Our weekly listen and look at living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening online:

John Mark Sherlock (b. 1970 — Canada)

I first discovered John’s work years ago on the venerable MP3 site Vitaminic. It’s often intimate, long, subtle and irrational; from some other things I’ve heard out of there, I think the breath of Feldman blew out of Buffalo, took a detour around Montréal, and ended up finding a home in Toronto. From an article by Michael Maclean: ….John Mark Sherlock is connecting to the music as well. The Toronto composer toils happily, if somewhat obscurely, in the city’s contemporary music scene, writing commissioned pieces for performers and small dance companies. He is in love with old electronic keyboards: Hammond organs, Rhodes pianos. His music blends their sounds with traditional orchestral instruments. His works are a response to the music he loves, from pop songs to classical works to jazz. Composing for him begins with what he envisions as a kind of musical shipwreck, “with all this flotsam and jetsam floating around on the surface, and I’m just hanging on to a piece of something”. A generous selection of listening awaits under the “audio” button.

Ava Mendoza (US)

I’ll just let Ava’s own direct, no-B.S. words do the talking:

“I am a guitar player, composer and quasi-electronic musician in Oakland, CA. I play improvised music/weird rock/original compositions. Improvised music was the first type of music that I got seriously interested in as a teenager, and I suppose any musical roots I have are in free improvisation.. That said, some of my music does not involve any improvisation at all — I indulge the anal retentive side of my personality by composing tape (fixed media electronic) pieces, and also sometimes very through-composed instrumental pieces. Some of my solo guitar compositions draw a lot from early country and blues music, sort of reworked in my own way. I am an extremely curious person and love a lot of very different sorts of music. I started improvising as a teenager, when I luckily met some socially-ostracized kids who introduced me to free jazz. At the time I was at Interlochen Arts Academy studying classical guitar. Soon after, I happily abandoned the classical guitar and began improvising on electric guitar. (My first electric guitar was a Peavey Raptor, which is not a very good guitar at all.) I graduated from Mills College, where I studied electronic music with John Bischoff and Maggi Payne. I spent a lot of my time at Mills ignoring my guitar and focusing on tape (electronic) composition. I call myself a quasi-electronic musician because I really don’t do much with electronics live, I though I’ve worked intensively on tape pieces. My recent focus has been on playing amplified acoustic guitar and trying to get a range of electronic-like textures out of the instrument without using many effects. I’ve been working a lot on playing solo, both fixed compositions and freely improvised.”

Don’t visit expecting to hear chamber concertos, but do expect some young, unafraid and vital soundplay.

Federico Rueben (b. 1978 — Costa Rica / EU) & Mauricio Pauly (b. 1976 — Costa Rica / EU)

Two composers, both native to Costa Rica but currently living in Europe (Rueben in the Netherlands and Pauly in England), team up to share this website. Quick bio sketches:

Federico Reuben trained as a pianist since the age of 9. He studied politics for two years at the Universidad de Costa Rica in San José before leaving to the United States in 1999 to study composition with Lawrence Moss at the University of Maryland. Since September 2002 he has been living in The Netherlands and studying at the Koninklijk Conservatorium with Gilius van Bergeijk and Martijn Padding where he earned his Bachelors Degree in 2003. Currently he is enrolled as a postgraduate student at the same institution studying composition with Louis Andriessen and Richard Ayres.

Mauricio Pauly studied composition in San José (Costa Rica), Miami and Boston (USA) with Lukas Foss, Richard Cornell, Fredrick Kaufman and others. As a bass player, Mauricio recorded two live albums with Costarican pianist Manuel Obregón and toured most of Central America with the legendary José Capmany and Café con Leche. In the US, he worked as a free-lance bassist and teacher. Currently is in the process of moving to the UK to begin a research-based PhD at the University of York. He is a founding member of the áltaVoz ensemble, a group of five composers of Latin-American origin who are now spread around America and Europe, organizing concerts in collaboration with other ensembles and performers, for the promotion of their music.

