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Composer
Michael Gatonska
Wins 2005
Underwood Commission
 Composer
Michael Gatonska has been named the winner of American Composers
Orchestra's 2005 Underwood Emerging Composers Commission, bringing
him a $15,000 commission for a work to be premiered by American
Composers Orchestra. Chosen from the ten finalists in one of
the most coveted opportunities for emerging composers in America, Mr.
Gatonska won the top prize at ACO's annual Underwood New Music
Readings with his work, An
Expedition Aboard the Third Mind.
Mr. Gatonska's texture-oriented work has been described as
"highly original." Melinda Wagner, Pulitzer
Prize-winning composer and a composer-mentor for the Underwood New
Music Readings stated, "Michael has demonstrated a unique
ability to thread together finely-carved, diverse & 'glimpses' of
music into a convincing, organic whole--a kind of temporal
kaleidoscope of style and color. I look forward eagerly to his new
piece for ACO!"
Michael Gatonska
studied composition with Krzystof Penderecki, Marek Stachowski, and
Zbigniew Bujarski at the Academy of Music in Krakow, Poland.
For several years, he traveled between Krakow and New York City,
where he studied with Elias Tanenbaum at the Manhattan School of
Music. His compositions have been awarded two ASCAP Morton Gould
Young Composer Awards, two Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute
awards (2002, 2004), the 2005 Pacific Symphony Composer Competition,
and the Chicago Symphony First Hearing Award in 1999. Now
residing in Hartford, Connecticut, he is currently at work on a
commission from the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, and recent past
commissions include SONYC (String Orchestra of New York City) and the
MATA (Music At The Anthology) Festival 2003, a solo work for the
electric cellist Jeffrey Krieger, and the Connecticut Commission on
the Arts.
 Mr.
Gatonska has been singled out for his "naturally symphonic
imagination and his gift for rich textures and urgent melodic
gestures," with works "concerned with expansion in the
realm of form--moving toward evolution in the relationships between
expository material and symphonic textures." Michael's
participation in the MATA Festival in New York introduced his music
to the String Orchestra of New York City, which commissioned and
premiered his piece Transformation
of the Hummingbird
and bringing it to Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. Transformation
of the Hummingbird
demonstrates Mr. Gatonska's expansive compositional sensibilities in
its coaxing of a full symphonic sound from an orchestra of strings
alone. In the medium of electronic music, Mr. Gatonska conveys
a strong sense of nature as well as a loud, imposing human presence
in On
Connecticut Naturalism,
for solo electric cello, commissioned and premiered by Jeffrey
Krieger. The composer uses a digital delay/sampler unit, with which
the cellist is able to build up sound by adding more and more layers
to a sample in real-time, creating long, sustained phrases, as well
as one of the oldest real-time electronics, the wah-wah pedal, which
helps create the wind sounds that begin the piece.
In 2005, Mr.
Gatonska received a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, and grants from
Meet the Composer, and the American Music Center. He is also a
MacDowell Colony Fellow and a recent recipient of two post-graduate
research grants from the Kosciuszko Foundation for music composition
studies in Poland.
The 14th annual
Underwood New Music Readings, held in New York on May 5-6, 2005 under
the direction of ACO's artistic director, composer Robert
Beaser,
with mentor-composers Steven
Mackey
and Melinda
Wagner,
and conductors Steven
Sloane,
Paul
Dunkel,
and James
Lowe,
attracted more than 150 submissions from emerging composers around
the country. This year's finalists were: Jennifer
Fitzgerald,
who holds a Ph.D. in Composition and a Women's Studies Certificate
from Duke University; Gregg
Wramage,
currently a doctoral candidate at the City University of New York
Graduate Center where he studied with David Del Tredici and George
Tsontakis; Joseph
Sheehan,
who is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in music composition at
Indiana University; Kenneth
Froelich,
who holds a Doctorate in Music degree from Indiana University and is
currently an Assistant Professor of Music Theory and Composition at
Ball State University; Spencer
Lambright,
currently completing his doctoral studies at Cornell University and
also holds degrees from the Yale School of Music and the University
of Oregon; Zhou
Tian,
who came to the U.S. from Hangzhou, China and graduated from the
Curtis Institute of Music, studying with Richard Danielpour and
Jennifer Higdon; Daniel
Visconti,
winner of the most recent Kronos Under 30 Project and working on the
resulting commission from the Kronos Quartet; and Stefan
Weisman,
who is a graduate of Bard College and Yale University, and is
currently a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University.
