2017-18 COLLABORATORS
ADAM ROBERTS
Adam Roberts writes music that takes listeners on compelling journeys while drawing on a vivid array of sonic resources. Roberts’ music has been performed by ensembles such as the Arditti Quartet, the JACK Quartet, le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, the Callithumpian Consort, Earplay, andPlay duo, Transient Canvas, Ums ‘n Jip, Fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center, the Boston Conservatory Wind Ensemble, the Association for the Promotion of New Music, violist Garth Knox, Guerilla Opera, and at festivals such as Wien Modern (Vienna), Tanglewood, the Biennale Musique en Scene (Lyons), and the 2009 ISCM World Music Days (Sweden).
Roberts’ music has been called “a powerful success,” “arresting,” and “amazingly lush,” (the Boston Musical Intelligencer), “an attractive mix of the familiar and exotic,” and “otherworldly” (Boston Classical Review), and “invigorating” with a “persistent melodic urge” (American Academy of Arts and Letters citation).
Roberts is a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow and is the recipient of a 2016 Fromm Foundation Commission. Other honors include the Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, the Bernard Rogers Prize (Eastman), the New York Bohemians Prize (Harvard), the André Chevillion-Yvonne Bonnaud Prize from the Orléans Piano Competition, the Earplay Donald Aird Award, the Christoph and Stefan Kaske Fellowship from the Wellesley Composers Conference, the Leonard Bernstein Fellowship from the Tanglewood Music Center, the Bldodgett Prize (Harvard), and other awards. Commissions have come from the Rochester Society for Chamber Music, the Callithumpian Consort, the Boston Conservatory Wind Ensemble, pianist Nolan Pearson, the Tanglewood Music Center, Guerilla Opera, and others.
Roberts obtained a Bachelor’s degree in composition from the Eastman School of Music in 2003 and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2010. Roberts also studied at the University for Music and Performing Arts in Vienna from 2007-2008 on a Harvard University Sheldon Traveling Fellowship. Roberts’ primary teachers have included David Liptak, Augusta Read Thomas, Julian Anderson, and Chaya Czernowin. Roberts has taught at Harvard University, Northeastern University, Istanbul Technical University’s Center for Advanced Studies in Music, and he is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Composition at the University of Georgia’s Hugh Hodgson School of Music. Roberts’ first disc, “Leaf Metal,” was released on Tzadik Records in January 2014, and his work "Nostalgia Variations" will be released on the New Focus label this summer.
Adam Roberts's piece was commissioned by the Johnstone Fund For New Music on behalf of Bearthoven.
KRISTINA WOLFE
Kristina Wolfe is a composer, electronic musician, maker, and multi-instrumentalist. Of Danish and American heritage, Wolfe spent many of her formative years wandering through the forests of Mols Bjerge (near the city of Aarhus) in Denmark listening to the sounds of space and place. This environment, rich with neolithic graves, stone markers, and ancient roadways cultivated her imagination and creative focus on the spirits of the past, and has inspired her composition and listening practices up to the present day.
Wolfe, a lifelong composer, acquired an interest in electronic music as an undergraduate studying with Dr. Kristine Burns at Florida International University in Miami where she graduated in 2007 with a B.A. In Music Technology. Her work for Viola da Gamba and Electronics was presented at the International Computer Music Conference, the International Alliance for Women in Music Conference, and the Third Practice Electro-Acoustic Music Festival in 2006. In 2007, Wolfe was the Greg Altman Media Intern at the Deep Listening Institute at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), under Pauline Oliveros.
Wolfe continued her studies at Dartmouth College under Jon Appleton, Michael Casey, Charles Dodge, and Kui Dong, where she graduated in 2009 with an M.A. In Digital Musics. While at Dartmouth, Wolfe was awarded an International Computer Music Association Student Scholarship, and was chosen for a 2008 residency at Visiones Sonoras in Morelia, Michoacan, Mexico under Dennis Smalley. Other notable teachers include Paul Lansky, Robert Hasegawa, and Dan Trueman.
More recently, while at Brown University (PhD 2016), Wolfe was awarded residencies at the 2013 Ostrava New Music Festival in Ostrava, Czech Republic; the 2013 Composit Festival and Institute in Rieti, Italy (under Philippe Leroux, Josh Fineberg, and Davide Ianni); and the Centre D'Art Contemporani I Sostenibilitat El Forn de la Calc in Calders, Catalonia, Spain. Her work has been featured at the Darmstadt International New Music Festival (2012), the International Computer Music Conference (2012), the Electro-acoustic Music Studies Conference (2013) and many others. Her article, Sonification and the Mysticism of Negation was published in Organised Sound in 2014.
In 2016, she was be a resident at Bang-On-A-Can Summer Festival at MASS MoCA in Western Massachusetts. She was also a finalist for the 2016 Viol Composition Competition (Viola da Gamba Society) and the 2014 Pauline Oliveros Prize (IAWM Search for New Music). She won first prize in the Villiers 2016 New Works Composition Competition and was also awarded a MATA commission.
SCOTT WOLLSCHLEGER
Scott Wollschleger (b. 1980)’s music has been highly praised for its arresting timbres and conceptual originality. Wollschleger “has become a formidable, individual presence” (The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross) in the contemporary musical landscape. His distinct musical language explores themes of art in dystopia, the conceptualization of silence, synesthesia, and creative repetition in form and has been described as “apocalyptic,” “distinctive and magnetic,” possessing a “hushed, cryptic beauty,” (The New Yorker, Alex Ross) and as “evocative” and “kaleidoscopic” (The New York Times).
Wollschleger’s concert works can be heard across the US and the world, most recently featured at NOW! Festival in Graz Austria, MATA Festival Interval Series, and the Festival of New American Music in Sacramento. His critically acclaimed piano concerto, Meditation on Dust, was recently performed by pianist Karl Larson at the Bang on a Can Festival at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. His apocalyptic monodrama, We Have Taken and Eaten, was featured on NPR’s Arts & Letters. Upcoming and recent projects include commissions from andplay, Bearthoven, violist Anne Lanzilotti, Metropolis Ensemble with violinist Rachel Lee Priday in collaboration with the String Orchestra of Brooklyn, and Third Angle Music. His debut album, Soft Aberration, was released on New Focus Recordings in 2017 and was named a Notable Recording of 2017 in The New Yorker.
Following lightly in the footsteps of the New York School, Wollschleger received his Masters of Music in composition from Manhattan School of Music in 2005, where he studied with Nils Vigeland. Wollschleger was a Co-Artistic Director of Red Light New Music, a 501c(3) non-profit organization dedicated to presenting and crafting contemporary music. In addition to his musical ideas, he frequently delves into the philosophical writings of Deleuze, Nietzsche, and Brecht and maintains an ongoing collaboration with Deleuzian scholar Corry Shores. Their recently co-authored thesis, Rhythm Without Time, was successfully presented at the London Graduate School’s academic conference, “Rhythm and Event.” Wollschleger’s work is published by Project Schott New York.