The UMBC Department of Music presents its spring 2004 season, featuring an array of contemporary classical music concerts by world renowned artists, including composer Christian Wolff, pianist Stephen Drury, flutist Jane Rigler and the Ruckus ensemble.

January 28
Patricia Green, mezzo soprano
12 pm, Fine Arts Recital Hall
Admission is free.

Mezzo soprano Patricia Green will perform King Harald's Saga (1979), a short opera for solo voice by Judith Weir. Green will host a vocal masterclass with UMBC students after her performance. Patricia Green has gained acclaim for her expressive voice, noted for its three-octave ease in diverse repertoire. Her international career includes performances with L'Orchestre de Radio-France, the Dutch Radio Philharmonic, the National Symphony, the Northern Israel Philharmonic, the Theater Chamber Players, Washington Bach Consort, Vancouver New Music, Onafhankelijk Collective, Bethlehem Bach Society, and New Music Concerts (Toronto). Her performances with conductors Pierre Boulez, Leonard Slatkin, Reinbert de Leeuw, Peter Eötvös, Pascal Rophé and Sir David Willcocks have been broadcast internationally on both television and radio. As a performer of new music, she is sought out by international composers. She has recordings on Newport Classics, Albany Records, and Live Unity Productions. Ms. Green received the Artist Diploma from the Peabody Conservatory, winning the George Castelle Prize. She teaches at Michigan State University.

February 15
Lisa Cella, flute
3 pm, Fine Arts Recital Hall
$7 general admission, $3 seniors, free for students, free with a UMBC ID.

Flutist Lisa Cella will perform Chronopolis by Franklin Cox, Flutter by Robert Rowe, Landmines by Anna Rubin, and other works. Artistic Director of San Diego New Music, Ms. Cella received a DMA in contemporary flute performance at the University of California, San Diego while studying with John Fonville. She has performed with SONOR, the faculty ensemble of UCSD, SIRIUS, and in various concert series and festivals in the San Diego area. She is a founding member of NOISE, the resident ensemble of San Diego New Music and runs the music series Noise at the Library at the Athenaeum Library in San Diego, California. She received her Applied Bachelors in Music with a dual concentration in Psychology from Syracuse University under the tutelage of John Oberbrunner. Upon graduation, she received the Civic Morning Musicals award for excellence in performance. She then received a Master of Music degree and a Graduate Performance Diploma from Peabody Conservatory, where she studied with Robert Willoughby. While in Baltimore, she was the winner of the 1992 Washington Flute Fair Young Artist Competition and founded the flute and guitar duo, Adesso!, which was a finalist in the Baltimore Chamber Competition. A dedicated performer of contemporary music, Cella was a member of the Baltimore based contemporary ensemble Polaris in 1993. She attended the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival in 1993 and was a fellowship member of the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble at the Aspen Music Festival for two summers. She is the founding member of the ensemble Sounding, a contemporary quartet (flute, clarinet, piano, percussion) that had its origins in the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble. With Sounding, she has performed at universities such as Bowling Green, Cornell, SUNY Buffalo, Oberlin, and Syracuse. Currently, she is a lecturer in music at UMBC and a founding member of the faculty contemporary music ensemble, RUCKUS.

February 18
Stephen Drury, piano
8 pm, Fine Arts Recital Hall
Admission is free.

