from the colonial period, and finally a modern Korean poet Hye-Soon Kim, Five Petals depicts a struggle to ground one’s identity in a land that was not their own. This performance has been rescheduled for the 2021-22 season in Walt Disney Concert Hall.

A recipient of the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Rhie was the Music Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University. Rhie has enjoyed honors and residencies from the Ojai Music Festival, London Festival of American Music, the Tanglewood Music Center (Otto Eckstein Composition Fellow) where she was the winner of the Geffen-Solomon New Music Commission, Seal Bay Chamber Music Festival, Aspen Music Festival, and School, the Banff Centre for the Arts, and the Chamber Music Conference and Composers’ Forum of the East among others.

She began playing the piano at age seven in South Korea and continued her musical studies in Los Angeles. After she studied piano performance and composition at the University of California at Los Angeles, she received her Doctorate of Musical Arts degree in composition at Cornell University. Her composition teachers include Steven Stucky, Roberto Sierra, Paul Chihara, Ian Krouse, David Lefkowitz, John Harbison, Samuel Adler, Stephen Hartke, and Colin Matthews. She studied piano performance with Xak Bjerken, Malcolm Bilson, and Ick-Choo Moon.

Born in 1956 in Olney, Maryland, composer Ian Krouse has been hailed by Gramophone as “one of the most communicative and intriguing young composers on the music scene today.”  Of his well-known Bulerías, Soundboard described his music as "absorbing, brutal, beautiful, and harsh, all at the same time."  He is widely known for his pioneering development of the guitar quartet, of which he has composed eleven to date, including the epic Quartet No. 5 Labyrinth (On A Theme of Led Zeppelin), most of which have received multiple recordings and are now featured regularly in the touring repertories of the leading groups of our time. Several of his solo guitar works, most notably Air (In the Irish style) and Variations On A Moldavian Hora, have received multiple recordings and are performed regularly by guitarists all over the world.

Though some have described his music as “universalism” or “totalism”, the eminent American composer Richard Danielpour has drawn a comparison between Krouse’s music and that of the great Hungarian composer, Bela Bartok, in that both composers rely heavily upon folk, popular, and world music influences. Though certainly true in Krouse’s case, many of his works also draw much from Renaissance, Baroque and Medieval music.

His most important work is the epic Armenian Requiem, Op. 66, scored for four vocal soloists, string quartet, organ, Armenian instruments, children’s chorus, choir, and orchestra, which received its premiere to general acclaim in April, 2015, at UCLA’s Royce Hall. Commissioned by the Lark Musical Society to commemorate the 100th year anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, the Armenian Requiem is the first ever large-scale concert setting of the traditional Armenian requiem liturgy. The debut recording of the work was released in March, 2019 on Naxos to considerable acclaim:

“Ian Krouse’s Armenian Requiem…a powerful case for redemption through music…is a timeless and timely pan-religious call to fight against oppression, not with arms and violence, but with immortal song.” (Gramophone, 2019) “This is a stunning work….proof that there still are composers who can summon the heights and depths of humanity in their music.” (American Record Guide, 2019).

Krouse’s vocal works, of which there are dozens, including song cycles, three vocal symphonies, choral works, and two operas, have over the past few years brought the composer some attention. In the lead up to the premiere of the Armenian Requiem, the Lark Musical Society commissioned two works on Armenian texts: Nocturnes, on poems by Metzarents, Mahari and Terian, for baritone and string quintet, conducted by the composer in performances in Los Angeles, Tuscany and Yerevan, with baritone Vladimir Chernov and the UCLA Camarades string ensemble, and Fire of Sacrifice, on poetry of Charents, for soprano and chorus, premiered by Vatsche Barsoumian and the Lark Master Singers. Of Nocturnes, critic Charles Fierro wrote in 2010:

“The most striking work of the day was the song cycle Nocturnes for baritone and string quintet…The metaphors of darkness and light, both physical and psychological, inform the words and the music with depth and empathy.  The trajectory of Krouse’s score is powerful because it is complex and truthful. His expert use of a widely extended tonality conveys strong emotion, as witnessed by the enthusiastic audience response. This is music that will repay many hearings. It clearly deserves a place in the standard repertory.” 

