Remembering the Chicago Composer's Forum

Tue, 12/06/2011 - 12:23 — sethbou
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Last Sunday ACM collaborated with the MAVerick Ensemble on the New Beginnings Festival, a concert celebrating the legacy of the Chicago Composer's Forum, who is closing their doors after years of advocating for composers.

I think it's wonderful that CCF chose ACM to continue their mission and I'm looking forward to rolling their members into our program and offering them opportunities to hear their music performed.

But it was sad to see CCF go.

New Membership Program Services

Wed, 11/09/2011 - 21:52 — sethbou
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Recently ACM got a generous grant from the Arts Work Fund to make significant improvements to our composer membership program, thereby allowing us to greatly improve our ability to serve composers.

Today I had a long phone call with our web programmers and they've finished what I think of as the boring stuff - the new database, the customer relations software and other backbone functionality - and we're about to get started on the fun stuff.

Composer Alive Genesis

Thu, 10/27/2011 - 11:27 — sethbou
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I first had the idea for the Composer Alive project in a museum. I was looking at a huge painting by John Singer Sargent in the National Gallery in D.C. and on an opposite wall they had about 15 sketches he had done to prepare for the painting. It was so interesting to be able to see the prep work he had done and the preliminary work he had done before attempting the colossal painting.

A Day at the Old Sears Tower Complex (With New Music)

Tue, 10/18/2011 - 20:30 — sethbou
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ACM was asked this year to be part of Open House Chicago, a two day long event celebrating 100 lesser known architectural gems and place of interest around the city. We looked at all of the sites before deciding to compose music for two that were right next to each other: the original Sears Tower from 1905 and the building that provided power to the whole Sears complex, now the Power House High School.

The Toronto side of this year's Composer Alive

Wed, 10/05/2011 - 09:47 — sethbou
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This past weekend I traveled to Toronto with ACM's Artistic Director Francesco Milioto and the Palomar ensemble. Palomar is collaborating with ACM on our Composer Alive: Toronto project in which we're working with composer Omar Daniel.

Composer Alive is my favorite ACM project. We commission a new piece from a composer we've never met and ask him to write it in four installments and email each installment to us as it is finished.

Second Installment of Composer Alive: Toronto

Tue, 07/26/2011 - 12:00 — sethbou
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Palomar met at the Chicago Cultural Center on a blisteringly hot Sunday afternoon to record the latest installment in Omar Daniel's series of preludes. Omar has said that he will write several of these short miniatures but he does not know how many of them will make it into the final piece, nor does he know in what order they will eventually be arranged.

Trip to Toronto Planned

Mon, 07/25/2011 - 11:58 — sethbou
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It's official! Franceso and I will be traveling with Palomar to Toronto the first weekend in October for several performances. First we'll record the fourth and final installment of Omar Daniel's Preludes under the composer's supervision. It's always a fantastic experience to be able to record one of the installments with the composer in the room but it's not always possible.

Composer Alive: Toronto gets under way

Tue, 07/19/2011 - 10:32 — sethbou
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Composer Alive is my favorite recurring ACM project. I like every part of the process: choosing which country to work with, selecting the composer we're going to commmission, planning the rehearsal dates and then receiving the music bit by bit over the summer months leading up to the final concert.

The open rehearsal sessions are always interesting because you never know who will show up and I love seeing how much people enjoy having the rehearsal process unveiled. To me rehearsals are old hat but for many people watching the piece come together is a completely new experience.

Summer is here!

Fri, 05/27/2011 - 15:29 — gigante

Time to celebrate the return of sunny days and hot temperatures. Summer also means no school and family vacations- it's easy to let piano lessons fall through the cracks.

Still, it is important to keep some kind of regularity. Try to continue lessons as much as possible, even if you have to take a few weeks off in between.

How much do "real world" concerns affect composers' music?

Thu, 04/28/2011 - 11:11 — cloweste
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How much do composers bend to the tastes of those who fund them? What about the tastes of their audience? And how much difference does it make what performers are available to them?
These are the questions I tried to answer in the paper I wrote as a culmination of my independent study/ACM internship (to read it, follow this link:
https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1estf-Qa89M__f6_S-HdExMa-PetuYCw... ). I think we tend to think of composers as looking into the night sky and writing in a sort of trance-like state music that comes to them from some sort heavenly visions. I'm not a composer, but I'm pretty sure that's not quite how it works!
As part of the internship, I researched grants and wrote one, am drafting a fundraising plan, worked the box office, and discussed how to develop ACM's fan base. The experience taught me that ACM's a great organization, not least because through it "contemporary music" and "fan base" can coexist peacefully in the same sentence.
If you'd like to take a look at the paper, below is a link to it. Skip to the end if you want to read about ACM, or if you're more interested in modern and contemporary composers than in historical ones.

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