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Living Composers: AnythingPiano Project

Living Composers: AnythingPiano Project  |  Previous PROJECTS  |  selected composers

Living Composers: AnythingPiano Project (LCAPP)
Compositions by the following living composers have been selected for performance. This list will continue to expand so please check back again. All LCAPP sound samples are presented with the full permission of the individual composers. Composers retain full ownership of their music. All rights reserved. For more information about a particular composer on this list, or to hear recordings of their music that they have made available, click on their name for a direct link to their web site. LCAPP composers are listed here in alphabetical order

Listen to LCAPP selections performed by The Four-Hand Piano Duo

Beth Anderson, Belgian Tango (1984)
Beth Anderson's music has been described as having "a refreshing simplicity without naiveté" and as -"deeply felt, direct, and yes, beautiful" and "charming and deeply felt to the point of romanticism". Her latest CDs are a new recording by Nancy Boston of September Swale as part of American Women: Modern Voices in Piano Music and Quilt Music, a CD of chamber music for smaller ensembles.

Danielle Baas, 'Les Temps de l'Homme' (2001)
Recueil de pièces pour piano 4 mains inspirées des tapisseries murales d'Edmond Dubrunfaut (selections):
Danielle Baas is Belgium of Dutch origin and has studied at Jette's Academy of Music and Brussel's Royale Academy of Music. Her works have been performed in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Bosnia, Spain, Germany, China (composition competition 2003), Brazil and the USA. In 2002, she created the Yolande Uyttenhove Ensemble, a group of musicians with variable geometry, aimed at promoting and creating Belgium contemporary works and broadcasting Belgium music abroad.

Donna Gross Javel, Fire Dance Duo (2007)
Donna Gross Javel's Fire Dance Duo received its first performance on February 2, 2007, just a week or two after its completion. It was performed by Mary Jane Rupert and Tom Zeman at Madalen College, in New Hampshire, where Tom Zeman was acting as a visiting professor.
"The Fire Dance Duo is a piece of strong character and vitality with a propulsive rhythmic energy
that will engage players and listeners alike."
•Victor Rosenbaum, pianist (Faculty member, New England Conservatory, Mannes College of Music,
former Director of the Longy School of Music)

Chuck Holdeman, Crossover Soundings (1998)
Chuck Holdeman has written songs, works for band, orchestra, chamber music, and film and educational music. His one-act opera “Agostino and the Puccini Clarinet,” with libretto by Vincent Marinelli, was premiered in 2007 at Wilmington Music School (Delaware) and produced again in 2008. Holdeman is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied bassoon with Sol Schoenbach, later studying in France with Maurice Allard. He is principal bassoonist for the Delaware Symphony Orchestra and the Bach Festival of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. For more than 20 years, he was a member of the Buffet Trio and now performs with the Philadelphia-based new music group Relâche. In 1999 Chuck Holdeman was named Composer of the Year by the Pennsylvania and Delaware State Music Teachers Associations, which commissioned "Crossover Soundings," and in 2000 he was the first recipient of the Delaware Division of the Arts Master Artist Fellowship. In 2003 Holdeman received the Beekhuis Award for outstanding service and performance in the Delaware Symphony Orchestra, which commissioned and performed the orchestral version of Crossover Soundings. He initiated and facilitates the DSO’s annual high school composition project, begun in 1995. Holdeman has produced two CDs and a CD of his chamber music compositions, including "Crossover Soundings" is planned.

Graham Howard, Short Piece No. 1 (2003)
Graham Howard was born in Penrith, Australia in 1973. In 1990 and 1991, he co-won the Sydney Symphony Orchestra School Composer's Competition. Graham completed a Bachelor of Music (Hons) at The University of Sydney in 1996, majoring in composition, studying with Anne Boyd, Ross Edwards and Peter Sculthorpe. Graham taught and lectured composition at The Australian International Conservatorium of Music in 2003, brass and composition at The King's School, Parramatta, from 2003 to 2005, and Organisational Psychology at The University of Western Sydney in 2006 and 2007. He is active as a freelance composer, conductor, trumpeter, teacher and photographer throughout NSW. Graham has been the photographer for The Nature Conservation Council of NSW since 2005, as well as a contributing photographer for The Wilderness Society since 2006.

