This season, the long-running Music Alive composer residency program brought contemporary music—and contemporary composers—to orchestras across the country. Music Alive is a national, three-year orchestra-composer residency program of the League of American Orchestras and New Music USA. Music Alive embeds composers with orchestras, and the residencies venture beyond the creation of new works to embrace collaborations with community groups, curated concerts and events, explorations of the composers’ existing scores, readings, and more.
Composer Theodore Wiprud’s Music Alive residency with the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra included a performance of Wiprud’s Grail with the South Dakota Youth Symphony Orchestra and the world premiere of his Wind of Many Voices, inspired by the South Dakota landscapes. In addition, Wiprud worked with local community groups. With California’s Berkeley Symphony, Anna Clyne was involved with a multimedia version of her Night Ferry and saw her This Midnight Hour interpreted by a modern-dance troupe. In Minnesota, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra gave the world premiere of a new work by Lembit Beecher that included samples of 47 recordings of Twin Cities community members reflecting on what home means to them, along with newly commissioned poetry. In Illinois, the Champaign-Urbana Symphony Orchestra performed Stacy Garrop’s Krakatoa viola concerto and Terra Nostra. Garrop and CUSO Music Director Stephen Alltop hosted a composers institute. Hannibal Lokumbe’s Music Alive residency with the Philadelphia Orchestra culminated in the world premiere of Healing Tones, a large-scale work that pays homage to the composer’s ancestors and focuses on communities that are experiencing trauma, homelessness, and divisiveness.
Music Alive is made possible by a lead grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional support from The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts, The Amphion Foundation, and The ASCAP Foundation Bart Howard Fund.
