COMPOSER SABRINA PENA YOUNG | MUSIC TECHNOLOGY | FILM | CLASSICAL | OPERA

How does a composer write music? Samuel Andreyev answers a viewer's question on how composers go about writing music.

The Phantom of the Opera - Prague Cello Quartet

Please read the original article here:  http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/composing-and-motherhood/ COMPOSING AND MOTHERHOOD BY  EMILY DOOLITTLE ON APRIL 26, 2017 When I started composing, as an 18 year old in 1990, I knew of few women composers. Those I did know of either had their careers curtailed when they had kids (Clara Schumann, Alma Mahler, Ruth Crawford Seeger), or they didn’t have kids (Pauline Oliveros, Meredith Monk, and the few women composers I knew personally). I thought I might want to have kids one day, and it was scary going into a field in which I knew no role models. But I needed to compose, and any possible kids were a long way off. Certainly I encountered occasional sexism as a student and young composer, but mostly I received great encouragement. My way of participating in the new music world was no different from that of my male contemporaries. I studied, [1]  I went to music festivals, I lived abroad, I went to artist residencie...

Jennifer Higdon is one of the most performed living American composers. Her list of commissioners and performing organizations is extensive and includes the Cleveland Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Tokyo String Quartet, the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the President’s Own Marine Band, among others. Higdon received the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her Violin Concerto, with the committee citing her work as a “deeply engaging piece that combines flowing lyricism with dazzling virtuosity.” Her lecture is co-sponsored by the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra.

Meet George Walker, the first black composer to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music. He won the prize in 1996. He is interviewed here in 2012, just a couple of months shy of his 90th birthday. He reflects on his long career. His 2 sons, Ian and Gregory are also interviewed. His most famous piece of music, the elegaic early "Lyric for Strings," and a recent work commissioned by the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, are featured. Walker has lived in Montclair, New Jersey for many years and taught music at Rutgers University in Newark.

For the past decade and a half I have explored using multimedia in classical composition . While my first forty or so works were entirely acoustic classical compositions, I found that my percussionist love for timbre and sound melded well with my very nerdy love of technology causing me to veer body and soul into the world of electronic music and media.  While I would love to write a traditional symphony someday, I find that my journey has let me to almost always consider possible visual elements in my work. This has taken mainly the form of animation that plays during live performance. For example, in the Creation Oratorio below, which won a New Genre Prize from the IAWM , the women's choir and percussion ensemble played live with a tape and original animation that projected imagery symbolic of both creation and procreation, the beauty of life on earth and life in the womb. These images were created in a program called Bryce, which was best known for the graphics in Zork , a l...