BORN 6 APRIL
Vanessa Lann has been a composer and pianist since the age of five. She studied composition with Ruth Schonthal at the Westchester Conservatory of Music, where she received the William Petchek Scholarship. For two summers she was a scholarship student at the Tanglewood Institute. She was graduated summa cum laude from the music department of Harvard University (composition, theory, musicology, piano performance, conducting), where her teachers included Earl Kim, Leon Kirchner and Peter Lieberson. Lann won the New York Music Teachers Association 'Herbert Zipper Prize,' the New York Musicians Club 'Bohemians Prize' and the Harvard University 'Hugh F. MacColl Prize.' She directed the Harvard Group For New Music and was co-founder of the Harvard Group For Gender Studies In Music. She also produced and announced radio feature programs (WHRB, Cambridge) and worked as music director for productions at the American Repertory Theatre. In addition to her music courses, Lann studied film theory and physics. In 1990 Vanessa Lann was awarded the Harvard University 'John Knowles Paine Travelling Fellowship,' which brought her to The Netherlands for further study in music composition. She received her Diploma with highest honors in 1993 from the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, where her teachers included Theo Loevendie, Gilius van Bergeijk and Louis Andriessen.
The majority of Vanessa Lann's compositions include aspects of ritual, ceremony or contemplation. She is interested in breaking with the conventional concert-hall approach to the performance and programming of music, and she frequently experiments with alternative ways of sharing sound, other media and time with audiences, often hoping to blur the boundary between art and daily experience. In her music Lann uses the repetition of recognizable figures, as well as layers of structures based on number ratios, to create a world in which each subtle element has a distinct meaning. In many works she explores the listener's perception of continuity, infinity and silence, as well as the shifting psychological relationship between foreground and background material, or between performer and audience. Lann is intrigued by the boundaries of what is audible: how long or how quietly a note can be appreciated, how a performer's changing physical experience of a musical gesture changes its nature, why an altered context of a recognizable element can render it absurd or divine. She embraces the sensuality of the rawest of sounds, as well as the riskiness and "impolite" quality inherent in the seemingly endless recurrence of the most basic, even childlike, patterns. She searches for extremes within limited means and asks the listener to enter the time and sound world of the music in as simple a manner as possible: as the essence of the music gradually becomes apparent, she hopes that the listener continuously reevaluates his relationship to the music and to the meaning of listening, itself.
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BARBARA BENARY - USA
BORN 6 APRIL
Barbara Benary was an American composer and ethnomusicologist specializing in Indonesian and Indian music.
Benary composed music for a number of theatrical productions at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club during the 1970s. She composed music for the ETC Company of La MaMa's repertory production of The Only Jealousy of Emer, which was produced during the early 1970s at La MaMa's East Village theater and on tour. She also composed music for Gauntlet or the Moon's on Fire, written and directed by John Braswell and produced at La MaMa in 1976.
In 1976, she co-founded Gamelan Son of Lion with Philip Corner and Daniel Goode. Benary also constructed most of the group's instruments. Benary performed with Gamelan Son of Lion in a production called 1001 Instruments You've Never Seen or Heard at La MaMa in 1979.
Her major works include two shadow puppet operas entitled Karna and The Story of Esther.
She was married to the woodwind player and instrument designer Steven Silverstein.
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Three Not Pavane
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