Description

Performers:

Fredrick Fox's early training in Detroit included lessons in saxophone with Laurence Teal and in theory and arranging with Ray McConnell. He first studied composition with Ruth Shaw Wylie at Wayne State University and, following his graduation from that institution, with Ross Lee Finney at the University of Michigan. He studied later with Bernhard Heiden at the Indiana University School of Music, where he earned his master's and doctoral degrees. Following a 15-year period in which he held various faculty and foundation posts, he joined the music faculty of Indiana University where he has taught since 1974. He was also founding and first director of the New Music Ensemble at Indiana University.

Among Dr. Fox's compositions are a ballet, several orchestral and concerted works, a good deal of chamber music for various instrumental combinations, and several choral works. He has received a number of awards for his music, and three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. His works have been performed in Europe, Latin America, and Japan, as well as throughout the United States, and several have been recorded: Night Ceremonies by the Louisville Orchestra; The Descent by the Gregg Smith Singers; Annexus on Roncorp recordings; and Shaking the Pumpkin (Soundpix SL-5042).

Like many young American composers in the Fifties and Sixties, Fox had some experience as a jazz performer and arranger before he took up composing, and he experimented with serial writing. He found serialism to be essentially at odds with his creative outlook, but his jazz background was to find its echo in several of his most characteristic works.

Don Freund (b. 1947) has composed over 80 performed works, ranging from solo, chamber and orchestral music to pieces involving live performance with electronic instruments, music for dance, and large theatre works. He is also active as a pianist, conductor, and lecturer. He has received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (Cello Concerto, Passion with Tropes), commissions including the Tennessee Arts Commission with Opera Memphis (The Bishop's Ghost), and prizes including the 1979 Washington International String Quartet Composition Competition, the International Society for Contemporary Music/League of Composers 1976 International Piano Music Competition, the Hanson Prize, the McCurdy Award, the Aspen Prize, and 13 ASCAP Awards. In the summer of 1992 he served as a Macgeorge Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Four of his compositions have been released on commercial CDs. His works are published by MMB Music, Boosey & Hawkes, Seesaw, and Vivace Press. He has been on Indiana University's composition faculty since 1992.

Don Freund was born in Pittsburgh; he studied at Duquesne University and earned his graduate degrees at the Eastman School of Music. His composition teachers were Joseph Willcox Jenkins, Darius Milhaud, Charles Jones, Wayne Barlow, Warren Benson, and Samuel Adler. As founder and coordinator of Memphis State University's Annual New Music Festival, he programmed close to a thousand new American works. He has been conductor or pianist in the performance of some 200 new pieces, usually in collaboration with the composer.

David Dzubay was born in Minneapolis in 1964 and raised in Portland, Oregon. Attending Indiana University, he earned a D.M. in Composition in 1991. His principal teachers have been Donald Erb, Frederick Fox, Eugene O'Brien, Lukas Foss, and Oliver Knussen. Dzubay's music has been performed in the United States, Europe, Canada, Mexico, and Asia, by orchestras such as Atlanta, Detroit, Honolulu, Louisville, New World, National Repertory, New York Youth, Vancouver, and Aspen. Dzubay won the 1995 Barlow International Competition for Orchestra Music, resulting in a commission for a consortium of the Baltimore, Minnesota, and Saint Louis Symphony Orchestras. His Symphony No.1 (1996) was commissioned by Meet-the-Composer for the Oregon Symphony, Oakland East Bay Symphony, and Louisville Orchestras. Other commissions include works for the Minnesota Orchestra, the National Repertory Orchestra, the Detroit Chamber Winds, the New York Youth Symphony, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, and the Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players. Dzubay has received awards from the NEA, BMI, ASCAP, the American Music Center, Composers, Inc., Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, Indiana State University, Tanglewood, and the Cincinnati Symphony. Recordings include Snake Alley (Louisville Orchestra, First Edition Recordings, LCD009), Threnody (Alexander String Quartet, Innova 111), Trio for Violin, Cello, and Piano (New Music from Indiana University - Vol 1, IUSM-05), and Sonata for Cello and Piano (Carter Enyeart and Adam Wodnicki, Centaur CRC2300). In fall 1992, after teaching at the University of North Texas, David Dzubay was appointed Assistant Professor at the Indiana University School of Music, where he teaches composition, is Director of the New Music Ensemble, and occasionally conducts an orchestra. Dzubay has also conducted groups at Tanglewood, Aspen, Disney World, the University of Puget Sound, and the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble and strings from the Louisville Orchestra at the Maple Mount Music Festival. He is currently serving as Composer-Consultant to the Minnesota Orchestra, helping run their Perfect Pitch reading sessions for works by composers of Minnesota.

Jeffrey Hass (b. 1953) has been a member of the composition faculty at Indiana University since 1987, serving as the Director of the Center for Electronic and Computer Music (CECM). He previously taught music theory and composition on the faculties of Rutgers University and the Interlochen Center for the Arts. His compositions have been premiered by the Louisville Orchestra and Concordia Chamber Orchestra, and have had performances at Lincoln Center and at national conferences of SCI, SEAMUS, and the College Music Society. His orchestral works have won several national competitions and are published by MMB Music. A large work for ensemble and electronic tape, Lost in the Funhouse, won the 1994 National Band Association Competition. Mr. Hass studied composition with Frederick Fox, Donald Erb, and Robert Moevs, receiving a doctorate in composition from Indiana University in 1989.

Eugene O'Brien (b.1945) has been the recipient of the Music Award and Citation of the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Rome Prize of the American Academy in Rome, and awards from BMI, ASCAP, and the League of Composers-ISCM. He has received Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Fulbright, National Endowment for the Arts, and other fellowships and has been commissioned by American and European performers and ensembles, by Meet the Composer/Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund, and by the Fromm and Koussevitzky Foundations. His music has been heard in concerts by the Cleveland Orchestra, the Italian Radio Orchestras of Rome and Turin, the Omaha Symphony, the St. Louis Symphony Discovery Series, the Louisville Orchestra New Music Series, and in numerous other orchestral and chamber concerts and festivals in this country and abroad. His music is published by MMB Music, G. Schirmer and Boosey & Hawkes, and can be heard in recordings on the CRI, Golden Crest, Crystal, and Capstone labels. Also active in the performance of new music, Mr. O'Brien was a co-founder of the Cleveland new music ensemble Reconnaissance in 1978 and was associated with the group until 1984. In 1985-87 he served on the production board of the Contemporary Music Forum in Washington, D.C. A member of the composition faculty at the Indiana University School of Music since 1987, Mr. O'Brien has also taught at the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Catholic University of America in Washington, and is a graduate of the University of Nebraska and Case Western Reserve University/Cleveland Institute of Music.

Catalog Number: IUSM-08

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