Don’t let the quirky website (navigation on the right half calls up stuff on the left) defeat you; each has a link to “works” that will give you lots of listening to highly varied and imaginative pieces. (Rueben’s are marked as MP3s; Pauly’s recordings are found as ZIP files by clicking on the work’s title). The site also chronicles other projects they’re involved with, with some further listening.

Our weekly listen and look at living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening right online:

Andrew McKenna Lee (US)

A native of Charleston, South Carolina, Andrew began his musical studies on the guitar at age twelve, going on to pursue composition in his late teens. He completed his undergraduate work at Carnegie Mellon University in 1997 and finished his Masters degree in 2000 at the Manhattan School of Music. His teachers have included Leonardo Balada, Richard Danielpour, Louis Andriessen, Magnus Lindberg, David Del Tredici and Steven Mackey. He’s currently in the Ph.D. program in composition at Princeton University.

As a guitarist, he’s studied privately with James Ferla and David Leisner, and is currently a student of Laura Oltman at Princeton University. In recent years, his music’s been performed by the Brentano String Quartet, ensemble ereprijs, Talujon, the New Jersey Symphony, Kroumata, Proteus, Janus, and eighth blackbird. He’s participated in numerous festivals, including the International Music Festival of Toroella de Montgrí, Spain, International Gaudeamus Week of the Netherlands, the Stockholm Arts and Sciences Festival, and the Aspen and Norfolk Chamber Music Festivals. His music has also been heard on WNYC’s New Sounds series with host Jonathan Schaefer.

Take a long and leisurely browse through the “Music” link on his sharp-looking site. There are recordings for many, many of his excellent works, and Lee’s own performances on guitar are just phenomenal (for a stunning combination of the two, find his Variation, Fixation, and Fantasy after a Prelude by Bach or his Scordatura Suite).

Missy Mazzoli (b. 1980 — US)

Missy (Melissa) Mazzoli is one of the new wave of scarily smart young composers, who don’t see why their command of the “serious” side of modern classsical should have to sit behind any boundary between it and the culture we actually live in day-to-day. Born in Lansdale, Pennsylvania to a “wonderfully supportive and happily tone deaf family”, she began playing piano at age 7, and composing at age 10. During high school she played piano and percussion with local orchestras and guitar with several punk bands. From 1998 to 2002 she attended Boston University, studying composition with John Harbison, Richard Cornell, Charles Fussell and Martin Amlin, and piano with Maria Clodes-Jaguaribe. In 2002 Missy received a Fulbright grant and traveled to the Netherlands, where she studied with Louis Andriessen, Martijn Padding and Richard Ayres at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague. In 2004 she was composer-in-residence at STEIM, Amsterdam’s center for electronic music, where she created electro-acoustic works for the Utrecht-based Insomnio Ensemble. In May, 2006 she received her Master’s degree from the Yale School of Music, where she studied composition with Aaron Kernis, Martin Bresnick and David Lang. At the “audio” link under her “Contents” menu, you’ll find a number of MP3s well worth your while.

Steve Peters (b. 1959 — US)

Long a force in the new-music scene in New Mexico but relocated to Seattle these last couple years, Steve creates music and sound for galleries, museums, public places, dance, theater, film/video, radio, recordings, and concerts. The work is often site-specific, made with recorded sounds of the environment and found/natural objects, or through exploration of acoustic phenomena; instruments and spoken text occasionally make an appearance. He no longer performs live, except as a member of the Seattle Phonographers Union. Steve also works as a freelance producer, writer and curator, and runs a non-profit called Nonsequitur which presents a monthly series of events related to all of the above.

….And truth told, he’s also a pal of mine from way back; we missed each other at the same college by only a year. He fell into some of my old circle of friends there, sent me a letter or two, and struck up a friendship that’s going on 25 years now. Many of Steve’s pieces of “music” are very long, meaning that the 10- or 15-minute MP3s here are often excerpts; still, they’ll give you a very good idea of his own particularly beautiful, enigmatic sound world.