The tenth
finalist, Carlos
Rivera,
was awarded Honorable Mention by ACO for his work Popol-vuh,
Four
Mayan Dance Scenes for Orchestra. A composer and guitarist of
Cuban/Guatemalan descent, Mr. Rivera is currently pursuing a Doctoral
in Musical Arts degree at the USC Thornton School of Music.
Since 1991, the
New Music Readings have provided invaluable career-development
opportunities for emerging composers, and served as a vital resource
to the music field by identifying a new generation of important
American composers. To date, some 75 composers have participated in
the Reading Sessions, hearing a full orchestral rendering of their
work, receiving critical professional feedback and mentoring from
conductors, composers and performers, and obtaining a professional
quality recording to assist in their advancement. Past participants
have included such award-winning composers as Melinda Wagner, Derek
Bermel, Pierre Jalbert, Randall Woolf, and Jennifer Higdon. Since its
inception in 1977, ACO has helped launch the careers of many of
today's top composers, including Ellen Taaffe Zwilich and Joseph
Schwantner, who both received Pulitzer Prizes for ACO commissions;
Robert Beaser, Ingram Marshall, Joan Tower, Aaron Jay Kernis,
Christopher Rouse, and Tobias Picker were all championed by the
orchestra when they were beginning their careers.
Kristin
Kuster,
winner of the 2004 New Music Readings, is writing her commissioned
work, Myrrha,
for premiere by ACO at Carnegie Hall on May 3, 2006. Blanco,
Azul, Rojo,
by Manly
Romero,
the 2003 commissionee, was premiered by ACO on February 23, 2005 at
Carnegie Hall. And Paul Yeon Lee, winner of the 2001 New Music
Readings commission, will have his Ballade No. 1 premiered by ACO
during the 2006-07 season. In all, 20 young and emerging composers
have been commissioned by ACO as a result of their participation in
the New Music Readings.
The 15th annual
New Music Readings are scheduled for Thursday, May 18 and Friday May
19, 2006 in New York City. The submission deadline for composers
interested in applying is Wednesday, November 18, 2005. Complete
submission guidelines and application will be available in print and
online this August by contacting www.americancomposers.org/nmr.htm,
email readings@americancomposers.org, or telephone 212-977-8495.
Lead support
for the Underwood New Music Readings comes from Paul Underwood, the
Fromm Music Foundation and The Helen F. Whitaker Fund.
ACO's emerging
composers programs are made possible with public funds from the
National Endowment for the Arts and with the support of Jerome
Foundation and the Eleanor Naylor Dana Charitable Trust.
Major support
of American Composers Orchestra is provided by Amphion Foundation,
Anncox Foundation, The Argosy Foundation Contemporary Music Fund,
Arlington Associates, ASCAP, The Bagby Foundation for the Musical
Arts, Bodman Foundation, Booth Ferris Foundation, BMI, BMI
Foundation, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, Citigroup Foundation,
Edward T. Cone Foundation, Consolidated Edison, The Aaron Copland
Fund for Music, Fidelity Foundation, Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation,
The Estate of Francis Goelet, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The
Irving Harris Foundation, Henfield Foundation, Victor Herbert
Foundation, Christian Humann Foundation, Jephson Educational Trust,
John and Evelyn Kossak Foundation, Helen Sperry Lea Foundation, Meet
the Composer, Neil Family Fund, The New York Community Trust, Bay and
Paul Foundations, PricewaterhouseCoopers, The Rodgers Family
Foundation, The Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, Fan Fox &
Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, The Susan and Ford Schumann Foundation,
Smith Barney, the Virgil Thomson Foundation, Oakleigh L. Thorne
Foundation, and The Watchdog and Sonata Charitable Trust. ACO
programs are also made possible with public funds from the New York
State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of
Cultural Affairs.
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