The Seattle Composers' Salon is pleased to welcome composer and pianist Wayne Horvitz for a discussion and presentation of his music. Wayne is a prolific and influential Seattle composer whose work easily skates across boundaries of genre, style and form.
Wayne Horvitz, a "defiant cross-breeder of genres", has led the groups The President, Pigpen, Zony Mash, and the Four Plus One Ensemble. He has recorded or performed with John Zorn, Bill Frisell, Elliott Sharp,Danny Barnes, Tucker Martine, Butch Morris, Fred Frith, Julian Priester, Philip Wilson, Michael Shrieve, Carla Bley, Tim Young, Bobby Previte, Skerik, Douglas September and others. He is perhaps most famous for being the keyboardist of the band Naked City. He has produced records for the World Saxophone Quartet, Human Feel, Marty Ehrlich, Fontella Bass, The Living Daylights, Bill Frisell or Eddie Palmieri.
As a composer, Horvitz has been commissioned by The Kitchen, The Kronos Quartet, Brooklyn Academy of Music, New World Records, The Seattle Chamber Players and Earshot Jazz. He has received commissioning grants from Meet the Composer, The National Endowment for the Arts, The New York State Arts Council, The Mary Flagler Carey Trust, The Seattle Arts Commission, The Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund and The Fund for U.S. Artists. In 2002 he was awarded a Rockefeller MAP grant for the creation of a new piece, Joe Hill, for chamber orchestra and voice, which premiered in October 2004 in Seattle. His 2003 composition, Whispers, Hymns and a Murmur for String Quartet and soloist, funded in part by a Seattle City Artist grant, premiered in March 2004. This composition and his earlier string quartet, Mountain Language are released on the Tzadik label. His newest string quartet composition, These Hills of Glory, was commissioned with support from 4Culture and the Mayors Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs. His recent collaboration with Tucker Martine, Mylab, was on the top 10 CD list for 2004 in jazz in both the New Yorker and Amazon.com. In February 2005 he received the Golden Ear award from Earshot Jazz for "Concert of the Year."
Works for theater and dance include music for the 1998 production of Death of a Salesman for Seattle's ACT theater (directed by Gordon Edelstein); productions of Ezra Pound's Elektra and the American premiere of Harold Pinter's Mountain Language, both directed by Carey Perloff. In 1992 choreographer Paul Taylor created a new work, OZ, to eleven compositions by Wayne Horvitz in collaboration with the White Oak Dance Company. Other theater and dance works include music for Bill Irwin's Broadway show, Strictly NY, and productions by the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, Ammi Legendre, Nikki Apino and House of Damesand the Crispin Spaeth Dance Company.
Horvitz has also composed and produced music for a variety of video, film, television and other multimedia projects, including two projects with director Gus Van Sant, a full length score for PBS's Chihuly Over Venice, and two films about the creation of Seattle’s EMP museum. His 85-minute score to Charlie Chaplin's film The Circus, for two pianos, two clarinets, and violin premiered in January 2000 in Oporto, Portugal.
As of April 2007 Horvitz performs with Gravitas Quartet, Sweeter Than The Day and Varmint.
Horvitz was born in New York City and currently lives in Seattle with his wife, composer Robin Holcomb, and their two children.
Durand has been teaching at the School of Music, University of Washington in Seattle, since 1991, where he is Professor of Composition. He has been Associate Director of the School of Music since 2002. Durand was awarded the Donald E. Petersen Endowed Professorship in 2003-06.
As a guest composer and lecturer, Durand has contributed to the "Centre de la Voix" in Royaumont, France where he was co-director of the composition course in September 1993, the "Civica Scuola di Musica" in Milan, Italy (1995), the Royal Academy for Music in London, UK (1997), the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt (1984, 1990, 1992, 1994), the "VIII. Internationaler Meisterkurs für Komposition des Brandenburgischen Colloquiums für Neue Musik", Rheinsberg (1998), Washington State University, Pullman, WA (2004), and Stanford University (2006), among others. In the Fall 1994 he was Visiting Assistant Professor in Composition at the University of California at San Diego. Durand is also Director of the Contemporary Group at the School of Music, University of Washington.
Durand's music has been commissioned and performed by many leading soloists, ensembles and orchestras throughout Europe, the US, Brazil, Japan and South Korea, including the Ensemble Intercontemporain, London Sinfonietta, Contrechamps, Arditti Quartet, ASKO, Nieuw Ensemble, Ensemble Köln, Recherche, musikFabrik, New York Philomusica, Counter)Induction, EarPlay, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre Philarmonique de Radio France, Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin.
He has also published an extensive analysis of Jean Barraqué's Piano Sonata (Entretemps, 1987), and an essay on the music of Ruth Crawford Seeger ("Voix Nouvelles 92", Royaumont).
A book on his music, Joël-François Durand In the Mirror Land, edited by Jonathan W. Bernard, was released in autumn 2005 by the University of Washington Press, in collaboration with Perspectives of New Music (you can view the Table of Contents).
At first influenced by postwar European serialism, as in the early String Trio (1980-81), Durand quickly sought to distance himself from the system by developing an interaction between pre-determined compositional processes and more spontaneously derived musical elements. The pre-determined processes often serve to define the compositional environment of a whole piece, giving it a particular sound, for example, or basic temporal proportions. Within the constraints of these large scale organizations, a number of elements are often decided freely during the actual writing. These two tendencies are set up to establish a kind of dialog with each other, during the act of composition as well as in the perceived result, so that their interaction creates a tension which the composer can use to carry the energy of the music. In works such as the Piano Concerto, Die innere Grenze, or Par le feu recueilli, for example, this interaction creates a sense of conflict, and the dialog is one of dramatic opposition. In the dyptich L'exil du feu/Un feu distinct, on the other hand, there is no such opposition as the two tendencies complement each other; here the whole fabric is permeated by melodic lines derived from the original material through a rigorous method of spatial projection. It is then mainly the contours that allow the melodic elements to be readily recognized even when their intervallic or rhythmic contents are radically transformed.
In his works from the mid-80s and early 90s, Durand explored musical forms in which the original elements of a work were presented only the very end, instead of the more traditional exposition at the beginning (as in the series: So er, Lichtung, Die innere Grenze, L'exil du feu, Un feu distinct). This progressive unveiling of the work's origin supported the composer's interest in linear and directional developments, and in the melodic dimension of music. The focus on linearity emphasizes the role of musical works as journeys, in which the auditor is guided by the music through varying densities of light and darkness, as if on a forest path, toward a specific goal. The music becomes the medium in a task of discovery, of initiation. As a result his music of this period is often characterized with an intense, introspective lyricism.