JoVia Armstrong is an accomplished musician from Detroit, winner of the 2014 Best Black Female Percussionist of the Year, given by the Black Women in Jazz Awards. She is a member of the jazz group Musique Noire and has appeared with a wide variety of artists and has also toured with the J.C. Brooks Band.
In this podcast, JoVia describes her early musical education in the Detroit public schools, her experiences as a music major at Michigan State and her subsequent career as a professional musician based in Chicago. The story of the challenges she faced and overcame along the way is both inspiring and uplifting.
The Spektral Quartet takes advantage of the open-ended playing time of a digital release to create effectively a double album for their latest recording, Experiments in Living. While double albums often suffer from a bit of flab, this one doesn’t have an extraneous moment. It is a well curated release that attends to meaning making in contemporary music with a spirit that is both historically informed and deeply of this moment.
A clever extra-musical addition to the project is a group of Tarot cards that allow the listener to ‘choose their own adventure,’ making their way through the various pieces in different orderings. These are made by the artist/musician øjeRum. The tarot cards may be seen on the album’s site.
It might seem strange to begin an album of 20/21 music with Johannes Brahms’s String Quartet Op. 51, no. 1 in C-minor (1873). However, Arnold Schoenberg’s article “Brahms as Progressive” makes the connection between the two composers clear. It also demonstrates Spektral’s comfort in the standard repertoire. They give an energetic reading of the quartet with clear delineation of its thematic transformations, a Brahms hallmark.
Schoenberg is represented by his Third String Quartet (1927). His first quartet to use 12-tone procedures, it gets less love in the literature than the oft-analyzed combinatorics of the composer’s Fourth String Quartet, but its expressive bite still retains vitality over ninety years later. Ruth Crawford Seeger’s String Quartet (1931), an under-heralded masterpiece of the 20th century, receives one of the best recordings yet on disc, its expressive dissonant counterpoint rendered with biting vividness.
Sam Pluta’s Flow State/Joy State is filled with flurries of glissandos, microtones, and harmonics to create a thoroughly contemporary sound world punctuated by dissonant verticals. One of Pluta’s most memorable gestures employs multiple glissandos to gradually make a chord cohere, only to have subsequent music skitter away. Charmaine Lee’s Spinals incorporates her own voice, replete with lip trills and sprechstimme that are imitated by string pizzicato and, again, glissandos.
Spektral is joined by flutist Claire Chase on Anthony Cheung’s “Real Book of Fake Tunes,” which combines all manner of effects for Chase with jazzy snips of melody and writing for quartet that is somewhat reminiscent of the techniques found in the Schoenberg, but with a less pervasively dissonant palette. Cheung’s writing for instruments is always elegantly wrought, and Chase and Spektral undertake an excellent collaboration. One could imagine an entire album for this quintet being an engaging listen.
The recording’s title track is George Lewis’s String Quartet 1.5; he wrote a prior piece utilizing quartet but considers this his first large-scale work in the genre. Many of the techniques on display in Pluta’s piece play a role here as well. Lewis adds to these skittering gestures, glissandos, and microtones the frequent use of various levels of bow pressure, including extreme bow pressure in which noise is more present than pitch. The latter crunchy sounds provide rhythmic weight and accentuation that offsets the sliding tones. Dovetailing glissandos create a blurring effect in which harmonic fields morph seamlessly. The formal design of the piece is intricate yet well-balanced. More string quartets, labeled 2.5 and 3.5, are further contributions by Lewis to the genre. One hopes that Spektral will take them up as well – their playing of 1.5 is most persuasive.
Los Angeles-based Populist Records has released a new digital recording by Catherine Lamb titled Point/Wave. Performed by Italian guitarist Giacomo Fiore, Point/Wave features a single 55 minute track that combines Fiore’s guitar playing with environmental sounds processed by an electronic synthesizer jointly developed by Lamb and Bryan Eubanks. The guitar tuning and electronic processing are both in just intonation.
