Anna Rubin's music has been heard and performed on four continents. She composes instrumental and electroacoustic music, often with an engaged political narrative. She has received awards, grants, and fellowships from such organizations as ASCAP, New York Foundation for the Arts, Ohio Arts Council, National Orchestral Association, Meet the Composer and the Gaudeamus Foundation. She been awarded residencies at Harvestworks, Inc., Brahmshaus, and Brooklyn College Center for Computer Music. Commissions include the California E.A.R. Unit, New American Radio, Radio Station WNYC, Abbie Conant, F. Gerard Errante, Thomas Buckner, and the New England Foundation for the Arts.
She is a member of ASCAP, International Computer Music Association (ICMC), Member-at-Large for the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music, U.S. (SEAMUS), as well as a Member of the Board of the International Association for Women Musicians. She has served as panelist for the New York Foundation for the Arts, Ohio Arts Council, Arts International, ICMC, and SEAMUS. She has a doctorate in composition from Princeton University and her principal teachers have been Mel Powell, Leonard Stein, Ton de Leeuw and Pauline Oliveros.
She has taught courses and lectured on women in music and helped organize one of the first campus festivals of women in music at CalArts in 1974 as well as one of the first academic courses on the subject. She has taught at Lafayette College and Oberlin College Conservatory of Music and in the fall of 2002 became Director of the Linehan Artists & Scholars Program at the University of Maryland/ Baltimore County where she created a new interdisciplinary arts program.
Arthur Kreiger, composer, holds degrees from the University of Connecticut and from Columbia University. His catalog contains pieces for orchestra, chorus, mixed chamer ensembles, solo performers and the electronic medium. Kreiger's honors include the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Brandeis University Creative Arts Award. He is the recipient of a 1999 Koussevitzky Foundation Commission. His Music appears on Neuma, Odyssey, Spectrum, Finnadar, CRI and New World Records.
Mario Davidovsky was born on March 4, 1934, near Buenos Aires, Argentina. As a child, he studied violin and began composing at the age of 13. While studying composition, theory and history, he had lessons with Teodoro Fuchs, Erwin Leuchter, Ernesto Epstein and his principal teacher was Guillermo Graetzer. In 1958 he studied at the Berkshire Music Center with Aaron Copland, who encouraged him to settle in the United States, where he has lived since 1960.
Davidovsky has taught at the University of Michigan, the Di Tella Institute of Buenos Aires, the Manhattan School of Music, Yale University, City College, CUNY, and at Columbia University where he directed the Columbia Electronic Music Center. In January 1994, he joined the music department at Harvard University. Since 1971, he has served as director of the Composers Conference at Wellesley College. He was composer-in-residence at the Tanglewood Music Festival in 1981 and 1994.
His many honors include two Guggenheim Fellowships, two Rockefeller Fellowships, a Koussevitzky Fellowship, the Brandeis University Creative Arts Award, an American Academy of Arts & Letters Award, the 1971 Pulitzer Prize, a Naumburg Award, a Guggenheim Award, and the 1994 National Seamus Award. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Letters in 1982. In addition, Davidovsky has received commissions from such major institutions as the Pan American Union, the Fromm and Koussevitzky Foundations, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, the Juilliard and Emerson String Quartets, Speculum Musicae and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, among others.
Mr. Davidovsky prefers to point to no specific influence on his music. Despite the fact that his main teacher, Graetzer, was a Hindemith student, he was greatly influenced early on by the second Viennese school, and later by the wide range of styles and techniques found in the musical life of New York. But perhaps the most defining influence on his music is born out of his own seminal work in the field of electronic music. He is best known for his compositions combining live instrumental performance with recorded electronic sound. For tape music he draws on the full range of "classical" studio procedures and requires performers to match the inventiveness of his electronic compositions by using an expanded spectrum of playing techniques. Davidovsky has never been interested in "sound effects;" rather, his concerns are those of continuity and expression.
The music of Mario Davidovsky is greatly admired by his professional colleagues and the musical public alike. Its acknowledged aesthetic value stems from the convergence of an extraordinary musical mind with the eloquence of profound simplicity.
