Composer's Voice Concert Birmingham Art Music Alliance Collaboration August 3, 2003 Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham 4300 Hampton Heights Drive Birmingham, Alabama 35209

Vox Novus and Birmingham Art Music Alliance Present: Artburst at the Unitarian Church Artburst at the Unitarian Church Birmingham, Alabama

Title Composer Performer Tears of Dew Robert Voisey Adam Bowles - piano Craig Hultgren - Cello Red Shift Terry Winter Owens Adam Bowles - piano Forward Looking Back Dorothy Hindman Adam Bowles - piano The New Yorker Songs James Jensen Melanie Williams - soprano Adam Bowles - piano Alabama Places Monroe Golden Great Performances Noah Creshevsky Craig Hultgren - Cello Melanie Williams - soprano and tape

Performers Cellist Craig Hultgren is a long-time activist for new music, the newly creative arts, and the avant-garde. This year he has performed solo concerts and chamber music in St, Louis, Miami, Atlanta, Memphis and Bowling Green, Ohio. A recipient of two Artist Fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, he is a member of Thámyris, a contemporary chamber music ensemble in Atlanta. A cellist in the Alabama Symphony, he also plays in the Chagall Trio and Luna Nova, a new music ensemble with a large repertoire of performances available as podcast downloads on iTunes. Hultgren is featured in three solo CD recordings including The Electro-Acoustic Cello Book on Living Artist Recordings. In 2004, the Birmingham Sidewalk Film Festival 48-Hour Scramble cited him for the best soundtrack creation for the film The Silent Treatment. Every other year he produces the Hultgren Solo Cello Works Biennial, an international competition that highlights the best new compositions for the instrument. He teaches at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the Alabama School of Fine Arts and Birmingham-Southern College where he directs the BSC New Music Ensemble. Adam Bowlesis becoming increasingly active on the contemporary art-music scene, performing frequently in the Birmingham Art Music Alliance, Artburst, and similar venues for new music. Dr. Bowles is a native of Los Angeles who holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. He obtained his Bachelor of Music degree at the Eastman School of Music, and received his Master of Music at the New England Conservatory of Music. His main teachers have been Milton Stern, Barry Snyder, Jacob Maxin, and Eugene and Elizabeth Pridonoff. He has also received periodic coaching with Richard Goode, Malcolm Bilson, and Seymour Lipkin. He is now an instructor on the Birmingham-Southern College Conservatory faculty where he teaches the two highest levels of music theory in addition to maintaining a studio of private students. At the college level he teaches Accompanying and both years of Keyboard Harmony for music majors. During the year Bowles frequently collaborates in recital with both students and faculty at BSC Melanie Williams enjoys an active performing career in the southeastern United States and beyond. A native of Jackson, Mississippi, Williams earned the MM and the DMA in vocal performance at Louisiana State University, where she studied with Dr. Sandra Kungle, Martino Arroyo, Robert Grayson, and Patricia O’Neill. Opera roles include Papagena in Opera Birmingham’s Die Zauberflöte , Berta in the company’s production of Il Barbiere di Siviglia, and Olympia in Baton Rouge Opera’s production of Le Contes d’Hoffman. She has sung several roles with Alabama OperaWorks, including Monica in The Medium, Laetitia in The Old Maid and the Thief, “The Girl” in Hello, Out There, Valerie in The Cabildo, and the title roles in Savitri and Iolanthe. Williams has twice traveled to England as soprano soloist for the International Cathedral Music Festival, performing in London, Canterbury, and Salisbury. Concert appearances in the Southeast include engagements with the Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, Kingsport, and University of Alabama Symphonies, as well as the Red Mountain Chamber Orchestra, Colla Voce choral ensemble, and most recently as soprano soloist in Carmina Burana with the Jacksonville State University combined choirs and orchestra. Upcoming solo engagements include solo recitals at the University of Montevallo, Troy University, and the University of South Alabama. Dr. Williams is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Montevallo, where she teaches applied voice, vocal pedagogy, and diction courses. A former Governor of the Alabama District of the National Association of Teachers of Singing, she presently serves on the Southeastern Region advisory board. She and husband, Mark, reside in Birmingham with their children, Anna Katherine and John Mark, and two dachsunds, Scout and Sophie.

