1 AUGUST 2019

ADRIENNE ALBERT - USA 
BORN 1 AUGUST

Award-winning composer Adrienne Albert has had her chamber, choral, vocal, orchestral and wind band works performed throughout the United States and across the globe. Before beginning composing her own music in the 1990s, Albert enjoyed a long career as a singer working with composers including Igor Stravinsky, Leonard Bernstein, Philip Glass, Gunther Schuller among others,. Adrienne’s own music has been supported by noteworthy arts organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts, American Composers Forum, Meet The Composer/Rockefeller Foundation, Subito Awards, Mu Phi Epsilon Fraternity, MPE Foundation, ACME, and ASCAP. Recent commissions include works for The Cornell University Chorus, Harvard-Westlake School, Holyoke Civic Symphony, Mu Phi Epsilon Foundation, Palisades Virtuosi, Zinkali Trio, Pennsylvania Academy of Music, Chamber Music Palisades, Pacific Serenades as well as private individuals. A graduate of UCLA, Albert studied composition privately with Stephen Mosko, and orchestration with Albert Harris. Her music has been recorded on MSR, Naxos, Navona, Centaur, Little Piper, Albany, and ABC Records and is published by Kenter Canyon Music (ASCAP). Her music can also be found through Falls House Press, FluteWorld, Theodore Front Musical Literature, and Trevco-Varner Music.

In 2007, Adrienne composed several commissions including Between the dark and daylight, a three-movement work for flute, violin, viola, cello and harp (Nightdreams, Lullaby, and Daydreams) for Pacific Serenades, an Evensong Cycle commissioned by St. Bedes Church in Mar Vista, CA. that premiered in May, 2007. 

She is former Composer-In-Residence for both The Wagner Ensemble and The Los Angeles Doctors Symphony Orchestra who commissioned two orchestral works, "Courage" (2000) and "Western Suite" (1999), both of which were premiered by LADSO on the West Coast and have had numerous performances across the country including performances by Virginia Symphony Orchestra, The Hewlett-Packard Symphony Orchestra, The Old Post Road Orchestra, the Carson City Symphony, Kona Symphony and the Conway Symphony Orchestra in Central Arkansas among many others. "Courage for Winds "(2009) was commissioned by a Consortium of Wind Bands headed by Jeffrey Boeckman, Director of the Inland Empire Youth Wind Symphony.

♫ LISTEN

Boundaries by Adrienne Albert  

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JANET HARBISON  
BORN  1 AUGUST   

Born in Dublin in 1955 into two worlds of music: traditional Irish and classical art music. At Trinity College Dublin, the Dublin College of Music and Cork University, Janet studied performance on a range of instruments: principally piano, composition and conducting and won a number of national competitions at the Feis Ceol. As a traditional musician, she played and developed informally within the community of traditional music, first on whistle and bodhran, and after taking up the harp at age 13 (with Mairin Ferriter at Sion Hill), she brought her harp to the session. By 1981, Janet had won every national Irish harp competition (including the All-Ireland Championship) and a number of international festival competitions (including the Isle of Man Millennium Competition and Festival International de l’Harpe Celtique, Dinan).

After some years of performing throughout Europe and America and composing film music, she moved to Northern Ireland primarily to pursue her doctorate but, with 'the troubles' (civil strife) still raging, found purpose in using music as a meeting place for the two traditions. Janet was awarded a 2 year Research Fellowship at the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen’s University, Belfast from where she progressed to the appointment of Curator of Music at the Ulster Folk Museum. Here, she established cross-community initiatives and collaborations in cultural heritage (including the formation of the Belfast Harp Orchestra (Grammy Award winners with the Chieftains), directing the Belfast Harpers Bicentenary Festival (including the World Harp Festival Belfast), establishing the Harp Foundation Ireland Ltd, a charitable community organization which she served as CEO for 8 years from 1994 accruing many awards and accolades for her achievements in helping the peace process (including an honorary doctorate from Ulster University). In 2002, Janet moved 'home' to Castleconnell, county Limerick establishing the Irish Harp Centre, a permanent base for her harp orchestra and residential harp college.