Pianist Stephen Drury will present a program of the three piano sonatas by Charles Ives (Sonata No. 1, Sonata No. 2 (“Concord, Mass., 1840–60”), and the Three Page Sonata) on the 50th anniversary of the composer's death. Drury was named 1989 Musician of the Year by the Boston Globe and has concertized throughout the world with a repertoire that stretches from Bach to Liszt to the music of today. He has given solo performances at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., New York's Symphony Space, and from Arkansas to California to Hong Kong to Paris. A champion of twentieth-century music, Drury's performances of music—ranging from the piano sonatas of Charles Ives to works by John Cage and György Ligeti—have received the highest critical acclaim. He has appeared at the MusikTriennale Köln in Germany, the Subtropics Festival in Miami, the Festival of New American Music in Sacramento, and the North American New Music Festival in Buffalo as well as at Roulette and the Knitting Factory in New York. At Spoleto USA and at the Angelica Festival in Bologna, he performed as both conductor and pianist. He has also conducted the Britten Sinfonia in England, the Santa Cruz New Music Works Ensemble, and the Harvard Group for New Music. In 1992 Stephen Drury directed the world premiere of George Russell's Time Line for orchestra, chorus, jazz band and soloists. In 1988-1989, he organized a year-long festival of the music of John Cage which led to a request from the composer to perform the solo piano part in Cage's 1O1, premiered with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in April, 1989. Drury has commissioned new works for solo piano from John Cage, John Zorn, Terry Riley, and Chinary Ung with funding provided by Meet The Composer. In 1995, he gave the first performance of John Zorn's concerto for piano and orchestra, Aporias, with Dennis Russell Davies and the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra. Later that same season he gave the premiere of Basic Training for solo piano, written for him by Lee Hyla. Drury is artistic director of the Callithumpian Consort, and he created and directs the Summer Institute for Contemporary Piano Performance at New England Conservatory. (Co-sponsored by UMBC's InterArts program.)

February 19
ConText Performers Collective
8 pm, Fine Arts Recital Hall
Admission is free.

The ConText Performers Collective, featuring Sylvia Smith and Carrie Rose. Their concert will feature Robert Erickson's Pacific Sirens, Stuart Saunders Smith's Transitions and Leaps, and works by Will Ogdon and Herbert Brün. Sylvia Smith is a percussionist, scholar and publisher, and is the artistic director of the UMBC New Music Ensemble. She has performed at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention and has participated in the Interpretations Series at Merkin Hall in New York. In 1998 she founded the ConText Performers Collective, which specializes in music that integrates percussion, spoken text and theatre. She has authored articles on graphic notation and curated many concerts of the music of John Cage. Smith owns and operates Smith Publications, and in 1994 was awarded an honorary doctorate for her work in American music by the University of Akron. Flutist and dancer Carrie Rose earned Master and Bachelor of Music degrees from the Cleveland Institute of Music as a student of Joshua Smith, principal flutist of the Cleveland Orchestra. She toured Russia and Eastern Europe with the American Russian Young Artists Orchestra, has performed throughout Switzerland, Germany and England, was awarded a full scholarship to the National Orchestral Institute at the University of Maryland, and was a Fellow in Chamber Music at the Schweitzer Institute of Music in Sandpoint, Idaho, directed by Gunther Schuller. Rose has played with the New World Symphony in Miami, and the Akron and Youngstown Symphonies in Ohio. Honors and awards include first prize at the national level of the Yamaha/Music Teachers National Association Competition, a Presser Foundation Scholarship, and the Amherst Symphony Womens' Committee Scholarship.

February 22
E. Michael Richards, clarinet
3 pm, Fine Arts Recital Hall
$7 general admission, $3 seniors, free for students, free with a UMBC ID.