Composers Trained in composition by Nadia Boulanger in Paris and Luciano Berio at Juilliard, Noah Creshevsky is the former director of the Center for Computer Music and Professor Emeritus at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. His musical vocabulary consists largely of familiar bits of words, songs, and instrumental music which are edited but rarely subjected to electronic processing. The result is a music that obscures the boundaries of real and imaginary ensembles though the fusion of opposites: music and noise, comprehensible and incomprehensible vocal sources, human and superhuman vocal and instrumental capacities. Creshevsky's work has been supported by grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and ASCAP. It has been published by Alexander Broude and the University of Michigan Press, released on records and compact discs, and performed and broadcast internationally. Formerly director of the Center for Computer Music and professor of music at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, he has served on the faculties of the Juilliard School and Hunter College, and been a visiting professor at Princeton University. Monroe Golden is a freelance composer from rural Alabama. His compositions often explore alternate tuning systems and the implications of those systems for other musical structures, and have been broadcast on adventurous radio and performed in concerts throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Critics have called his music "delightfully disorienting" and "lovely, sumptuous, yet arcane." Awards include the 2006 Alabama Music Teachers Association/MTNA Commissioning Award, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, and commissions from several solo performers and groups. A CD of his works entitled A Still Subtler Spirit is available from Living Artist Recordings, amazon.com, and CD Baby. Beyond his artistry, Golden has actively encouraged and promoted the innovative arts in his resident community. He is a founding member of the Birmingham Art Music Alliance, serving as President from 2003-2005. He has also headed the Birmingham Art Association and the ARTBURST Performance Series at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham. He produced the 1998 Birmingham International Improvisation Festival, and founded the New Arts Stage of Birmingham's City Stages, directing the stage from 1999-2004. Golden graduated cum laude from the University of Montevallo and earned a doctorate from the University of Illinois. His composition teachers include James A. Jensen, Ed Robertson, Ben Johnston, Sever Tipei, Aurel Stroé, and Herbert Brün. Dorothy Hindman Dorothy Hindman (b. 1966) is a professional composer whose works are regularly performed throughout the United States and Europe. Her commissions include works for soloists, small and large ensembles, and commercial productions. Critics have hailed Hindman’s music as ‘intense, gripping, and frenetic’, ‘sonorous and affirmative’ and ‘music of terrific romantic gesture’. Each of her unique pieces explores her ongoing interest in issues of musical perception, beauty, timbre, contextual meaning, and profundity. Terry Winter Owens is an internationally published composer based in New York City. Her music has been widely performed in Europe and, to a lesser extent, in the US. Her long-time interest in astronomy, astrophysics and poetry is reflected in a recent series of compositions for piano and narrator. A CD of her piano music of the 1990’s, “Exposed on the Cliffs of the Heart”(title from a Rilke poem) in a performance by Portuguese virtuoso Francisco Monteiro was produced by AM&M Records, Portugal and is available from Amazon. Her catalogue also includes works for two pianos, chamber and vocal ensembles, and symphony orchestra. Influenced by the Post-Webernian school , Owens's music has evolved over the years in a modal/atonal direction which she calls the Resonant Continuum. Her compositions are transparent in texture with soaring pointillistic phrases. She also composes in traditional, historical idioms exemplified by her “Homage To Corelli” written in the Baroque style and an album of piano pieces, “Serenades to the Composers” in 19th century harmonic and stylistic idioms. Her score for “The Clearing”, a silent film with continuous music, is scored for two flutes, piano and timpani. “The Clearing” was selected for the 1994 New York Expo and has been screened at international film festivals. http://www.nohofilm.org/store/1995.htm “The Lost Children of Coney Island”, her third collaboration with filmmaker Douglas Morse was premiered at The Kitchen in Sept. 2000 with funding from the American Composers Forum and Meet the Composer. Owens improvised at the piano a la the tradition of the silent film. Owens has performed widely as a pianist and harpsichordist and given many recitals of the music of Gurdjieff/DeHartmann. She directed a Baroque and Elizabethan Chamber Ensemble and performed as a harpsichordist with the Collegium Musicum of the College of Staten Island. She has been a free-lance editor for various publishers and prepared orchestral/vocal computer-notated scores from hand-written manuscripts for the Kurt Weill Foundation. She teaches piano and composition privately and was awarded teaching grants by the New York State Council on the Arts. Owens received a BA in Music from The City College of NY and did graduate work in Musicology at New York University. She studied piano with Lisa Grad and composition with Ralph Shapey. She currently serves as the Independent Composers Representative of the Society of Composers. Robert Voisey “With few opportunities and much competition,...composers show creativity in just getting heard.” And in Chris Pasles’s article in the Los Angeles Times, Robert Voisey is highlighted as one of those composers. Composing electroacoustic and chamber music, his aesthetic oscillates from the Romantic to the Post Modern Mash-Up. His work has been performed in venues throughout the world including: Carnegie Hall, World Financial Center Winter Garden Atrium, and Stratford Circus in London.

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