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June in Buffalo Returns to UB

Jeffrey Stadelman is a senior composer at this year's June in Buffalo Festival.

The new music festival offers a busy week

The history of the June in Buffalo Festival stretches back to the era of when Morton Feldman was the Edgar Varése professor of composition at the University of Buffalo. Feldman, realizing the importance of having young, aspiring composers work with already established composers, came up with the idea of holding a yearly music festival in Buffalo where just this kind of creative interaction could take place, during the first week of June.

June in Buffalo eventually underwent a hiatus for a few years, but it was successfully revived in 1986 by UB faculty member David Felder, who last season celebrated his 25th anniversary as the artistic director of the festival. The selection process for student participants is rigorous, with applicants from around the globe. The students, who are selected based on submissions of their work, earn the opportunity not only to work with the senior composers but to have their own compositions performed by world-class musicians and musical ensembles.

The senior composers taking part in this year’s festival are Edmund Campion, Eric Chasalow, David Felder, Hilda Paredes, and Jeffrey Stadelman. Edmund Campion’s music explores relationships between sound and space and often involves the mixing of traditional acoustic instruments and technologically influenced instruments, along with newly invented, computer-based instruments. Brandeis faculty member Eric Chasalow, who directs that university’s Electro-Acoustic Music Studio, studied composition at the renowned Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, and flute with Harvey Sollberger, a long-standing June in Buffalo regular, who has appeared both as a composer and a performer. The award-winning composer Hilda Paredes, one of the leading Mexican composers of her generation, studied with British composers Peter Maxwell Davies and Richard Rodney Bennett, completing her Ph.D at Manchester University, and is now based in London, while continuing to teach in her native country. UB associate professor of composition Jeffrey Stadelman studied at Harvard with Milton Babbitt, Earl Kim, and Donald Martino. Stadelman’s music, once memorably described by the music critic of the Los Angeles Times as “deftly dispersed in time and glazed with a dry wit,” has been performed by leading new music ensembles world-wide. David Felder, SUNY distinguished professor of composition, has also served since 2006 as the director of the Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music at UB, and from 1992 to 1996 he was the composer-in-residence with the BPO. Felder’s work is known for its highly energetic profile, through its frequent employment of technological extension and elaboration of musical materials, as well as for its lyrical qualities.

Free Afternoon Concerts

The afternoon concerts, featuring the works of student composers are all open to the public, without charge.

Monday, June 6, at 4:30pm, SIGNAL Ensemble will host a workshop concert, with conductor Brad Lubman, in Room B-1, Slee Hall.

Tuesday, at 4pm there will be a chamber music workshop concert in Baird Recital Hall.

On Wednesday, at 4pm, Lippes Concert Hall in Slee Hall is the location for a Slee Sinfonietta workshop concert, under conductor James Baker.

On Thursday, the Ensemble Linea workshop concert takes place at 4pm in Room B-1 Slee Hall.

On Friday, at 3:30pm, Baird Recital Hall is the site of the final chamber music workshop.

Evening Concerts

On Monday, June 6, at 7:30pm, an evening of chamber music in Lippes Concert Hall in Slee Hall will feature Edmund Campion playing his work for piano, Roulette; clarinetist Jean Kopperud performing Eric Chasalow’s In a Manner of Speaking; and trumpet player Jon Nelson and pianist Eric Huebner performing Jeffrey Stadelman’s joyfully boisterous work, Mr. Natural, as well as a performance of Shamayim, a multimedia work by David Felder and video artist Elliot Caplan.

At 7:30pm on Tuesday, in Slee Hall, conductor James Baker leads the Slee Sinfonietta in Felder’s Requiescat, Hilda Paredes’ Alegoria Tri-partitia, Chasalow’s Suspicious Motives, Stadelman’s Incidental Music, and Brice Pauset’s Six Preludes, with the composer himself taking the harpsichord part.

The only free evening performance takes place on Wednesday at 7:30pm in Baird Recital Hall. Violinist Irvine Arditti, a frequent performer on the June in Buffalo series as the first violinist of his eponymous, cutting-edge string quartet, makes a rare Buffalo solo appearance in Paredes’ In Memoriam Thomas Kakuska and Salvatore Sciarrino’s 6 Capricci. Tom Kolor is the percussionist and Jean Kopperud the clarinetist in Stadelman’s wills & wonts, while Kolor and pianist Eric Huebner team up for Campion’s Domus Aurea.

Conductor Brad Lubman leads the SIGNAL Ensemble on Thursday, at 7:30pm in a Slee Hall event featuring Felder’s Journal, Pauset’s Vita Nova, Paredes’ Ah Paaxo’ob, and a post-war, modern classic, György Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto for 13 instrumentalists.

The only off-site concert in this year’s June in Buffalo Festival takes place on Friday, at 6:30pm, at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, when Jon Nelson leads his unclassifiable ensemble, the Genkin Philharmonic in a program of the music of Frank Zappa. Tickets for this event will only be available at the door, exact prices to be announced.

The June in Buffalo Festival winds up on Saturday, at 7:30pm, in Slee Hall, with a performance by the Ensemble Linea, under conductor Jean-Philippe Wurtz. Works to be performed include Campion’s Auditory Fiction, Pauset’s quatre variations, Felder’s Partial [Dist]res[s]toration, Chasalow’s Due (cinta)mani, Philippe Hurel’s Step, and Gerard Grisey’s Tales, with a closing reception to follow the concert.

Tickets are $12 general admission, $9 for UB faculty, staff, and alumni, and $5 for students. For tickets and more information, call 645-2921 or visit www.slee.buffalo.edu.

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