Clarinetist E. Michael Richards will perform the Fantasia da Concerto su motivi de La Traviata di G. Verdi by Donato Lovreglio, Altre Tracce by Fabio Cifariello Ciardi, the American premiere of magnificat 2: Still by Linda Dusman, Undercurrents by Eve de Castro-Robinson, and Dal Niente (Interieur III) by Helmut Lachenmann. The pieces all connect the clarinet to the human voice, from the arrangement of Verdi arias in a bel canto style (Lovreglio), to short ambiguous (and embedded in a complex structure) quotations of famous works (part of our “cultural memory” such as Bizet's Carmen, Rossini's Barber of Seville, etc.) that share a motivic similarity (Ciardi), to an exploration of the passagio among registers of the clarinet that culminates in multiphonics (Jones), to extreme contrast between chalumeau and altissimo registers that includes simultaneous singing and playing (de Castro-Robinson), to the idea of a “musique concrete instrumentale,” in which all of the sounds point away from themselves as a kind of “corporeal” experience. And finally, as Lachenmann said, “The instrument becomes a device: a characteristically manipulated filter for the player's breath.” Two of the works will be performed by the Tanosaki-Richards Duo, featuring pianist Kazuko Tanosaki. As a recitalist of new music, E. Michael Richards has premiered over 125 works throughout the United States, Japan, Australia, and Western Europe. Trained as a clarinetist at the New England Conservatory (B.Mus.) and Yale School of Music (M.Mus.), Richards earned a Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego. He received a 1990 U.S./Japan Creative Artist Fellowship (sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission, and Japanese Government Cultural Agency) as a solo recitalist for a six-month residency in Japan, an NEH Summer Fellowship to study traditional Japanese music, and a residency grant (Cassis, France) from the Camargo Foundation to complete a book, The Clarinet of the Twenty-First Century. Richards has performed as concerto soloist with the Syracuse Symphony and Shinsei Japan Philharmonic (Tokyo), in chamber music performances with the Cassatt Quartet, Ying Quartet, SONOR, and the East-West Quartet, and in recital at eight international festivals and more than 20 universities, as well as at Lincoln Center, the Guggenheim Museum (New York), the American Academy in Rome, and the Tokyo American Center. He has also performed as a member of the Tanosaki-Richards Duo (with pianist Kazuko Tanosaki) since 1982. Richards has recorded on the NEUMA, Mode, CRI, Ninewinds, and Opus One labels. He has taught at Smith College; the University of California, San Diego; Bowdoin College; Hamilton College; and the Hochstein Music School in Rochester, New York; and completed short terms with Kazuko Tanosaki as visiting artists in residence at the University of Massachusetts, CNMAT (Center for New Music and Audio Technologies), at the University of California Berkeley, and San Jose State University.

March 4
Christian Wolff, composer
8 pm, Fine Arts Recital Hall
Admission is free.

Composer Christian Wolff will perform some of his own work for solo piano in celebration of his 70th birthday, including For Prepared Piano (1951) and selections from two new works, Keyboard Miscellany and Incidental Music. Born in 1934 in Nice, France, Christian Wolff has lived mostly in U.S. since 1941. He studied piano with Grete Sultan and composition with John Cage. Although mostly an autodidact, his early contact with Cage, Morton Feldman, David Tudor and Earle Brown, and later Cornelius Cardew and Frederic Rzewski helped form the direction of his work. He received academic training in classics and comparative literature at Harvard University, taught classics at Harvard and, from 1971 until 2000, classics, comparative literature and music at Dartmouth College. Wolff's compositions include works for piano(s), miscellaneous keyboards, instrumental solos, chamber groups, unspecified groups of players and sound sources, tape, chorus and orchestra. A particular interest in Wolff's work has been to allow performers flexibility and ranges of freedom at the actual time of a piece's performance, to devise notations to make this practicable, to foster among both professional and lay players a spirit of liberating interdependence, and to draw material from traditions of popular political music. Wolff's music has been performed throughout the world, especially in Europe and the United States. A number of pieces have been used by Merce Cunningham and his dance company, and also the dancer Lucinda Childs. His music is published by C.F. Peters in New York, and has been recorded on Columbia-Odyssey, Vox, Time-Mainstream, Wergo, Centaur, Elektrola, EMI, CRI, Opus One, Philo, EMI-TOCI, Collecta, Hat Hut, Mode, Koch International, Time-Scraper and Content. His writings on music have been collected in: Cues: Writings & Conversations, published by MusikTexte, Cologne. Christian Wolff has performed as an improviser with Takehisa Kosugi, Steve Lacy, Christian Marclay, Kui Dong and Larry Polansky. He received awards from the American Academy and National Institute for Arts and Letters (1975); DAAD, Berlin (1974); and the Asian Cultural Council Grant (1987); received the John Cage Award for Music (1996); and was made a member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin in 1999.