Point/Wave is written for acoustic guitar in just intonation where the tuning of the strings is based on whole number harmonic ratios instead of equal divisions of the octave that comprise our conventional temperament. As the liner notes indicate, the acoustic guitar was chosen for this piece because guitars “… are easy to retune, as strings and soundbox alike are generally more resilient to scordatura than bowed instruments. Thus one can implement ad hoc tuning systems by tuning the open strings in whole-number ratios, and by limiting the performance of notes only to those frets that approximate just intervals (such as major seconds, perfect fourths, and perfect fifths).” Additionally, the tuning specified by Lamb has the highest harmonic of the series tuned on the lowest string (transposed down two octaves). This might be analogous to freeing the melody from the bass line in a conventional piece, allowing “…one to explore the movements within each modal segment of the piece without necessarily relating it to a common ground.”
The electronic component of Point/Wave is similarly crafted with care. This is built around the Secondary Rainbow Synthesizer, a device that processes environmental sounds through a series of filtering stages into a gentle wash – in just intonation. The ambient sounds for this performance were field recordings of the people and traffic just outside of Fiore’s home in the Sunset district of San Francisco. This track of ambient sounds was processed by the Secondary Rainbow Synthesizer and then played in the recording studio along with the live guitar. The challenge, as described in the liner notes, was that “Changes in harmony occur based on a combination of external sound excitation and internal timers in a manner that is unpredictable for the performer aside from a subtle cross-fading. As the guitar part is itself cyclical, the resulting texture is a constantly changing alignment of harmonic fields, sometimes reinforcing one another, other times slightly at odds.”
So what does all this sound like? The electronic track opens the piece with warm, sustained pitches that hover in the air with a slight ringing sound. It creeps in stealthily, like the fog on a San Francisco evening, enveloping the listener in a smooth, continuous wash. The filtering process by the Secondary Rainbow Synthesizer recalls the classic Alvin Lucier piece I am Sitting in a Room, wherein spoken words are repeatedly recorded and played back in a room such that the sounds are reduced to their component resonant tones and pitches for that space. There is a sense here that the original street sounds have been distilled to their ultimate essence, adding a luminous patina to the overall electronic texture. This music requires close listening to perceive the subtle harmonic shifts and soft changes that are always occurring. There is no beat or pulse to form a rhythmic structure in the electronics; Point/Wave is propelled entirely by its harmonic possibilities.
After an introduction, the entry of the guitar at 2:35 provides a sharp contrast with a series of single notes that stand out vividly against the gentle sounds of the electronics. The tuning of the guitar allows its notes and subsequent overtones to ring out and interact with the electronic tones underneath. The guitar notes are solitary and stately, always leaving space for the sounds to intertwine. It is as if the guitar is in dialog with the extracted musical quintessence of the ambient natural world. Point/Wave is an extended conversation, taking some 55 minutes to complete, and it stays within a consistent construction. The liner notes state: “In this piece, however, nothing follows the introduction; rather we are invited to explore its harmonic spaces as they develop through the interactions of its sonorous parts…”
It is easy to admire the technical achievements here, and the excellent performance by Giacomo Fiore. The real significance of this piece, however, goes further. The processing of ambient street sounds into expressions of their essential tones allows the musician to interact with the environment on equal terms, using a common language. This makes the harmonic dialog that much richer and alters the traditional perspective of music as commentary. Point/Wave is expanding musical communication into a new and exciting place.
Point/Wave can be streamed in its entirety at Bandcamp:
For further inquiries please contact Populist Records via email: info@populistrecords.com.
When Michael Tippett composed The Ice Break, he was already in his early 70s. Set in a contemporary country (the US is strongly implied), and with characters caught up in racial violence and drug use, the opera received a tepid reception upon its 1977 Covent Garden premiere. The consensus was that the composer’s insistence on writing his own libretto, coupled with what Michael Berkeley calls “his touching but naive desire to keep in touch with the young and their vernacular”, had driven his dramaturgy into irreparably sophomoric sentimentality.
Thus, when director Graham Vick and conductor Andrew Gourlay focused Birmingham Opera Company’s attention on this fourth, and briefest, of Tippett’s five operas in 2015, it marked only the second time that the work had been staged in the UK. The production has now, for the first time, been made available to stream online through July 30, 2020. And just as Vick’s radical staging commemorated the anniversary of the Birmingham riots of 1985 and 2005, so does its video release place the opera’s themes of social fracture alongside the current milieu of BLM-driven protests.
