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--- Preston Stahly grew up in South Bend, Indiana, and started studying piano at age seven. By the time he was a teenager, he was performing and arranging music in soul, R&B, and rock bands on the midwest college circuit, in the Chicago/Milwaukee area, and as a studio musician at Chess Records. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in composition from the University of Michigan, where he studied with Leslie Bassett, William Bolcom, Ross Lee Finney, Eugene Kurtz, and George B. Wilson. His concert music encompasses a wide variety of instrumentation, from solo and chamber works to his Chimera, a three-part work for orchestra that received the Charles Ives Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His music has been recorded on the Fleur De Son Classics, Musical Heritage and NYAE labels. In addition to chamber, vocal, and symphonic works, he has also written music for film (Robert Altman’s Secret Honor) and television (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Children’s Television Workshop). He currently serves as Artistic and Executive Director of the New York Art Ensemble. |
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--- Considered by critics to be one of the most important and exciting performers on the contemporary scene today, violinist Mary Rowell is equally at ease on the stage of Lincoln Center and in grunge rock clubs. While working towards her BM and MM degrees from The Juilliard School, she developed her interest in contemporary music. At the same time she delved into the worlds of the alternative rock scene (as the violinist of the Silos), jazz and swing (as a member of String Fever), and tango and palm court (performing with the Tango Project). As a soloist, she has appeared with the National Symphony, Houston Symphony, New York Chamber Orchestra, and Warsaw Philharmonic, among others, on traditional and electric violin. She performs frequently as a soloist with the New York City Ballet, where she has stunned the dance world with her brilliant solo electric violin performances of Richard Einhorn’s Maxwell’s Demon. Mary has also performed and recorded with notables Madonna, Sheryl Crow, Paula Cole, Billy Joel, John Lurie, and Steve Coleman. She is featured on several Joe Jackson albums including Night Music, Heaven and Hell, Symphony #1, and most recently Night and Day II (Sony Classical). Mary Rowell is a founding member of the quartet ETHEL (www.ethelcentral.com), and she is currently the Concertmaster of both the Radio City Music Hall Orchestra and the Palm Beach Orchestra. |
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| ---Geoffrey Burleson, pianist, has performed to wide acclaim throughout Europe and North America, and is equally active as a recitalist, concerto soloist, chamber musician, and jazz performer. The New York Times has hailed Mr. Burleson’s solo performances as “vibrant and compelling,” furthermore praising his “rhythmic brio, projection of rhapsodic qualities, appropriate sense of spontaneity, and rich colorings.” Mr. Burleson made his New York City solo recital debut at Merkin Hall in 2000, sponsored by the League of Composers/ISCM. He has appeared as concerto soloist with the Boston Musica Viva, Arlington Philharmonic, New England Philharmonic, and the Holland Symfonia in the Netherlands, performing repertoire ranging from Mozart, Weber, and Saint-Saëns to Gershwin and Klaas de Vries. Mr. Burleson’s solo CD, Arthur Berger: Complete Works For Solo Piano (Centaur), received high praise from The New York Times, Gramophone, The Boston Globe and the American Record Guide. Currently, he is recording the complete piano sonatas of Vincent Persichetti for New World Records. He has also made solo, chamber, and jazz recordings for Oxingale, Albany, Music & Arts, CRI, VMM and Neuma. In addition to the New York Art Ensemble, he is a member of the Boston Musica Viva and the Pittsburgh Collective. Mr. Burleson holds the DMA degree from SUNY-Stony Brook, where he studied with Gilbert Kalish. Currently, he teaches piano at Princeton University, and is on the music faculty of Queensborough CC-The City University of New York. |
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Over the last 30 years new music has witnessed an evolution--from academia to “the street.” New music has slowly broken free of its serial/atonal “Modern” style approach and is in the process of coming to grips with the ever-changing pop media environment in which we all live. Many names or terms have emerged for this new direction, “avant pop” being favored by an increasing number of people.
Some wonder if this means the death of atonality. The answer is no. Rather, atonal expression has become absorbed into the entire tonal spectrum—another tool in the toolbox—along with modal, traditional, and other forms of harmonic organization. The entire tonal language has expanded.
Originally, the intent of the serial process was to replace the straitjacket of traditional harmonic language—a brave new world at the beginning of the 20th century. But for many, one straitjacket was replaced by another. The serial/atonal approach became destructive dogma because of its proponents’ extreme, exclusive, and myopic attitude toward other forms of tonal expression. By the 1960s, academia was obsessed. (Who is more extreme, the teacher or the disciples?) The audience was ignored, alienated, disrespected. “Who cares if you listen?” was the rhetorical question posed by one famous disciple.
Music students would study tone rows by day, and sneak off at night to play “pop music:” rock, jazz, R&B, punk, hip-hop, and so forth. Why would students keep performing this music? Because they grew up with it, it’s in their blood. It speaks to them in their own language, not Schoenberg’s.
Unfortunately, old academic habits die hard and many students today are still getting caught in the old “my way or the highway” mindset. Much of academia still lives in denial.
Fallout from the Modern stigma is a public that avoids or is disconnected from “new music,” a recording industry locked into the idea that new music is “Modern” and therefore unmarketable, classical radio stations that are more and more irrelevant or nonexistant, orchestras too timid to program living composers, and yet are puzzled as to why a living audience does not attend.
The New York Art Ensemble has vowed to attack this problem with a fresh approach to programming that considers composers, performers, and the audience as one--to be integral to the relevance and success of our art. After our early concerts in the 1990s, audience members would consistently tell us that they “loved our concerts” and “never knew there was music like this to hear!” It was the latter comment that got our attention. We realized that new music had been effectively eliminated from the lives of most Americans--a destructive sin of omission.
Today, new music is exploding into a galaxy of wonderful new styles and expression. The NYAE is dedicated to putting people back in touch with the music of their time and nurturing the development of works by living composers. Please join us as we challenge, inspire, entertain, educate, and connect one another to the best of new American music.
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