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Cleveland Opera Theater and Composers’ Guild team up for New Scenes Workshop

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by Jarrett Hoffman

COT logoConfused courtship, food addiction, and 19th-century Neapolitan song provided the inspiration for three new operas, selections of which will be heard this weekend. Cleveland Opera Theater will partner with the Cleveland Composers’ Guild to present a workshop of scenes from The Higgler, Taste of Addiction, and Piedigrotta, written by Guild members Margi Griebling-Haigh, Ryan Charles Ramer, and Lorenzo Salvagni.

The piano-accompanied, twenty-minute readings will be performed on Saturday, January 27 at 3:00 pm and on Sunday, January 28 at 7:30 pm at the Maltz Performing Arts Center. Both events, part of COT’s {NOW} Festival, are ticketed but free, and include talk-back sessions with the performers and composers.

“Margi, Ryan, and Lorenzo each have incredibly unique styles,” Guild chairman Joseph Hollings said in an email. “If a music lover is looking for a way in to contemporary opera, if a veteran opera-goer wants a refreshing afternoon or evening out, or if anyone wants a chance to quiz the composers about how the musical sausage is made, they don’t want to miss this.” [Read more…]

Composers Guild to celebrate 25th Anniversary of “Creativity: Learning through Experience”

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by Mike Telin

CCG-PosterIt’s never too early for young musicians to begin working with living composers. Since 1992, the Cleveland Composers Guild’s Creativity: Learning through Experience program has matched talented young performers aged 18 and under with Guild members, who write pieces specifically for the students to perform. On Sunday, May 7 at 3:00 pm, the Cleveland Composers Guild will celebrate the silver anniversary of this special program with a concert in Harkness Chapel on the campus of Case Western Reserve University.

During the past 24 years, 296 compositions have been premiered through the program — 409 students have performed, and 317 teachers and coaches have prepared those performances. “It is kind of amazing,” Guild chair Margi Griebling-Haigh said during a telephone conversation. “I have the records of all the pieces, including composers, performers, and private teachers.”

Griebling-Haigh, who has been involved with the Learning through Experience program from its inception, credited then-Composers Guild chair Marshall Griffith for its creation. [Read more…]

NEOSonicFest 2017 to include half a dozen new music concerts

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by Jeremy Reynolds

CCS-032814-Bill-NairnanFor the past three years, the Cleveland Chamber Symphony has sponsored NEOSonicFest, a new music festival that spotlights musicians and groups in Northeast Ohio. The festival begins on Friday, March 17 and runs through Sunday, March 26 (see below for concert dates and times).

“There’s always been an incredibly active new music scene in Cleveland,” said Steven Smith, music director of the Grammy Award-winning Cleveland Chamber Symphony. “Cleveland is unique in terms of the high level of its artistic institutions for a city of its size, and it’s been that way for a very long time.” New to the 2017 roster are the ensembles No Exit, the percussion and saxophone duo Patchwork, and harpist Stephan Haluska. [Read more…]

Cleveland Opera Theater launches {New Opera Works} Festival

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by Mike Telin

Amelia-LostThe presentation of new and recently composed operas has been part of Cleveland Opera Theater’s mission since it was founded in 2006. Beginning on Friday, January 20, the company will launch its first festival dedicated to new opera works.

Scott Skiba, executive artistic director of COT, said that this year’s {New Opera Works} Festival features works that are in the beginning, middle, and ending stages of development. “Federico García Lorca’s final play, The House of Bernarda Alba, is in the initial stages of being adapted into an opera, and there will be a reading of the English translation by Lorca scholar Caridad Svich,” Skiba said during a recent interview.

Representing the middle period of development will be a preview of Scene Three from composer Nkeiru Okoye’s and librettist David Cote’s new opera We’ve Got Our Eye on You. “This will be a teaser of the complete opera, which will be presented during next year’s {NOW} Festival,” Skiba said. A recently completed work at the Festival will be Amelia Lost, a new opera by Larry Delinger and Brad Carroll which had its world premiere in Knoxville back in 2014 (pictured above). [Read more…]

Save the dates: January events to log in your classical music calendar

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by Daniel Hathaway

gaffigan-jamesFormer assistant conductor James Gaffigan will return to the podium at Severance Hall from Thursday, January 5 through Saturday, January 7 to lead The Cleveland Orchestra and pianist Kirill Gerstein in Bernard Hermann’s Suite from Psycho, Arnold Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto, the original, jazz band version of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. Performances include Thursday and Saturday evenings, a Friday matinee and a Fridays@7 event.