Edmund Jolliffe, Romp (2002)
Edmund Jolliffe is a British composer of music for the concert hall, television and theatre. His music has been performed in many prestigious venues, including the Wigmore Hall, the Purcell Room, the Old Vic Theatre, Westminster Abbey, Jermyn Street Theatre, the National Portrait Gallery, the Red House at Aldeburgh and the Tate, Liverpool. It has also been performed as far afield as Michigan, Dallas and France. He has written television music for all the terrestrial channels in the United Kingdom and many of the Satellite Channels. His music for the Imagine programme 'Fantastic Mr Dahl' is now an added extra on the DVD to 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' and is an in flight movie on American Airlines. He studied music at Oxford University and completed a Masters in Film Composition at the Royal College of Music under Joseph Horovitz. He also studied on the Advanced Composition Course at Dartington International Summer School under Pavel Novak in 2004 (supported by the Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust).

Beatriz Lockhart, Joropo for Piano, Four Hands (1986)
Beatriz Lockhart is a Uruguayan pianist, music educator and composer. She was born in Montevideo and studied composition at the Montevideo Conservatory and the Latin-American Center for Musical Studies of the Instituto Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires from 1969-70 with Carolos Estrada and Héctor Tosar. She took a teaching position in 1974 at the National Conservatory in Caracas, Venezuela, then returned to Uruguay in 1998 to teach at the Escuela Universitaria de Música and at the Uscuela Municipal de Música. She is noted as a specialist in contemporary tango and has written several modern tangos for solo piano. Her compositions have received prizes. www.mujeresenmusica.org

Mike Nock, Southern Suite (selections) (2008)
Mike Nock's compositions have been commissioned and performed by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony (USA), Australian Chamber Orchestra, Synergy, Melbourne Windpower, Ensemble 24, The New Zealand String Quartet, Dunedin Civic Orchestra (NZ) and Umo Jazz Orchestra (Finland). He has worked in the USA with many of the world's top jazz musicians such as: Coleman Hawkins, Yusef Lateef, Dionne Warwick and Michael Brecker. He has a large catalogue of critically acclaimed, internationally released recordings and a substantial body of original compositions in print and on recordings.

Gary Noland, Andante in F Minor Op. 46 (2002)
Gary Noland was born in Seattle and raised in Berkeley. His compositions have been performed and broadcast in many locations throughout the United States and are regularly featured on the Seventh Species new music concert series in Oregon, which he founded in San Francisco in 1990. He earned a B.A. in music from U.C. Berkeley in 1979, continued studies at the Boston Conservatory, and transferred to Harvard University where he worked as a teaching fellow and added to his academic credits an M.A. and a Ph.D. in 1989.

Charles Smith, Samba in F-sharp Minor (1999)
Charles Smith has a M.M. in Piano Performance and D.M.A. in Piano Performance and Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana. In 1988, he won first place in the Society of American Musicians (SAM) competition at Roosevelt University, in Chicago. In the same year, he won first place in the Classical Music and Composition categories in the ACT-SO competition in Chicago (African-American Cultural, Technological, and Scientific Olympics). He then represented ACT-SO in the national Competition in Washington D.C. and won second place in Classical Music. In 1989, he took first place in the local competition in the same categories and represented ACT-SO in the National Competition in Detroit, Michigan. In 1990, he won the ACT-SO First Place Award in Musical Composition at the local level, and represented ACT-SO in the national competition in Los Angeles.