At the Irish Harp Centre, Janet trained up and directed another community of professional harpers and teachers - catering for students from all over the world who aspired to careers in stage and studio performance, ceremonial performance (weddings), as entertainers (background and corporate), teachers and as therapists in palliative health-care. With her regular touring Irish Harp Orchestra (now with management in Munich, Germany), and having published her traditional (oral) ‘Harp Method’ (with 6 tutor books and teacher support manuals (2006), and having further developed the Irish Harp College examinations system, teacher training courses and 1-3 year professional apprenticeships, Janet was at her zenith - however with 9-11, recession and family responsibilities, and exhaustion after her 2014 Brian Boru Millennium year, Janet was content to return to academe on her appointment as Visiting Professor of (Irish) Music at the University of Ulster at Magee College, Derry in Northern Ireland in July 2016.

From her home base currently in London, Janet travels to Northern Ireland for her activities there, and continues to compose, perform, teach, write and record.

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Bright Morning by Janet Harbison 

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24 MAY 2019

DEIRDRE GRIBBIN - IRELAND

BORN 24 MAY

"Deirdre Gribbin is a charismatic and intriguing new voice in contemporary music."

Paul Conway - The Independent Deirdre Gribbin is a composer from Northern Ireland.

Gribbin was born in Belfast. She studied at Queen's University Belfast where, at the age of twenty, she began to compose. Further studies were in London and in Denmark (the latter with Per Nørgård). Her first professional success came in 1991, when her piano piece Per Speculum in Aenigmate won the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival Composition Prize.

Subsequent major works have included the piano quartet Jack B. (inspired by the work of the Irish painter Jack B. Yeats), the piano trio How to Make the Water Sound, the opera Hey Persephone!, the violin concerto Venus Blazing and the clarinet concerto Celestial Pied Piper, the latter composed in New York where she was a Fulbright Fellow in 1999-2000. Several of her works respond to the political climate of her homeland, such as the ensemble piece Tribe, the orchestral work Unity of Being, and her epic percussion concerto Goliath, premiered at the Belfast Festival in 2006.

She won an award in the 2003 UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers with her orchestral work Empire States, and an Arts Foundation Award for her first opera, Hey Persephone!. She was Artistic Director of the London-based Society for the Promotion of New Music (SPNM) from 2003-05. Richard Morrison of the Times wrote of her in June 2004: "This Belfast born composer is one of the most original thinkers in years."

Her music has been performed at The Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York. Empire States for orchestra was an award winner in the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers. She also won an Arts Foundation Award for her prestigious opera Hey Persephone! for Aldeburgh and Almeida Festivals. Deirdre has been exploring links between music and genetics at Sanger Institute, Cambridge and UCL London developing music codes from human DNA. She is a Sir Winston Churchill Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar and a Leverhulme Overseas Fellow. (see events pages)

She is Artistic Director of 'Venus Blazing Music Theatre Trust', working with young people with learning disabilities.

♫ LISTEN 

Trough every wind that blows by Deirdre Gribbin

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DONIA JARRAR  - USA
BORN 24 MAY

Dr. Donia Jarrar is an Arab and Muslim-American composer, pianist, scholar and interdisciplinary artist. Her music spans the genres of classical, electronic, experimental and pop, with improvisation as a key element of her performance practice. Born to a Palestinian father and an Egyptian-Greek mother, who grew up between Kuwait, Egypt, the West Bank, and the United States, her personal experiences have strongly shaped her compositional voice, leading her to explore themes of intergenerational memory, trauma, identity, exile, displacement, and cultural narrative in her work.

She received her Doctor of Musical Arts and Master of Musical Arts degrees from the University of Michigan. 