From January 6-8, the Philadelphia-based vocal ensemble, The Crossing, will give sixeen performances of David Lang’s Lifespan in Gallery 218 — the glass house that rises above the Cleveland Museum of Art’s East Boulevard façade. Surrounding a 4-billion-year-old rock suspended from the ceiling, three vocalists will whistle and breathe, moving the rock like a pendulum, “a poetic form of wind erosion” (read a preview here). Performances are scheduled for Friday at 4:00, 5:00, 6:00, 7:00, 7:45 and 8:30 pm, and on Saturday and Sunday on the hour from noon to 4:00 pm. Weigh in on your experience by sharing your own comments on the ClevelandClassical.com Facebook page. [Read more…]

Composers Guild & Syndicate for the New Arts: chamber music at Historic St. John’s (Dec. 4)

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by Daniel Hathaway

syndicatcomposersExcellent performances of chamber music written by 7 of the 34 members of the Cleveland Composers Guild were featured in a collaborative concert with the Syndicate for the New Arts on Sunday evening, December 4 at Historic St. John’s Episcopal Church in Ohio City. [Read more…]

“Made Anew” — Cleveland Composers Guild at CSU’s Drinko Hall (October 11)

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by April Sun

Cleveland-Composers-Guild-ScoreModernity — with its fresh inventions, sounds, and sensations — often inspires us to respond in kind. We are in constant dialogue with our environs. We listen. We talk back. We create reflections of our experience. This was certainly the case in last Sunday’s Cleveland Composers Guild concert (October 11), which filled Drinko Hall at Cleveland State University with an array of new resonances. [Read more…]

Preview: Solaris Quintet to collaborate with Cleveland Composers Guild

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by Mike Telin

SolarisDuring the past fifty years, The Cleveland Composers Guild, (CCG) one of the nation’s oldest new music organizations, has established an impressive record of supporting contemporary music. On Sunday, March 17 at 3:00 pm in Gamble Auditorium at Baldwin Wallace Conservatory, CCG joins forces with the renowned Solaris Wind Quintet in a concert featuring works by CCG members.

In recent years the Guild has collaborated with the Cleveland Ballet, the Poets’ and Writers’ League of Greater Cleveland (now called The Lit), the Rocky River Chamber Music Society, and the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society. “One of several groups that was under consideration to approach about showcasing compositions by guild members’ music was Solaris,” says Cleveland Composers Guild president David Gooding. “In fact they were very high on our list so we contacted them, and they were interested.”

[Read more…]

“Guitar Plus”: a conversation with composer Monica Houghton

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by Mike Telin

Monica Houghton’s Songs Without Words will be one of the featured works on Sunday, February 20, 2011 at 3:00 pm, when the Cleveland Composers Guild teams up with the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society for “Guitar Plus” (music for guitar and other instruments) at Christ Episcopal Church in Shaker Heights. We spoke with Monica Houghton by telephone.

Mike Telin: Is this your first work for “Guitar Plus”?

Monica Houghton: I have never written for the combination of guitar and flute before. I have written some pieces specifically for the guitarist Don Better, who I met in graduate school at CIM, and he is a colleague of mine now. I wrote some songs for soprano and guitar, as well as a solo piece for Don, which he has played quite a few times.

MT: How did Songs without Words come about?

MH. Don asked me to write a piece for him and a friend who played five string electric bass, but that project didn’t work out so well because the bassist did not read music. So we got in to this sort of never never land. I kept thinking that I would just play through the part and he could get it, but it just doesn’t work that way crossing between the classical world and the jazz world. It can be an interesting experience for both sides I would imagine. Anyway, I really liked the music, and the piece was based on a poem from the Chinese Tung Dynasty poet TuFu. He is one of the greatest poets of all time. So this was a poem that I liked called “New Moon”, and that was what I had based the piece on, I thought I didn’t want to let the piece go, so when this concert opportunity came up, I thought ‘oh well, I wonder if I just took the bass part and put it above the guitar part and messaged the music a little bit, I could make this a piece for flute and guitar?’, because for some reason, the sound of flute and guitar seemed to fit the poem. It is odd to think that you could turn a piece for electric bass and guitar into a piece for flute and guitar, that you could perform that translation without having major damage. But it seemed quite natural, and I was surprised. So I went with that, but then I saw the piece was a little short so I wrote two other pieces to go with it, which are also sort of riffs on TuFu poems. [Read more…]

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