March 18
Ruckus
8 pm, Fine Arts Recital Hall
Admission is free.

Ruckus, the professional contemporary music ensemble in residence at UMBC, will present Elliott Carter's Triple Duo, Vinko Globokar's Correspondences, Anna Rubin's Dreaming Fire, Tasting Rain, a new work by Thomas DeLio, Hiroyuki Itoh's Shadows of Night III, and Milton Babbitt's Composition for Four Instruments. The ensemble features flutist Lisa Cella, cellist Franklin Cox, percussionist Tom Goldstein, clarinetist E. Michael Richards, pianist Kazuko Tanosaki and violinist Airi Yoshioka. Founded in 2000 to promote the performance of contemporary chamber music, Ruckus has performed at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, and at universities throughout the East Coast.

April 4
Airi Yoshioka, violin
3 pm, Fine Arts Recital Hall
$7 general admission, $3 seniors, free for students, free with a UMBC ID.

Violinist Airi Yoshioka, accompanied by pianist John Novacek, will feature Ludwig van Beethoven's Sonata No. 10 in G major, Op. 96; Robert Schumann's Sonata No. 1 in a minor, Op. 105; Arvo Pärt's Fratres; the world premiere of a work by Alice Shields; and three rags by John Novacek. Airi Yoshioka has concertized throughout the United States, Europe, Japan, and Canada. Deeply committed to chamber music, Ms. Yoshioka was a founding member of Yale University's Wenceslas Ensemble and the Modigliani Quartet. Her orchestral credits include performances with the American Sinfonietta and engagements as concertmaster and soloist with the Manhattan Virtuosi and concertmaster of one of the festival orchestras at the Aspen Music Festival. An enthusiastic performer of new music, she was one of the original members and concertmasters of the New Juilliard Ensemble and performed in the school's FOCUS! Festival as well as with the Lower Eastside Ensemble for Contemporary Music. Of a performance with the New Juilliard Ensemble, The New York Times wrote, “Airi Yoshioka played the violin solo touchingly.”

April 18
Franklin Cox, cello
3 pm, Fine Arts Recital Hall
$7 general admission, $3 seniors, free for students, free with a UMBC ID.

Cellist Franklin Cox will feature J.S. Bach's Cello Suite No. 4 in E-flat (BWV 1010), a new work by Erik Ulman, Willow by Stuart Saunders Smith, and a new work by Franklin Cox. Franklin Cox has performed in numerous festivals and new music ensembles, including the Indiana University New Music Ensemble, the Group for Contemporary Music, and SONOR, as well as at the 1980 and 1982 Spoleto Festivals, the 1983 Banff Summer Chamber Music Festival, the Xenakis Festival and Darmstadt Revisited Festival at UCSD, and at the Darmstadt Festival since 1988, where he received a special citation for cello performance in 1990. He received a Bachelor of Music degree in composition from Indiana University, a Master of Arts degree in composition from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in composition at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Cox has studied with Brian Ferneyhough, Roger Reynolds, Joji Yuasa, Steven Suber, Fred Fox, Harvey Sollberger, Fred Lerdahl, and Jack Beeson. He received an Alice M. Ditson Scholarship and Dissertation Fellowship at Columbia University, Regent's Fellowship and a Dissertation Research Fellowship for Outstanding Research at UCSD, a full scholarship to the 1990 June in Buffalo Festival, and full scholarships for the 1988 and 1992 Darmstadt Festivals. He was awarded a Stipendium Fellowship at the 1990 Darmstadt Festival, won 2nd prize in the Los Angeles Arts Commission competition in the spring of 1991, and was co-winner of the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis (highest award for composition) in the 1992 Darmstadt Festival.

April 25
Federal City Brass Band
3 pm, Fine Arts Recital Hall
$7 general admission, $3 seniors, free for students, free with a UMBC ID.

