• "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 creates works that connect past and present in attractive and unexpected ways, provoking Gramophone to exclaim, “Each score is an arresting and appealing creation, full of fanciful and lyrical flourishes within traditional forms that are brightly tweaked." His music is characterized by a keen sensitivity to color, a mastery of form, and what the Louisville Courier-Journal has called a "compelling, innate soulfulness." Despite losing 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 immediately 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.

    Dillon's music, in the words of American Record Guide, is "lovely...austere...vivid and impressive." Three recordings of his music were released in 2010-2011 on the Bridge, Albany and Naxos labels. His works have been commissioned and premiered in the last four seasons by the Emerson String Quartet, Le Train Bleu, the Ravinia Festival, the Daedalus String Quartet, the Lincoln Trio, the Seattle Chamber Music Society, the Cassatt String Quartet, the Mansfield Symphony, the Boise Philharmonic, Wintergreen Summer Arts Festival, the Salt Lake City Symphony, the Quartetto di Sassofoni d’Accademia, the University of Utah and the Idyllwild Symphony Orchestra.

    In October 2010, Bridge Records released “Insects and Paper Airplanes,” a disk of Dillon’s chamber music featuring the Daedalus String Quartet and pianist Benjamin Hochman. Gramophone called it "highly recommended," saying, "Just when you thought the string quartet may have reached the edge of sonic possibilities, along comes a composer who makes something novel, whimsical and haunting of the genre."

    Dillon’s recording “Appendage and Other Stories” made Fanfare Magazine’s 2010 Want List. Raymond Tuttle wrote of it, "This is a terrific work. In fact, it is so good it made me weep. And Dillon, with his vivid imagination and his ear for vocal and instrumental color, seems to be a terrific composer.”

    In April 2011, Naxos released “Violin Music of Lawrence Dillon” featuring Sphinx Grand Prizewinner Danielle Belén. MUSICWEB INTERNATIONAL described it as "an hour of music that is often profound without being pretentious, sometimes light-hearted but never 'lite', humorous without being arch, and immensely appealing but never frivolous."

    Lawrence Dillon is represented by Jeffrey James Arts Consulting.

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Feb 25 2007

Music Now

Posted by Lawrence Dillon in Uncategorized
I’m back home from the MUSIC NOW fest, but I’m not sure I’ve fully grasped what I’ve seen and heard at EMU in the last few days. I have a feeling that the significance of what I’ve experienced goes far beyond any personal benefits I may have gained, as ample as those are. It certainly went far beyond what I anticipated.
First of all, it’s important to make the nature of this MUSIC NOW festival clear. There’s no other way to say it: over a period of three days, several hundred people got as far inside my compositional head as possible. In contrast to the new music festivals that try to cover all the bases — giving every composer and every approved stylistic trend an equal hearing — this one sacrificed breadth for depth. Before I arrived, six of my compositions (reflecting my work from 1983 to 2005) were rigorously rehearsed by faculty, guest artists and students. Hundreds of students were assigned to write papers on me, on my music, and on my words. They researched, they asked me tough questions, they measured my responses against their own. In addition to the concerts, there were three events in which I spoke, attended by (my guesstimate) 40, 100, and 300 people.

What is the upshot of all this activity? Following a single composer’s thought process as it progresses over the space of 22 years gives these students unique insights into one individual’s artistic mission. Seems to me that they’ve been given a real opportunity to grasp the nature of artistic activity in a way that is clearly distinguished from the superficial handholding many students expect.

After the events of the last few days, these students are in a better position to understand and appreciate the next composer they meet, and the next one, and the one after that. Compare that to the questionable benefit of playing 10 minutes or so of fifteen different composers and identifying general stylistic trends – helpful in its way, but perhaps not as beneficial in the long run.

So much of our world demands that we learn to make snap judgments, marshalling a few salient details into alignment with a bigger picture. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s good to have academic institutions that push us deeper into thought, rather than faster through received opinion.

In the next few posts, I’m going to attempt to lay out how the MUSIC NOW residency worked, in the hope that other institutions may consider using something akin to this format as well. Hopefully I’ll hear from others about similar ventures. I can’t say it is a perfect approach in every way, but it has plenty to recommend it.

It certainly helped that the faculty and students of EMU are exceptionally collegial, curious and mutually supportive human beings.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 25th, 2007 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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