Nadia (Nadine Benjamin), Lev (Andrew Slater) and their rebellious son Yuri (Ross Ramgobin)
Vick repurposed an abandoned Birmingham warehouse for the production, mocking up its interior as a stylized airport terminal (through which the ambulatory audience is ushered by uniformed “security” personnel), and setting the action rather specifically in the UK. The terminal is the locale for the first of Tippett’s three acts, but in this performance the opera unfolds in a continuous 75-minute span with no curtains or set changes. The story is compact: Nadia has come to meet her husband Lev, who is joining her in exile after spending 20 years in a (Soviet?) gulag for pacifism (mirroring Tippett’s own WW2 incarceration as a conscientious objector). Accompanying Nadia is their son Yuri, who does not remember his birth country or father, and who expresses contempt for the latter’s views on non-violence (“Cowards, they let themselves be stamped on”). Yuri has been radicalized as a young immigrant, and appears to have sympathies with white supremacists (“Here it’s different. We’re not pushed around. Every guy has a gun”).
Also arriving at the airport is Olympion, a victorious prizefighter and black militant. Greeting him is a crowd that includes Yuri’s WWC girlfriend Gayle and her black friend Hannah, a nurse who is also Olympion’s girlfriend. Gayle attempts to seduce the virile Olympion, incensing Yuri, who charges the boxer (“You motherfucking bastard!”). But Olympion easily repels him, then rebuffs Gayle as “trash”. Eventually the scene degenerates into a race riot in which Olympion and Gayle are killed and Yuri is badly injured.
Hannah (Chrystal E. Williams), Olympion (Ta’u Pupu’a) and Gayle (Stephanie Corley)
Yuri is taken to a hospital, where Hannah tends to him and Nadia, who is dying from an unspecified illness. The chorus, augmented in this production by dozens of supernumeraries drawn from the Birmingham community, makes a second appearance as a mass of young, dancing, drug users beguiled by Astron, an extraterrestrial character (or perhaps a psychedelic apparition) voiced in unison by a male and a female singer. The communal trip dissipates, whereupon Hannah cuts a now-humbled Yuri out of his full body cast (in Vick’s staging, Yuri’s bloody clothing is scissored away, leaving him naked, both figuratively and literally). As Yuri struggles to walk towards his father (“Let me go, let me stand!”), the two men are reconciled (“Chastened, together, we try once more”).
Vick’s assembly of choristers and actors seems to include every available exemplar of modern street life and transnational conflict. Rioters, skinheads, cops, S&M practitioners and greedy industrialists are all in the mix, as are pushers, pimps, Islamist executioners and their orange-suited victims, and for the Astron sequence, 60s-style flower children. Brief excerpts of news reports and footage from the actual Birmingham riots are inserted during act breaks. It all lends a degree of novelty, immediacy and intensity to the drama. Yet the one-dimensionality of these personas echoes the shallowness of the main characters: 75 minutes is just not enough time for us to learn much about the principals (only half of which survive to the end), or their personalities and motivation. Nor is it enough time to dramatically prepare Nadia’s death and the bizarre Astron/acid digression. There’s also little that can be done about the daft lyrics, including appropriation of such period slogans as black is beautiful and burn, baby, burn. The real star here is the mise en scène itself, whose impact must have been especially memorable for the live audience, which apparently included a considerable number of first-time opera attendees.
Whatever dramatic limitations may persist through a staging of The Ice Break, there can be few regrets about its music, which typically of late Tippett is unpredictable, rhythmically potent, and confident in its exploitation of contrast and instrumental color. The orchestra includes organ, electric guitar, electric bass, drum set, and a team of eight percussionists. And the sound world parallels that of Tippett’s Third and Fourth Symphonies (also from the 1970s), with the sheer delight and prowess in the elicitation of timbral mixtures pointing ahead to his final masterpiece, The Rose Lake from 1993.
The opera opens with two striking chords which return at various points as a ritornello. Tippett regarded them as “the frightening but exhilarating sound of the ice breaking on the great northern rivers in the spring”, but they also symbolize the binary divisions that drive the opera’s dramatic conflict: divisions of race, of class, and of generations as evinced in the chords’ final recurrence, when the convalescent Yuri labors to stride toward his father (1:17:17 in the video). Indeed, the entire closing sequence seems modelled on the dialectic conclusion to the composer’s Third Symphony (1970–72), which alternates between despair and optimism, with the latter—barely—getting the last word.
