You’ll find yourself at the very center of contemporary music-making with a special concert featuring new works by three young composers—Viet Cuong, Dani Howard, and Michael Schachter—conducted in rotation by six emerging conductors, the culmination of the prestigious Conductors/Composers Workshop. The concert is a chance to hear new voices now shaping the future of orchestral music, and a fascinating look at variations offered by a conductor’s interpretation. Don’t miss the excitement when the creative sparks fly!
2016 In the Works Composers
VIET CUONG (b. 1990) is a composer who has had works performed on six continents by musicians and ensembles including Sō Percussion, the PRISM Saxophone Quartet, JACK Quartet, American Modern Ensemble, Gallicantus, Music From Copland House, Winston-Salem Symphony, Mimi Stillman, Anthony McGill, Lisa Moore, and over seventy college and conservatory wind ensembles. Cuong’s music has been featured in diverse venues such as Carnegie Hall, the Aspen Music Festival, International Double Reed Society Conference, Boston GuitarFest, US Navy Band International Saxophone Symposium, and on American Public Radio’s Performance Today. Awards include the ASCAP Morton Gould Award, Suzanne and Lee Ettelson Award, Theodore Presser Foundation Music Award, New York Youth Symphony First Music Commission, Cortona Prize, and Walter Beeler Memorial Prize. He has been an artist in residence at Copland House, Yaddo, Ucross, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and was a scholarship student at the Aspen, Bowdoin, and Lake Champlain music festivals. A graduate of the Peabody Conservatory, Cuong is currently a Naumburg and Roger Sessions PhD Candidate at Princeton University. His teachers include Kevin Puts, Oscar Bettison, Steven Mackey, and Donnacha Dennehy. vietcuongmusic.com
DANI HOWARD (b. 1993) graduated from the Royal College of Music, London, where she received a first class BMus Honors Degree. Howard was a Rose Williams scholar supported by the Henry Wood Trust, and studied composition under Jonathan Cole. Her compositions have been performed internationally including Europe and the UK, Hong Kong, Brazil, and the USA.
Howard was a winner of the 2015 Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize, as well as a London Symphony Orchestra Sound-hub Associate Member. In February 2016, her work Velvet Spires was performed by the RCM Philharmonic, as part of their Concerto Competition. In 2014 she was named winner of the Royal Philharmonic Society/IdeasTap Sound:Vision Competition. She was awarded 3rd Prize and Special Prize for the Best Free Composition among junior participants in both the 5th and 6th International Antonin Dvořák Composition Competition, Prague. In 2015 she was selected as one of seven finalists for the International A. Rendano composition competition, Italy. Howard was shortlisted for the British Section of the World Music Days Festival, Slovenia, and won 3rd Prize in the Cheng-du Sun River Composition Prize, China. danihoward.com
MICHAEL SCHACHTER (b.1987 in Boston, MA) is an Ann Arbor-based composer, pianist, teacher and scholar. His works have been commissioned and performed by ensembles such as the Minnesota Orchestra, the Naples Philharmonic Orchestra, Alarm Will Sound, the 21st Century Consort, the Aurea Silva Trio, and the New York Virtuoso Singers. Recent and current projects include a New York Youth Symphony First Music chamber commission, a choral-orchestral setting of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Uriel” for the Concord Chorus, a new choir-band work for Harvard University’s 2017 commencement exercises, and an opera based on Langston Hughes’s “The Black Clown” for the American Repertory Theater. Currently a Ph.D. candidate in Music Theory and Composition at the University of Michigan, Schachter earned his BA from Harvard in 2009, and he spent the 2009–10 academic year on a John Knowles Paine Fellowship studying Karnatak music in Chennai, India. He is a die-hard Boston sports fan. michaelschachter.com
Photo: rr jones