The Federal City Brass Band, directed of Jari Villanueva and based in Baltimore, recreates the sound and appearance of a U.S. Army regimental brass band of the 1860s. With the exception of the reproduction rope-tension drums, all of the instruments used by the Federal City Brass Band are originals dating to the mid-19th century. The sources of the music the band plays include original band journals and sheet music of the Civil War era. Members of the Federal City Brass Band are professional and volunteer musicians, music educators, historians and re-enactors, and collectively represent some of the finest brass and percussion players in the hobby today. The band has performed for events at Gettysburg, Sharpsburg, Baltimore, Fredericksburg, Rockville, and Arlington, for the Library of Congress and the American Bandmasters Association, and at the 2003 National Civil War Band Festival in Campbellsville, Kentucky. The program at UMBC will feature Civil War-era favorites.

April 28
Jane Rigler, flute
8 pm, Fine Arts Recital Hall
Admission is free.

Flutist Jane Rigler will perform a program of contemporary works. With an extensive background in both classical and contemporary music, Jane Rigler has considerable experience as an interpreter of contemporary music. Her repertoire covers some of the most complex and demanding works played today, including works such as Monolith by Vinko Globokar and Cassandra's Dream Song by Brian Ferneyhough. Between 1989 and 1995 she was a member of several orchestras and contemporary music ensembles in California as well as collaborated with both Madrid-based Ensemble Plural and Grupo Cosmos. In 2000, she was a guest artist with Grupo Cosmos, touring Tokyo and various northern Italian cities and playing works by John Cage and Bruno Maderna. Besides ensemble work, her performing experience encompasses flute and electronics, computer interactive improvisation and interdisciplinary experimental works. Between 1994–1999, Rigler collaborated with composer/multi-intstrumentalist Rafael Liñán. Together they have performed in contemporary music festivals in Madrid, Barcelona, Alicante and Granada, in the Horizontal Radio of the European Radio Union, the Paralelo Madrid, and the Punto de Encuentro of the Association of Electroacoustic Music of Spain. In addition, the Rigler-Liñán duo has given more than 250 pedagogical concerts for children in both Madrid and Granada. Their performances throughout Spain have been reviewed as showing “great imagination and profound knowledge” (Enrique Franco, El Pais) as well as having “an intense humanistic content” (Manuel Ferrand, ABC). Rigler has been combining forces with other composers and performers such as Koji Asano, Agustí Fernández, Hannes Giger, Barbara Held, Christoph Irmer, Marisa Manchado, Wade Matthews, Liba Villavecchia, Musicalibre of Madrid and the IBA Olestars of Barcelona, among others.

April 30
Zanana
8 pm, Fine Arts Studio 508
Admission is free.

Zanana, a collaborative duo featuring Kristin Norderval (voice) and Monique Buzzarté (trombone), will perform a program of improvised music blending acoustic sounds, electronics and live processing. Kristin Norderval is a classically trained singer, improviser, and composer who performs an eclectic repertoire that spans the renaissance to the avant-garde. Many works have been written for her, and her collaborations have included work with choreographers, sculptors, filmmakers and installation artists. Since 1997, she has also been recording on-site improvisations in unusual spaces, many of them industrial. Profiled by The New York Times in “Downtown Divas Expand their Horizons” and hailed as one of “new music's best” by the Village Voice, her performances range from concert and opera to multi-media events. Her work as a soloist has taken her to festivals throughout the world, and her credits include performances with the San Francisco Symphony, the Stuttgart Philharmonic, Oslo Sinfonietta, the Philip Glass Ensemble, and numerous new music ensembles in the United States and Europe. She has recorded new works for Mode, Nonesuch, Point, and CRI as well as for Norwegian, German, and Austrian radio, and has performed in opera and music-theater productions for Lincoln Center, BAM, the Yerba Buena Arts Center in San Francisco, Santa Fe Opera, Netherlands Dance Theater, and Dance Alloy. Ms. Norderval received 2002 Artist Residencies at Harvestworks Digital Media Arts and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Ms. Norderval is certified to teach the meditative improvisation techniques of Deep Listening. Monique Buzzarté, trombonist, is an avid proponent of contemporary music, commissioning and premiering many new works for trombone alone, with electronics, and in chamber ensembles. Since 1983 her New Music from Women: Trombone Commissions project has been supporting the expansion of the trombone repertoire, with 2002–2004 commissions forthcoming from Pauline Oliveros, Annea Lockwood, Anne LeBaron, and Alice Shields. Ms. Buzzarté is currently developing a new interactive performance system for the trombone, supported in part through artist residencies at Create@iEAR Studios in 2003 and Harvestworks Digital Media Arts in 2003. Ms. Buzzarté's recordings include John Cage's Five³ with the Arditti Quartet (Mode Records) and Dreaming Wide Awake with the New Circle Five (Deep Listening 20). An author, activist, and educator as well as a performer/composer, Ms. Buzzarté has published research on the brass music of women composers and led efforts which led to the admission of women into the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Ms. Buzzarté is certified to teach the meditative improvisation techniques of Deep Listening. (Presented by UMBC's InterArts program.)