Another highlight, and the opera’s one compelling soul-searching aria, is Hannah’s soliloquy (“Blue night of my soul”), tenderly accompanied by flute and harp (37:28). Meanwhile, Tippett’s flair for juxtaposition and polystylism is showcased in the demonstration scenes, which include a characteristic Protestant hymn sung to “the noblest of the klan”, and a violent outburst between opposing camps represented by Coplandesque hoedown strings on one side and ambiguously Afrobeat reeds and drums on the other (42:38). Stylistically, the operas of Turnage and Adès can be viewed as a continuation of Tippett’s lineage newly emerged from the darkness of chronic despondency. More specifically, the riot scenes and racy language in The Ice Break seem an important precedent for Turnage’s Greek (1986–88).
The acoustics in this unconventional performance space must have been horribly echoey, but the production team has managed to isolate the vocal and instrumental sources so well that the sound quality in the video exceeds that of the work’s only commercial recording (1991 with the London Sinfonietta and Chorus conducted by David Atherton). And the diction is surely more comprehensible in the video than it was for the live audience, who in this compact venue barely outnumber the cast.
Published right after the re-streaming of their 2012 premiere production of Stockhausen’s Mittwoch aus Licht, this revisitation of The Ice Break solidifies Birmingham Opera Company’s place among the world’s most innovative and accomplished proponents of music theater. Whether Tippett’s dramaturgy and uneven lyrics can be rehabilitated remains open to debate, but no one is better suited to the valiant effort than Vick and company.
Chorus (bottom left), audience (top left), Lev (at table), actors (on Gucci platform) and orchestra (top right)
Michael Tippett: The Ice Break (1975–6). Produced 2015 by Birmingham Opera Company. With Andrew Gourlay (conductor), Graham Vick (director), Stuart Nunn (designer), City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Birmingham Opera Company Chorus and Actors. Lev: Andrew Slater, Nadia: Nadine Benjamin, Yuri: Ross Ramgobin, Gayle: Stephanie Corley, Hannah: Chrystal E. Williams, Olympion: Ta’u Pupu’a. Video produced 2020 by AdVision TV. OperaVision link
Sophie Schatleitner, violin; Lorelei Dowling, bassoon;
Klangform Wien, Stefan Asbury and Peter Rundel, conductors
Kairos CD 00140220KAI
Composer Liza Lim’s creative projects have long embraced a variety of ecomusicology. The environment in her home country Australia and the treatment of indigenous peoples there have featured in several works. 2018’s Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus casts an even broader net, addressing concerns of climate change worldwide. Scientific studies assessing projected extinction of flora and fauna due to the impact of the climate change disaster suggest that, unless humanity changes its ways quickly, a vast number of creatures vital to the ecosystem will no longer remain.
Narrative in instrumental music is an elusive business. However, like John Luther Adams and R. Murray Schafer, Lim is adroit at creating aural imagery that is evocative of environmental subject matter. Rain sticks, air-filled noises, and terse, insectile solos provide a sense of place and population to the piece. Baying brass announce movement breaks with poignant glissandos. The third movement, Autocorrect, features fluid solos by violinist Sophie Schatleitner offset by microtonal bends in the brass and flourishes from winds and percussion. During Dawn Chorus, the last movement, extended woodwind drones and terse sepulchral lines provide a slow-moving, harmonics filled background.
Especially impressive is the 2013 solo bassoon piece Axis Mundi, which is performed by Lorelei Dowling. Angular lines and glissandos that frequently fade are set against boisterous trills and blatting bass notes. It parses the piece into clear registral areas to create post-tonal and timbrally enhanced counterpoint that allows the disparate parts of the piece to cohere.
Songs Found in a Dream uses a similar palette as Extinction Events, feeling something like a more boisterous sketch for the larger work. However, Songs’ quicker pacing and frequently saturated textures distinguish it from the latter piece. On both works, Klangforum Wien creates supple, nuanced, and, where necessary, powerful performances. The Kairos CD sounds excellent, with a strong feeling of dimensionality among the various parts of the ensemble. Highly recommended.
In recent years, the prominence of Icelandic composers on the international stage has grown considerably, many of them championed by the Sono Luminus label. New discs on the imprint are portraits of two more composers whose careers are in ascent: Páll Ragnar Pálsson (b. 1977) and Halldór Smárason (b. 1989). They are abetted by some of Iceland’s finest chamber musicians, the Siggi String Quartet and CAPUT Ensemble.
