Yoko Ono
Ono’s performances and instructional paintings of the early 1960s changed forever the relationship between artist and audience.
Category Archives: Music
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Anna Thorvaldsdottir
Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “seemingly boundless textural imagination” (NY Times) and “striking” (Guardian) sound world has made her “one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary music” (NPR).
Aghabaji Rzayeva
Azerbaijani composer Aghabaji Ismayil gizi Rzayeva received many honors, including the Honored Art Worker of the Azerbaijan SSR (1960), Order of the Red Banner of Labour and the Order of the Badge of Honour (1972).
Elena Firsova
Her works were performed with great success in the western world beginning in 1979. During the same year, she and her husband, the composer Dmitri Smirnov, were attacked by the Composers’ Union as “not worthy of the Soviet Union.” During the course of perestroika, Elena Firssova first received permission to travel abroad. There was no lasting change in Russian musical life, however, since the influence of the functionaries of the Composers’ Union remained strong. She founded the association ASM together with Edison Denissov and Dmitri Smirnov, which performed contemporary music with its own ensemble at home and abroad. In 1990 Elena Firssova moved to England with her family.
Elena Firsova has so far composed well over 100 works, including operas, cantatas, concertos, orchestral works but also much chamber music. She received a commission for a composition for Expo 2000. Her “Achmatova Requiem” received its world premiere at the Berlin Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt in September 2003.
Isabelle Aboulker
In parallel with her studies in music theory and accompaniment at the Paris Conservatory, she composed for the cinema, the theatre, and the television. An accompanist, a choral director and subsequently teacher of young singers at the Paris Conservatory, she focussed her creative activity from 1981 on the voice and opera. Attentive to prosody, demanding in the choice of libretti, she considers herself an heir to the French tradition of Debussy, Ravel and Poulenc. The excellent welcome accorded to the premiere of her first stage work Les Surprises de l’Enfer (1981) revealed her orientation: Leçons de français aux étudiants américains (1983), Trois folies d’opéra pour trois femmes compositeurs (1986), Cinq Nô Modernes (1992), La Lacune (1993), Monsieur Balzac fait son theatre (1999), Le Renard à l’opéra (2004).
Vivian Fine
At age five, she won a scholarship to the Chicago Musical College and would eventually become the recipient of many more major musical awards and honors leading to a virtually uninterrupted career composing music until old age. Several of her compositions were funded through the National Endowment for the Arts, including her multidimensional Meeting for Equal Rights, 1866 for chorus and orchestra requiring three conductors. She also received an individual NEA grant for her opera Women in the Garden. She was elected to membership in the American Academy and Institute of Art and Letters in 1979 and she won a Guggenheim Fellowship for composition in 1980. Fine’s music achievements were honored by the San Francisco Symphony with their 1983 dedication of a “Vivian Fine Week” retrospective of her work. The Symphony also commissioned Fine’s massive Drama for Orchestra as part of this celebration, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. In 1989, Boston mounted a similar celebration with their own “Vivian Fine Week” to celebrate the great composer’s music, during which Fine was also given the “keys to the city.”
Nadia Boulanger
French composer, conductor and composition teacher Nadia Boulanger was a hugely influential figure in twentieth century music.
Michèle Reverdy
A producer at Radio France from 1978 to 1992, in residence at the Casa Velázquez in Madrid between 1979 and 1981, composer in residence at the Strasburg Conservatory and guest of the Festival Musica in that city in 1993, she has been teaching analysis and orchestration at the Paris Conservatory since 1983. In 1995 she won the Grand Prix for symphonic music of the SACEM for her work as a whole. Michèle Reverdy has written many pieces for various chamber formations, vocal and choral music, works for chamber orchestra and symphony orchestra, as well as four operas.
Du Yun
Du Yun is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, performance artist, activist, and curator for new music, who works at the intersection of orchestral, opera, chamber music, theatre, cabaret, musical theater, oral tradition, public performances, sound installation, electronics, visual arts, and noise.
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich
As the 21st century dawns and the musical offerings of the world are more varied than ever before, few composers have emerged with the unique personality of Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. Her music is widely known because it is performed, recorded, broadcast, and above all, listened to and liked by all sorts of audiences the world over. Like the great masters of bygone times, Zwilich produces music “with fingerprints,” music that is immediately recognized as the product of a particular American composer who combines craft and inspiration in reflecting her optimistic and humanistic spirit in her compositions.