Lawrence Dillon@Sequenza21.com

"There are no two points so distant from one another that they cannot be connected by a single straight line -- and an infinite number of curves."

Composer Lawrence Dillon has produced an extensive body of work, from brief solo pieces to a full-length opera. Three disks of his music are due out in 2010 on the Bridge, Albany and Naxos labels. In the past year, he has had commissions from the Emerson String Quartet, the Cassatt String Quartet, the Mansfield Symphony, the Boise Philharmonic, the Salt Lake City Symphony, the Ravinia Festival, the Daedalus String Quartet, the Kenan Institute for the Arts, the University of Utah and the Idyllwild Symphony Orchestra.

Although he lost 50% of his hearing in a childhood illness, Dillon began composing as soon as he started piano lessons at the age of seven. In 1985, he became the youngest composer to earn a doctorate at The Juilliard School, and was shortly thereafter appointed to the Juilliard faculty. Dillon is now Composer in Residence at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, where he has served as Music Director of the Contemporary Ensemble, Assistant Dean of Performance, and Interim Dean of the School of Music. He was the Featured American Composer in the February 2006 issue of Chamber Music magazine.


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Friday, March 21, 2008
priceless presslerisms

A few weeks ago, I wrote about pianist Menahem Pressler’s residency here. Some nice quotes:
• “In order to have enough time to practice, I have dinner when I get home, then go to bed, then get up out of bed at 10 pm to practice. You have to be a bit of a maniac.”
• Looking up towards the ceiling as the opening of a student’s phrase reverberated through the hall: “Hear that up there? Meet it somewhere on its way down!”
• On interpretive license: “Meat needs seasoning…but too much seasoning makes you sick!”
• “You may not always like [your teachers] but you do love them. And what you learn from them, you take with you through your life.”
On an unrelated note, kudos to my freshman composition student Leo Hurley, who won the Winston-Salem Symphony competition I wrote about here. His piece, Echoes of Red, influenced by Miles Davis and George Gershwin, was premiered by the orchestra three times on Tuesday and Wednesday to thousands of appreciative listeners.