Published: November 12, 2009 08:30 pm         

Contemporary Music Festival set to kick off at Indiana State

TERRE HAUTE — Steve Reich, regarded widely as one of the greatest living composers, has been selected the principal guest composer of Indiana State University’s 43rd annual Contemporary Music Festival. He and a portion of the Steve Reich Ensemble will perform during the three-day festival Tuesday through Thursday.

The premier event of its kind in the United States, the ISU Contemporary Music Festival attracts an audience from throughout the world. All events are free. Other guests of this year’s festival include the Steve Reich Ensemble String Quartet and composition contest winner Lansing McLoskey.

Born in New York, Reich graduated with honors in philosophy from Cornell University in 1957. For the next two years, he studied composition with Hall Overton, and from 1958 to 1961 he studied at the Juilliard School of Music. Reich received his master’s degree in music from Mills College in 1963.

In 1966, Reich founded his own ensemble of three musicians, which rapidly grew to 18 members or more. Since 1971, Steve Reich and Musicians have frequently toured the world and have the distinction of performing to sold-out houses at venues as diverse as Carnegie Hall and the Bottom Line Cabaret.

Reich’s 1988 piece, “Different Trains,” marked a new compositional method, rooted in “It’s Gonna Rain” and “Come Out,” in which speech recordings generate the musical material for musical instruments. In 1990, he received a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Composition for “Different Trains,” recorded by the Kronos Quartet.

In June 1997, in celebration of Reich’s 60th birthday, a 10-CD retrospective box set of Reich’s compositions, featuring several newly recorded and re-mastered works, was released. He won a second Grammy award in 1999 for his piece “Music for 18 Musicians.” In July 1999 a major retrospective of his work was presented by the Lincoln Center Festival.

Reich’s music has been performed by major orchestras and ensembles around the world, including the London Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, The Ensemble Intercontemporain, the London Sinfonietta, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the BBC Symphony and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

In 1994, Reich was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, to the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1995, and, in 1999, awarded Commandeur de l’ordre des Arts et Lettres. In October 2006, Reich was awarded the Praemium Imperiale Award in Music. This important international award is for areas in the arts not covered by the Nobel Prize. He also received The Polar Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Music in 2007.

McLoskey will participate in the festival as the Contemporary Music Festival/Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra composition contest winner. The composition competition was established to recognize outstanding composers of orchestral music.

His music has been performed to critical acclaim in 13 countries on six continents. He has received dozens of commissions and grants and has written for such renowned ensembles as The Hilliard Ensemble, Speculum Musicae and Dinosaur Annex. McLoskey is president of Composers in Red Sneakers, and faculty at the University of Miami. He earned a doctorate from Harvard University, where he directed The Harvard Group for New Music. He holds degrees with honors from the University of California at Santa Barbara and the USC Thornton School of Music, with additional studies at The Royal Danish Academy of Music.

The orchestral version of “Requiem” will have its world premiere during the Contemporary Music Festival. The piece was originally commissioned as a chamber work for The New Millennium Ensemble as a sort of “requiem for a millennium” and was subsequently expanded for orchestra. “Requiem” features a wide variety of instrumentation: flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trumpets, trombones, marimba, Balinese gongs, snare drums, toms, bass drum, triangle, suspended cymbals, vibraphone, tam-tam, bongos, crotales, piano and strings.

McLoskey admittedly came to the world of composition via a somewhat unorthodox route. The proverbial “Three Bs” for him were The Beatles, Bauhaus and Black Flag. His first experiences at writing music were as the guitarist and songwriter for punk rock bands in San Francisco in the early 1980s. It was actually through these years that he first developed a love for classical music.

The Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, which performed at last year’s festival for the first time, returns to perform at 7:30 p.m. Thursday in Tilson Auditorium.

The orchestra, consisting of 35 professional musicians, focuses on programming that is unique to its composition and size by presenting an annual concert series of masterworks from four centuries of music composed for the small orchestra. In keeping with its mission, the orchestra performs a body of music that most audiences have traditionally had few opportunities to hear in live performances.

Since 1967, more than 175 established and emerging composers-including 17 winners of the Pulitzer Prize and four winners of the Grawemeyer Award have participated in the ISU Contemporary Music Festival.

The 43rd annual Contemporary Music Festival is funded in part through Meet the Composer’s MetLife Creative Connections program and supported by grants from Arts Illiana; the Indiana Arts Commission, a state agency; and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.

Contact the ISU music department at (812) 237-2771 or go to www.indstate.edu/music/cmf.html for more information.