Nocturnes was released by Naxos in 2020.

Other vocal works for which he is known are his song cycles Cantar de los Cantares (Song of Songs) and Invocation, (also released by Naxos in 2020), both written for American soprano Jessica Rivera who released the former in 2009 for Urtext Digital Classics to critical acclaim, and the earlier Cinco Canciones Insólitas, which has been championed and recorded by American mezzo-soprano, Suzann Guzman with the Debussy Trio. In 2010 Mr. Krouse’s a cappella setting of Walt Whitman’s Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking received its successful premiere performance by the May Festival Chorus of Cincinnati under the direction of the work’s dedicatee, conductor Robert Porco.  Writing of another of Mr. Krouse’s choral works, it is at moments after I have dreamed (on a text by E.E. Cummings) Nick Strimple wrote, in the American Choral Review: “Krouse’s work is varied, surprising, engaging, and gorgeous.” Krouse’s latest choral work i carry your heart also on a text by E.E. Cummings, was recently premiered in Beverly Hills, California, by the Golden Bridge led by Suzi Digby.

In addition to hundreds of performances annually by guitarists and guitar quartets all around the world, his works have been performed or recorded by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Seocho Philharmonia Orchestra (Seoul, Korea), the Ukraine Radio and Television Orchestra, the Philharmonic Orchestras of Cairo, Armenia, and New Zealand, the UCLA Philharmonia, the USC Symphony, the Mexico City and Pasadena Chamber Orchestras, the Aureole Trio, Dinosaur Annex, 20th Century Consort, Remix, Debussy Trio, Pacific Serenades, Dilijan Ensemble, May Festival Choir, and Los Angeles Chamber Singers, to name a few.

PETER GOLUB began playing the piano when he was six. Alongside his interest in music, in high school he developed a passion for the theatre, forming a troupe with a group of classmates and directing and acting in plays by Pinter, Ionesco and Beckett. His interest in music and theatre led to his ongoing interest in dramatic music as his career travels between film, theatre, and concert music.

FILM

Golub composed the score for Chloe Zhao’s Songs My Brothers Taught Me, shown at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival and Frozen River, directed by Courtney Hunt, and winner of Jury Award for Best Film at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. The Laramie Project, directed by Moises Kaufman for HBO, was the opening night film at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival and features a score performed by The St. Luke’s Orchestra.  With James Newton Howard, he co-composed the score for The Great Debaters, directed by Denzel Washington and starring Washington and Forest Whitaker.   He composed music for the documentaries Wordplay (starring Will Shortz, Bill Clinton and Jon Stewart) and I.O.U.S.A., both directed by Patrick Creadon and both shown at the Sundance Film Festival. His score for Stolen, directed by Rebecca Dreyfus, was awarded Best Music at the 2003 Avignon Film Festival. He also scored American Gun, directed by Aric Avelino starring Forest Whitaker, Marcia Gay Harden and Donald Sutherland and Sublime, directed by Tony Krantz, starring Thomas Cavanagh. In 2021 he scored Bernstein’s Wall, which was shown at the Tribeca Film Festival.  (See the Film page for complete listing, or visit the Internet Movie Database.)

THEATRE

Broadway credits include: Time Stands Still (by Donald Marguiles, with Laura Linney; Daniel Sullivan, dir), Come Back, Little Sheba (directed by Michael Pressman, with S. Epatha Merkersen, who was nominated for the 2008 Tony Award), Hedda Gabler (directed by Nicholas Marin, with Kate Burton), and Suddenly Last Summer (directed by Mark Brokaw, with Blythe Danner).

