DACE APERANE - CANADA
BORN 19 DECEMBER
The composer, organizer of musical events, teacher, conductor, and music reviewer Dace Aperans was born on December 19th, 1953 in Winnipeg, Canada to the family of the well known community affairs organizer, Latvian youth song festival initiator and organizer Mārtiņš Štauvers.
At the age of 11 D. Aperans began learning piano, and at the age of 12 she began composing (piano works and songs). D. Aperans began studying composition at McGill University in Montreal in 1972 with professors Charles Palmer, Bruce Mather, and Brian Cherney. In 1976, she graduated from the university with honours, receiving her bachelor’s degree. While studying, the budding composer founded the Montreal Latvian youth choir and worked together with the Montrealas koklētājas–dainotājas. In 1977/78 she attended theory and compositional classes at the Mannes College of Music in New York and at the Fontainebleau School of Music in Paris, where among her teachers were Nadia Boulanger and Louise Talma. From 1978 to 1980, D. Aperāne studied composition at Hunter College in New York and graduated with honours, receiving her master’s degree.
The composer first gained notice in 1976, when her work Illuminations for wind quintet received first place at the Sixth Canadian Latvian Song Festival New Composition Competition. In the following years, D. Aperans’ works were frequently performed in both American and in exile Latvian chamber concerts, as well as song festivals.
D. Aperans is regularly involved in writings about music – from the beginning of the 90s, she is a music critic for the newspaper Laiks, and a wide array of her articles about the works of Latvian composers and other themes have been published in the magazine Jaunā Gaita.
D. Aperans has received a series of awards both for her achievements in composition, as well as her work in cultural affairs. She has been awarded the Prix de La Societe Musique Canadienne(1975), the World Federation of Free Latvians Krišjānis Barons award (for her cantata Balsis [Voices]) and the World Federation of Free Latvians Note of Recognition, and the General Goppers Fund Award (1993), an award from the US organization Opera Works for her cycle Three Songs with Texts by Emily Dickinson and the honorary WFFL diploma (1996), a Note of Recognition from the New York Latvian Lutheran Church, the Jānis Bieriņš Memorial Award (1999), and the Three Star Award of Latvia (2001).
D. Aperans is a member of the Latvian Composers’ Union, the American Music Center (1990), the Canadian Music Centre (1993), SOCAN (Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada) and a member of AKKA (the Latvian Copyright and Communication Consultation Agency – 1995)
♫ LISTEN
Variations on a Latvian Folk Song by Dace Aperane
Variations on a Latvian Folk Song by Dace Aperane
REBECCA SAUNDERS - UK
BORN 19 DECEMBER
Rebecca Saunders (born 19 December 1967) is a London-born composer who lives and works freelance in Berlin. In a 2017 Classic Voice poll of the greatest works of art music since 2000, the number of total votes received by Saunders compositions was the third highest (30), surpassed only by the works of Georg Friedrich Haas (49) and Simon Steen-Andersen (35).
Saunders studied violin and composition at the University of Edinburgh, earning a PhD in Composition in 1997. As a DAAD scholar, she studied with Wolfgang Rihm from 1991 to 1994 at the Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe; Nigel Osborne supervised her doctoral thesis.
Her awards include the Busoni Prize of the Berlin Academy of the Arts, Sponsorship award (1994), the Ernst von Siemens Composers' Prize (1996), the Hindemith Prize of the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival (2003), the composition prize of the ARD, and the Mauricio Kagel Music Prize (2015). In 2019 she won the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize (main prize), the second woman, and first female composer to be awarded.
Saunders’s music is characterized by limited pitch material and a wide breadth of timbral complexity. She is fascinated with resonance and extraneous noise created by instrumentalists, such as the scratch of a bow change, the thud of the pedals of a piano or harp, and the taps and slides of the left hand on a string instrument’s fingerboard. Due to the subtleties and specificity of the sounds she creates, Saunders includes lengthy textual explanations in many of her scores to describe each effect that she wishes the performer to produce.
Much of Saunders’s music is based upon a single pitch, or sometimes a small collection of pitches which govern large sections of music. Therefore, development and elaboration are determined more by sonority and texture rather than traditional voice leading. However, she does sometimes include “quasi-diatonic” pitch collections, which suggest a more traditional context than that of her music based on single notes.
Source: Rebecca Saunders Official Website and Wikipedia
♫ LISTEN
Molly's Song by Rebecca Saunders
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