February 21
The Jubilee Singers under the direction of Janice Jackson. 7 pm, Fine Arts Recital Hall. Admission is free.

March 14
The UMBC Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Wayne Cameron, featuring winners of the High School Concerto Competition, and Ryan Bridgland, winner of the UMBC Department of Music Concerto Competition, performing a Dmitri Shostakovich Cello Concerto. 3 pm, Fine Arts Recital Hall. Admission is free.

April 24
The Maryland Camerata under the direction of David Smith. 7:30 pm, Fine Arts Recital Hall. Admission is free.

April 29
The UMBC Jazz Big Band under the direction of Jari Villanueva. 8 pm, Fine Arts Recital Hall. Admission is free.

May 1
The Jubilee Singers under the direction of Janice Jackson. 7 pm, Fine Arts Recital Hall. Admission is free.

May 2
An Evening of Opera, featuring selected works by composers such as Verdi, Bizet, Offenbach, Puccini and others, featuring soloists, duets, and the choral ensembles of UMBC. 7:30 pm, Fine Arts Recital Hall. Admission is free.

May 3
The UMBC Chamber Players under the direction of E. Michael Richards. 8 pm, Fine Arts Recital Hall. Admission is free.

May 6
The UMBC Concert Band under the direction of Jari Villanueva. 8 pm, Fine Arts Recital Hall. Admission is free.

May 8
The UMBC Guitar Ensemble under the direction of Troy King. 5 pm, Fine Arts Recital Hall. Admission is free.

May 8
The Collegium Musicum under the direction of Joseph Morin. 8 pm, Fine Arts Recital Hall. Admission is free.

May 9
The UMBC Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Wayne Cameron. 3 pm, Fine Arts Recital Hall. Admission is free.

May 11
Departmental Honors Recital. 8 pm, Fine Arts Recital Hall. Admission is free.

May 14
The UMBC Jazz Improv Ensemble under the direction of Rick Hannah. 8 pm, The Commons Cabaret. Admission is free.

February 27
Stone Groove, an Afro-BeatDubJazzFunk group featuring Africana Studies faculty member Stephanie Johnson. 12 – 2 pm, Main Street at The Commons. Admission is free.

March 29
The Global Percussion Trio, featuring Department of Music faculty member Barry Dove, featuring African, Brazilian, Japanese and other forms of drumming from around the world. 12 – 2 pm, Main Street at The Commons. Admission is free.

April 14
Willbilly, an American roots music ensemble that draws from the folk, blues, country, and rock traditions. The band features John Thomakos on drums, Dave Chappell on guitar, Justin Crown on bass, Mookie Siegel on keyboards, and Department of Music faculty member Billy Kemp on guitar and vocals. 12 – 2 pm, Main Street at The Commons. Admission is free.