Early in his career, Golub began working in the theatre in New York, composing numerous scores and working with some of the giants of the downtown theatre scene. During his ten-year creative partnership with Charles Ludlam, he was composer-in-residence at Ludlam’s legendary Ridiculous Theatrical Company, writing scores for such works as The Mystery of Irma Vep, Galas, Salammbo, and The Artificial Jungle. He and Ludlam wrote a dramatic scene for actor, mezzo-soprano and orchestra, The Production of Mysteries, which was performed by Lukas Foss and the Brooklyn Philharmonic He also worked on numerous shows with Joseph Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival, including Shakespeare in the Park productions of Twelfth Night (with Gregory Hines, Michelle Pfieffer and Jeff Goldblum) and Othello (with Raul Julia and Christopher Walken). His ongoing collaboration with writer/director Moises Kaufman, includes scores for Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and The Laramie Project.  He worked with the noted performance artist Ethyl Eichelberger, composing and performing in Ariadne Obnoxious at the Joyce Theater and several musical at La Mama. As a member of Joseph Chaikin’s Winter Project, he wrote and performed music for numerous productions at La Mama.

He has written two musicals: Amphigorey (with story and designs by Edward Gorey; Drama Desk Nomination) and The Idiots Karamazov (book by Albert Innaurato and Christopher Durang, lyrics by Mr. Durang). He’s also written scores for Playwrights Horizon, Manhattan Theater Club, Berkeley Rep, The Mark Taper Forum, the Huntington, Williamstown Theatre Festival, The Old Globe, Seattle Rep, American Repertory Theatre, and the American Music Theatre Festival. With playwright Richard Nelson he wrote a musical theatre piece based on Chekhov’s Platonov called “Unfinished Piece for Player Piano”, which was performed at New York Stage and Film.

CONCERT

Golub’s recent concert works include: On Gossamer Wings (for chamber orchestra), 17 Preludes for piano; Suite for Solo Violin; 8 Miniatures for Violin and Piano; Six Dirty Limericks, for soprano and piano; Ghost Songs for baritone and piano (texts by Thomas Hardy) and Light Verse for soprano and piano. Other works include: Dark Carols for Chorus and Orchestra (with text by Philip Littell, recorded on the ECM label); Threaded Dances for flute and piano; Three Interludes for guitar (recorded on Gasparao Records by Robert Phelps); As Birds Do, Mother for ‘cello and oud. His music has been performed by Tashi, The Brooklyn Philharmonic, The Jubal Trio, and numerous chamber groups and soloists. He has composed four ballet scores in collaboration with noted choreographer Peter Anastos: The Lost World, commissioned by Edward Villella for the Miami City Ballet; The Gilded Bat (story and designs by Edward Gorey, for Ballet West; performed at the Kennedy Center); Trianon (for the Atlanta Ballet); and Straight Through the Heart (for the Milwaukee Ballet). (see complete catalogue of works under “Concert”).

EDUCATION

As an undergraduate at Bennington College, he studied composition with Henry Brant, a pioneer in spatial music in the tradition of Charles Ives and a master orchestrator. (In addition to his huge catalogue of original works, Brant orchestrated film scores by Alex North, including A Streetcar Named Desire and Cleopatra.) In addition to studying the  traditional piano repertoire, he focused on 20th Century works. He continued his training at the Yale School of Music where he studied composition with Toru Takemitsu and Jacob Druckman and earned a Doctorate. His work and friendship with Takemitsu, who in addition to his concert works was the composer of a large body of film scores, was pivotal in his development and continues to be an inspiration.

AWARDS ETC.

Since 1999 he has been the Director of the Sundance Film Music Program, where he runs the yearly Composers Lab, a workshop for aspiring film composers. He was awarded the Classic Contribution Award by BMI and a 2008 Vision Award. He is also the recipient of a Charles Ives Scholarship (given by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters) as well as grants from the National Endowment of the Arts (Opera/Musical Theater Program), Meet-the-Composer, and New York Foundation for the Arts. He serves on the Board of the American Music Center.

He has taught at Bennington College, Reed College, Columbia College and CAL Arts. He is currently a continuing lecturer at UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music and teaches in the Screen Scoring Program at USC.  Golub is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.