This is Pálsson’s second solo CD, consisting of works written from 2011 to 2018. He has a varied background. In his twenties he was a rock musician and then took an extended sojourn for studies in Estonia. Atonement encompasses those experiences and is also about the composer’s return to Iceland after his time abroad. Pálsson says that the importance of place is a significant touchstone for his approach to composing.
Relationships also play a pivotal role in his work. The abundantly talented soprano Tui Hirv is Pálsson’s spouse. She features prominently in several pieces, singing minute shadings and sustained high passages with tremendous dynamic control and expressivity in the title work. On Stalker’s Monologue, singing a text adapted from the Tarkovsky film, Hirv demonstrates more vocal steel and the accompaniment takes on a bleary-eyed cast. Midsummer’s Night features recited text instead of singing, with a poem by Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir.
The CAPUT Ensemble acquits themselves admirably as well. Lucidity features the ensemble crafting microtonal shadings and exaggerated trills, the latter sometimes doubled in strings and winds to kaleidoscopic effect and punctuated by swells of percussion. The extended ensemble passages on Wheel Crosses Under Moss are an excellent response to the keening part sung by Hirv.
Smárason’s debut solo CD features the Siggi String Quartet. The title work is a good example of the composer’s aesthetic. Spacious use of silence is complemented by long sustained notes that generally have an “edge to them,” in terms of dissonance or playing technique. The quartet are dispatched on a similar errand on the piece Draw and Play, but the gestures between the rests are more animated. Blakta, also for strings, features gentle pizzicato against harmonics and upper register pileups of verticals.
A guitar and electronics piece, Skúlptúr 1, requires the performer, Gulli Björnsson, to make his way through a challenging hop scotch of techniques in a specified time frame in order to avoid an alarm from the electronics part. Happily he makes it on the recording.
The best piece on Stara is also the one for the largest ensemble, Stop Breathing. The Siggi Quartet is augmented with bass flute, clarinet, and piano. Breathy whorls and wind glissandos are set against harmonic ostinato passages as well as aggressive squalls of sound.
A number of current composers are concerned with silence and pianissimo stretches. On Stara, Smárason distinguishes himself by filling in the silence with music of an uneasy demeanor from which one receives little respite or release. His work is unerringly paced and delicately unnerving. Both Atonement and Stara contain excellent performances of provoking works: recommended.
Julian Bennett Holmes is the Sacred Music Coordinator of the St. Paul Chapel at Columbia University. He is an award winning composer, having studied with Lowell Liebermann and Richard Danielpour. Julian also teaches undergraduate courses at the Manhattan School of Music.
In this podcast we cover a variety of topics including Julian’s music, pipe organ improvisations, the future of sacred music and the state of composing and performing in a time of pandemics and isolation.
American composer and pianist Marga Richter died peacefully of natural causes at her new home in Barnegat, NJ on June 25, 2020. She had lived on Long Island for many years prior, regularly spending summers in Vermont. Born in Reedsburg, Wisconsin and raised in Robbinsdale, Minnesota, she was the first woman to graduate with a master’s degree in composition from Juilliard in 1951 where she studied piano with Rosalyn Tureck and composition with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti. She was one of few women composers to have her orchestral works performed by major orchestras, and over her lifetime she composed nearly 200 works for orchestra, piano, chamber ensembles, chorus, and voice that were performed by major artists and organizations including pianist Menahem Pressler, violinist Daniel Heifetz, the Drucker Trio, cellist David Wells, the Western Wind, the Minnesota Orchestra, Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Natalie Hinderas and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Civic Orchestra of Chicago. In 1981 an all-Richter concert was held at Merkin Concert Hall in New York City.
Marga Richter’s musical style was very chromatic from her early years and primarily uses layered textures and ostinatos to generate structure. Her music ranges from highly dissonant works to more modal works that always have a twist of chromatic flavor. She viewed chromaticism as an important tool for intuitive emotional expression and disliked strict precompositional systems, rejecting twelve-tone techniques wholeheartedly for her own music. Many of her works drew inspiration from distinctly American, Irish/English, or Asian images or texts. For instance, her Landscapes of the Mind series was inspired by paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, Blackberry Vines and Winter Fruit was inspired by writings of Thoreau, her orchestral tone poem Spectral Chimes/Enshrouded Hills was inspired by Britisher Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and her Dew Drops on a Lotus Leaf is a setting of poems by Ryokwan. She composed works for ballet early in her career, including The Abyss, a ballet composed for The Harkness Ballet. Many of her works are dedicated to individuals in her life; Lament for string orchestra was composed in memory of her mother, the opera singer Inez Chandler. She composed the chamber opera Riders to the Sea, and a grand Triple Concerto for violin, piano, and cello soloists. Being a fine pianist herself, she composed many piano works, large and small, including her Piano Sonata.
