Music of the Last Ten Years Course Blog

Thomas Flippin is an American composer and guitarist. He has performed across the country in venues such as Carnegie Hall, The Metropolitan Museum, and The Cleveland Orchestra. His 2018 album, Night Triptych, which featured female composers exclusively, was called “ one of the Best Classical Music albums  of 2018 by both All Music and I Care if You Listen. ” In 2020, Flippin composed Endless Loop, Endless Days as part of the Yale School of Music’s Postcards from Confinement project.  Postcards from Confinement   is described   by the YSM as a way “to share messages of gratitude with those who are confronting the COVID-19 pandemic directly." Students, faculty, and alumni were chosen to submit a performance of their choice dedicated to the people fighting COVID-19 on the front lines. Each performance was then sent to the recipient as a digital "postcard." Endless Loop, Endless Days was written as a metaphor for the feelings of frustration and monotony that people fel...

Miguel del Águila's DISAGREE!  was premiered by SOLI Chamber Ensemble in Austin, TX in 2017. True to its title, Disagree features competing themes which somehow coexist without ever coalescing into a unified whole. According to the program notes  from the premier, "Disagree is a work about integrating disparity...[making] a statement about pluralism in music and in our society."  To better understand the inherent conflict in this work, it is necessary to explore the composer's background . Miguel del Águila is a Uruguayan-American composer who studied in San Francisco and Vienna and has served as composer in residence at various institutions around the world. His music has a distinctly international sound without ever losing touch with his Latin American roots. In Disagree, we hear Latin inspired themes which are constantly interrupted by music which bears more European influence. The disagreement itself is almost cinematic in the way that themes transition; upo...

Austin Franklin, a friend of mine since our undergraduate days at Lamar University - before I jumped ship for Kent State, has been hard at work at Louisiana State University. Austin is completing his PhD in Experimental Music and Digital Media which includes writing code and designing specialized software within Cycling 74's program 'MaxMSP' for use in live performance with instrumentalists. While this is a large part of his work, Austin also composes music brought to the listener's ears by pure algorithms which have been presented at many festivals over the course of 2021.  Lately, I had the pleasure of premiering his most recent piece,  Concentric Circles,  for Piano, Cello, Percussion & Live Electronics. With this piece he began finalizing his methodology and goals for his PhD and electronic music. This included a variety of specially coded programs within MaxMSP which manipulate data that are taken in through microphones listening to live performers then send th...

     Alan Silvestri is an American composer who first dreamed of being a jazz guitar player; he was born in New York City and raised in Teaneck, New Jersey. He spent two years at Berklee School of Music in Boston and later became a performer and arranger. Silvestri then made his way to Hollywood, where he successfully composed music for a film called "The Doberman Gang," He made a name for himself in the film composing world. In the 1970's Silvestri's part in a show called "CHiP's" got the attention of the filmmaker, Robert Zemeckis. Since then, their collaboration has created a dynamic duo as a genius composer and filmmaker making 21 films. Some films they've worked on together include the "Back to the Future" trilogy, the "Polar Express,"Forrest Gump," and recently "The Witches," and more. Silvestri's fantastic work on "Forrest Gump", got him awarded Oscar and Golden Globe nominations.     Silvestri...

World-renowned American composer and pianist Gabriela Lena Frank does not shy away from centering her multicultural identity in her music and draws inspiration from composers like Bela Bartók and Alberto Ginastera, and the mythology, poetry, and music of indigenous Latin American communities. Having traveled extensively throughout Andean South America, Gabriela often highlights the sounds of native instruments of this region within the context of Western classical instrumentation and form. She describes her music through a concept of "mestizaje," familiarized by Peruvian writer, Jose Maria Arguedas, in which multiple cultures can co-exist without the dominance of one over another. She centers mestizaje in a few of her earlier pieces, such as Sonata Andina (2000), Leyendas: an Andean Walkabout (2001), and Sonata Serrana No. 1 (2012) to name a few. A common feature of her works involves rich storytelling and imagery and her recent work premiered by NYO-USA and commissioned by...

Alyssa Morris is a renowned oboist and composer of music for the oboe (and graduate of CCM!). Her works have been premiered and featured at numerous International Double Reed Society Conventions, and are on the lists of major international competitions. In 2017, Morris published her Collision Etudes (Oboe Solo)  in response to the Gilles Silvestrini's Six Etudes for Solo Oboe published in the late 20th century. Silvestrini, also an oboist, has had enormous success in writing for the oboe and has even turned his Six Etudes into an even more challenging set of Three Duos for two oboes. The Six Etudes are based on six paintings, each trying to evoke through music what is depicted on the canvas.  Morris's Collision Etudes are also six etudes reflecting six works of art, showcasing works by female American painters.  Both the Silvestrini and Morris solo etudes push the boundaries of standard oboe technique. Silvestrini introducing use of extreme high register, harmonic finge...

The Negro Folk Symphony by William L. Dawson (1898 – 1990) is considered as an enlightened and significant American Work that develops themes taken from the popularly known Black Spirituals. This work brings the language of post-slavery with the timbres and aesthetics of the European Symphony Orchestra. The premiere was on November 20th, 1934 at Carnegie Hall by the Philadelphia Orchestra, led by its conductor Leopold Stokowski. This event was acclaimed by the audience and critics. An example is by Olin Downes in The New York Times, who noted :  "This music has dramatic feeling, a racial sensuousness and directness of melodic speech."                                      A drawing of composer William Dawson in 1935 by Aaron Douglas                                   To und...

In 2020 David Rakowski finished his 100 preludes for piano, matching his set of 100 etudes finished in 2010. Before we dive into these sizable pools of music let’s first explore Mr. Rakowski the person. His bio on his own blog reads, “David Rakowski blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah. Blah. Blah, blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah, blah blah his wife Beth Wiemann, and a red canoe.” Clearly this composer is going against conventions, poking fun at traditions. In addition to regular posts about life, music, and composition Rakowski includes peripheral pages that highlight a wry humor, a mind that is ever at work with puns, wordplays, and comedic ideas. One page “ridiculizes” serious movie lines by reforming them into passive voice. Another lists punch lines in search of jokes and another details surefire conversation stoppers (which can be used to end drawn out conversations when you need to get back to practicing).  Rakowski’s 100 preludes and 100 etudes are sim...

We Shall Not Be Moved  was composed by Daniel Bernard Roumain with a libretto by Marc Bamuthi Joseph, and directed by Bill T. Jones. The opera brings in musical signifiers from several genres while pointedly critiquing issues such as police brutality, the rights of transgender individuals, and structural racism within the US public education system. While the opera has not been taken on by another company since its premiere in 2017, it is an overlooked example of the possibilities illuminated by the frameworks and orientations of Black Opera as defined by Naomi André , and, I would argue, contemporary US opera more broadly.  The opera grew out of an Opera Philadelphia collaboration with a non-profit called Arts Sanctuary called  "Hip H'Opera,"  initially launched in 2007. In the Hip H'Opera program, students "[learned] the history and aesthetics of hip-hop and opera . . . and then "[used] poetry, fiction, and non-fiction [to capture] their own urban stories....

 Welcome! "Music of the Last Ten Years (2012-2022) is a Sp 2022 graduate course being taught at the College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati. This course concept, which is indebted to Anne Shreffler's original "Music of the Last Ten Years" course series at Harvard University, will allow us to explore (primarily) western art music composed from 2012-2022.  -Dr. Steigerwald