Jarrar was recently awarded the 2019 Discovery Grant for Female Composers from the National Opera Center of America for her work Seamstress, a documentary multimedia opera based on oral history interviews conducted with Palestinian women and girls from her community. She is also currently the only woman to be awarded First Prize in the Marcel Khalife Competition for the Young Palestinian Composer (40 and Under) for her work Border Crossings, a programmatic piece for voice, spoken word and orchestra describing her family’s flight out of Kuwait as refugees of the Gulf War. She has been commissioned by the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art and is a featured musician on the Emmy-award winning series Arab American Stories. The film version of Seamstress also premiered at the 6th DC Palestinian Film & Arts Festival. Her music has been featured in Reorient Magazine and MidEast Tunes: Music for Social Change, and her solo piano work “Perpetual Dance” was recently released on disk and iTunes on the compilation album project Letters to Palestine. Whether recording audio samples and interviews on the streets of Cairo in Tahrir Square or between the bars of a caged turnstile at a military checkpoint, her electronic music heavily features found sound within occupied public spaces, and has been published online at Textsound and featured in documentary shorts including Egyptian filmmaker Laura ElTantaway’s “Crazy for Sisi.” Jarrar has presented at several panels, forums and festivals in the U.S. and abroad, most recently in an interdisciplinary dance and multimedia improvisational work as part of the New Arab American Avant Garde panel at DIWAN’s forum for the Arts, and her work as a translator during the January 25 Egyptian Revolution led to her being invited to present as a TEDx Fellow at the University of Michigan. She is also a juror for the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival.

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Cairo I love you Part 1 by Donia Jarrar 

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19 MARCH 2019

ELIZABETH MACONCHY - UK    

BORN 19 MARCH 

Elizabeth Maconchy was a composer of great versatility and unfailing integrity, amply deserving of a British critic’s description of her as ‘one of the most substantial composers these islands have yet produced’. Born to Irish parents in Hertfordshire on 19 March 1907, she grew up in rural Ireland, playing the piano and writing music from the age of six. She studied at the Royal College of Music with Vaughan Williams, who remained a lifelong friend; but she was attracted less by English pastoralism than by the central European modernism of Bartók and Janáček, and she completed her studies with K.B. Jirák in Prague.

In the post-war era, Maconchy was greatly in demand as a composer amongst the leading professional ensembles, orchestras and soloists of the day, whilst also writing for amateurs and students, and was recognised as a leader of her profession: she chaired the Composers’ Guild of Great Britain, was President of the Society for the Promotion of New Music, and in 1987 was appointed Dame of the British Empire. She lived in an Essex village with her husband, the scholar and medical historian William LeFanu, to whom she was married for over sixty years; the younger of their two daughters is the composer Nicola LeFanu. ‘Betty’ Maconchy, as she was affectionately known by many, died in November 1994.

 
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Overture, Proud Thames by Elizabeth Maconchy

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KATIA TIUTIUNNIK - AUSTRALIA   

BORN 19 MARCH

Katia Tiutiunnik is an Australian violist, scholar and composer. She is of Russian, Ukrainian and Irish descent. 

Tiutiunnik's compositions have been published in Australia, Italy and the United States and are held in several international libraries, including the Bodleian Library at Oxford University (which also holds a copy of her doctoral thesis, The Symbolic Dimension: An Exploration of the Compositional Process),  Harvard College Library,  the National Library of Australia and the Wiener Music Library at Columbia University. On 11 December 2009, a revised version of Tiutiunnik's doctoral dissertation was published as a book and released internationally. Tiutiunnik's published dissertation received an extensive, scholarly review by Australian musicologist, Dr. Sally Macarthur, in the prestigious, peer reviewed journal, Musicology Australia, in July 2011.

The symbolic dimensions of a number of Tiutiunnik's compositions have been associated with the motif of the journey through darkness to illumination. Also, several of Tiutiunnik's works have been inspired by Islamic mysticism and related traditions—the musical symbols therein often manifesting themselves in the form of compositional processes emanating from her interpretations of Near Eastern traditions of numerology. Other important influences on the symbolic dimensions of Tiutiunnik's compositions include the landscapes, flora and fauna of Australia; historical and current events pertaining to the Middle East, in addition to the religion and mythology of Ancient Mesopotamia.

♫ LISTEN

Night Journey for String Quartet by Katia Tiutiunnik

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