I met Marga in 2003 and view her as a true friend and wonderful composer, with a great sense of humor. She loved connecting and sharing music with all the many people in her life, playing piano, collecting blue mason jars, taking long walks daily, word play, and working as cofounder and member of the Long Island Composers Organization. She was predeceased by her husband Alan Skelly and is survived by her son pianist Michael Skelly; daughter Maureen Raj, a nurse; four grandchildren; and four great grandchildren.
Share a memory with her family at her Tribute Obituary here.
Read and Listen Further: Marga Richter
Archival video footage from a series of “Hear & Now” interviews hosted by Judith St. Croix for American Cable Systems features “An Exploration of the Creative Mind” with composer Marga Richter discussing her creative process and her piece “Landscapes of the Mind 1.” Posted on the NYWC YouTube channel
Interview with Marga by filmmaker Leslie Streit for the documentary “An American Ballet Story”
The Longform Editions label has recently released a new piano music EP from Michael Vincent Waller, available via digital download. Dedicated to “the slow recovery of our times”, A Song is a quietly atmospheric piece, improvised by the composer and recorded in a single take with no editing.
The opening chords of A Song are simple yet elegant. The first tones are clear and sustained, ringing out like church bells on a quiet summer morning. There is nothing technically demanding here, but Waller’s touch in these opening moments is impeccable. The quiet, introspective feel is immediate and compelling. The piece flows easily along, sometimes becoming insistent but never breaking the reflective mood. Less is so much more with this piece – it is driven entirely by the beautiful harmony and a subtle counterpoint underneath. At about 8:00 the melody becomes just a bit more animated, even as the luminous chords continue to ring out.
As A Song slowly unfolds, it gradually gathers in complexity and acquires a slight coloring of anxiety that seeps onto its placid surface. By 15:00 it has gained a modicum of intensity, aided by some darker tones in the lower registers. The phrases rise and then subside again, yet they always maintain a welcome equanimity. Towards the finish there is a strong crescendo that climaxes with a faint sense of regret, a fitting ending to a piece dedicated “to the slow recovery of our times…”
A Song is entirely improvised, but it has an arc to it that suggests an intentional framework beneath its understated surface. The piece unfolds with a calm assurance and even as the settled sounds of the opening gradually build to the more agitated finish, the piece always retains its sense of balance. Artistically linked to Moments, Waller’s most recent full length album, A Song represents a sort of shorthand summary for the present state of his minimalist aesthetic, a bright marker on an advancing musical path.
A Song (LE056), is available for digital download from Longform Editions.
The Naxos Grand Piano Records label has released a new CD by Nicolas Horvath, The Unknown Debussy – Rare Piano Music. Known for his interpretations of the piano music of Philip Glass, Franz Liszt and Erik Satie, Nicolas Horvath here performs previously unheard works by Claude Debussy as reconstructed by scholar Robert Orledge. According to the liner notes: “Robert Orledge’s research into Debussy’s sketches and incomplete drafts has resulted in the unearthing and reconstruction of numerous lost masterpieces, the piano versions of which are given their première recordings here.” The Unknown Debussy – Rare Piano Music will no doubt prove to be an important addition to the body of scholarship on the music of Claude Debussy.
The Unknown Debussy – Rare Piano Music is available through Grand Piano as well as Amazon Music.
In this podcast, Nicolas Horvath talks about his musical training, his affection for contemporary composers and the challenges of interpreting the previously unknown music of Claude Debussy. With Paul Muller and Jim Goodin.
Julian Bennett Holmes is the Sacred Music Coordinator of the St. Paul Chapel at Columbia University. He is an award winning composer, having studied with Lowell Liebermann and Richard Danielpour. Julian also teaches undergraduate courses at the Manhattan School of Music. 
