Joan Tower is widely regarded as one of the most important American composers living today. During a career spanning more than sixty years, she has made lasting contributions to musical life in the United States as composer, performer, conductor, and educator.
Gubaidulina’s compositional interests have been stimulated by the tactile exploration and improvisation with rare Russian, Caucasian, and Asian folk and ritual instruments collected by the “Astreia” ensemble, of which she was a co-founder, by the rapid absorption and personalization of contemporary Western musical techniques (a characteristic, too, of other Soviet composers of the post-Stalin generation including Edison Denisov and Alfred Schnittke), and by a deep-rooted belief in the mystical properties of music.
Betsy Jolas has won many awards, including those of the Copley Foundation of Chicago, the American Academy of Arts and the Koussevitsky Foundation, becoming a member of the American Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983.
Laurie Anderson’s career spans four decades and her contributions to the histories of performance art, experimental music, contemporary visual art and installation have received wide recognition.
Ono’s performances and instructional paintings of the early 1960s changed forever the relationship between artist and audience.
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).
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).
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.
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).
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.”