David Bennett Thomas, Short Sonata for Four Hands (2001)

David Bennett Thomas is a composer in the Philadelphia area, where he teaches composition, piano, and heads the theory department at The University of the Arts.  He has composed extensively for chorus, chamber groups, and piano, and also composes and works as a jazz pianist.  Thomas' music has been commissioned and performed throughout America and abroad, and can be found on several CD labels.

Ana Isabel Vargas Dengo, Por los Senderos (2002), Oropéndolas: Theme and Variations Op. 275 (2006)
Ana Isabel Vargas Dengo is a musical educator and a composer from San José, Costa Rica and is an active member of Asociación Mujeres Costarricenses en la Música, an association of women musicians (composers, performers, educators, and musicologists) in Rosta Rica. She comes from a musical family; her grandfather and her father both received their musical training in the United States. She has written more than 200 children's songs and about 60 piano pieces. The last few years she has been composing four-hand piano pieces. Por los senderos de Costa Rica is inspired by the wonderful nature you can see as you walk in the fields and woods from her land of Costa Rica. ana can be reached by email at: anaivd@hotmail.com.

Elizabeth Vercoe, Umbria oiuion Suite (1999)
Elizabeth Vercoe has been a composer at the MacDowell Colony, the St. Petersburg Spring Music Festival in Russia, and the Cité International des Arts in Paris, as well as a participant in the US/USSR Composer Exchange in Boston and the American Music Oral History Project at Yale University. She has written works on commission for Wellesley College, Austin Peay University, the Pro Arte Orchestra, and the First National Congress on Women in Music. Her awards include grants from the the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artists Foundation, and the Massachusetts Arts Council. Described by Gardner Read as "a composer with a fine technical command and a keen sensitivity to sound materials," her music has been widely performed and broadcast in Europe and the U.S. with concerts in London, Paris, Bangkok, New York, and San Francisco. Following her doctoral degree at Boston University in 1978, she began to promote women's music as a board member of the International League of Women Composers, Director of the Women's Music Festival/85, and author of articles on the subject. She held the Acuff Chair of Excellence at Austin Peay State University in 2003 and teaches at Regis College. Her music includes the Herstory series of vocal works on texts by women, two staged monodramas, Changes for orchestra, and music for various chamber combinations. The Umbrian Suite is now being published by the German Publisher, Certosa Verlag.

Judith Lang Zaimont, Snazzy Sonata (1972)
Judith Lang Zaimont is an internationally-recognized composer whose music is characterized by its expressive strength, dynamism, and rhythmic vitality. Many works from Zaimont’s catalogue of more than 90 compositions have won prizes. Among her composition awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellowship and the Debussy Fellowship of the Alliance Française de New York; grants from the Presser Foundation, from the Maryland and Minnesota state arts councils, and from the National Endowment for the Arts and Minnesota Composers Forum. Her music is frequently played in the United States and abroad, and has been programmed at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Merkin Hall, the National Gallery of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, and other major auditoriums on three continents.

Edson Zampronha, Composition for Piano Four Hands (1985), Comment I (2005)
Edson Zampronha has received two awards from the São Paulo Association of Art Criticism, Brazil. In 2005 he won, together with SCIArts Group, the 6th Sergio Motta Award, the most outstanding prize on Art and Technology in Brazil, for the installation Poetic Attractor. He has worked as a guest composer at LIEM-CDMC (Madrid), Phonos (Barcelona), the University of Birmingham (England). His compositions have been performed in many well known concerts and festivals: BEAST Concerts in Birmingham, Bourges Festival, Sonoimágenes in Buenos Aires, The Los Angeles Philharmonic Green Umbrella, JIEM-Madrid, and Brazilian Contemporary Music Biennial at Rio de Janeiro among others. He is Professor of Musical Composition at the São Paulo State University, Brazil and he is a Guest Professor at the Valladolid University, Spain. He has a Ph.D. in Communication and Semiotics - Arts - by the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo. His compositions are included in ten CDs released bydifferent record labels and institutions.

"A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral."

- Antoine De Saint-Exupery

All content © by Donna Gross Javel