Wiki Category: Women Composers

1957, Philadelphia, PA
American composer and educator

Works for Brass Ensemble

• Brass Quintet No. 1 (2000)

Biography

Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize in music. Melinda Wagner‘s undergraduate degree is from Hamilton College. She received her graduate degrees from University of Chicago and University of Pennsylvania. She also served as Composer-in-Residence at the University of Texas (Austin) and at the ‘Bravo!’ Vail Valley Music Festival. Some of her teachers included Richard Wernick, George Crumb, Shulamit Ran, and Jay Reise. A resident of Ridgewood, New Jersey, Wagner won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for her Concerto for Flute, Strings and Percussion. The Chicago Symphony has commissioned three major works -Falling Angels (1992); a piano concerto, Extremity of Sky (2002) for Emanuel Ax; and a third orchestral work in 2006. Extremity of Sky has also been performed by Emanuel Ax with the National Symphony, the Toronto Symphony, the Kansas City Symphony, and the Staatskapelle Berlin.Other works have been performed by a number of orchestras, including the New York New Music Ensemble, the Network for New Music, Orchestra 2001, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and many other leading organizations.

She has received many honorable mentions, including a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and three ASCAP Young Composer awards. Beforehand, she also received an honorary degree from Hamilton College. Some of her famous pieces are the Trombone Concerto (2007), Falling Angels (1992), and Extremity of Sky (2002).

Wagner was also commissioned by the New York Philharmonic (a concerto for principal trombonist Joseph Alessi), from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Barlow, Fromm, and Koussevitzky Foundations, the American Brass Quintet, and from guitarist David Starobin. She has received a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an honorary degree from Hamilton College, as well as a Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Pennsylvania. Her other performances include the Dallas Symphony, the American Composers Orchestra, the Women’s Philharmonic, the New York Pops, and the US Marine Band.

Melinda Wagner has taught at many universities including the University of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore College, Syracuse University, and Hunter College. She has lectured at many schools such as Yale, Cornell, Juilliard, and Mannes. Ms. Wagner has served as Composer-in-Residence at the University of Texas in Austin and at the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival. She currently resides in New Jersey with her husband, percussionist James Saporito, and their children.

References

• Melinda Wagner Official Website
• Melinda Wagner Wikipedia Page

1935, Croatia – 2020, Belgrade
Serbian composer, musicologist, and educator

Works for Brass Ensemble

• Two Brass Quintets (1962)

Biography

Mirjana Živković graduated in composition at the Music Academy in Belgrade (class of Prof. Stanojlo Rajičić) in 1964. She also studied world literature at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade. During 1967-68 she obtained a French government fellowship for furthering education at the Paris Conservatory under Olivier Messiaen (composition, musical analyses) and at the Fontainebleau School of Music under Nadia Boulanger (composition, harmony, musical analyses). She completed Master studies in Belgrade.

From 1964 to 1976 she worked in Josip Slavenski Music School, while in 1976 he became assistant lecturer, and afterward full-time professor at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade, where she later was a Head of the Music Theory Department (1998-2001). After retirement, she became postgraduate teacher in theory of music. She was also professor at the Faculty of Philology and Arts in Kragujevac.

Mirjana Živković has had an important role in reorganizing and bringing up to date curriculum for the subject ’harmony’, and received two significant recognitions for her pedagogical work: The Golden Medallion of the University of Arts (1997, Belgrade) and Life Award of The Union of Music and Ballet Pedagogues of Serbia (2004).

She was involved in inventorying and editing the inheritance of Yugoslav composer Josip Slavenski and contributed in opening of his Legacy in Music Information Center in Serbia. She was also a member of the advisory board for publishing Slavenski’s complete works. After retirement Mirjana Živković is still active composer, and engaged in editing and publishing the Serbian composers’ works (Anthology of Serbian Solo-Song, Ballet Suites ’The Legend of Ohrid‘ by Stevan Hristić, Music from ’The Letters of Light‘ by Ljubica Marić…), as well as the papers refer to the music theory (Proceedings of Music theory and analysis published by the Music Theory Department, Faculty of Music in Belgrade; Josip Slavenski and his time, SOKOJ-MIC).

References

• Mirjana Živković official website
• Mirjana Živković wikipedia page
• International Alliance for Women in Music

6 September 1938, New Rochelle, NY
American composer, pianist, conductor, and educator

Works for Brass Ensemble

• Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman (1986) for brass ensemble
• Second Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman (1989) for brass ensemble
• Third Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman (1991) for two brass quintets
• Celebration Fanfare (1993) for brass ensemble
• Fifth Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman (1993) for 4 trumpets
• Copperwave (2006) for brass quintet

Biography

Lauded by The New Yorker as “one of the most successful woman composers of all time”, Joan Tower‘s bold and energetic compositions have been performed in concert halls around the world. After gaining recognition for her first orchestral composition, Sequoia (1981), a tone poem which structurally depicts a giant tree from trunk to needles, she has gone on to compose a variety of instrumental works including Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, which is something of a response to Aaron Copland‘s Fanfare for the Common Man, the Island Prelude, five string quartets, and an assortment of other tone poems. Tower was pianist and founding member of the Naumburg Award-winning Da Capo Chamber Players, which commissioned and premiered many of her early works, including her widely performed Petroushskates.

Tower moved to Bolivia when she was nine years old, an experience which she credits for making rhythm an integral part of her work. For the next decade Tower’s talent in music, particularly on the piano, grew rapidly due to her father’s insistence that she benefit from consistent musical training. Tower’s relationship with her mineralogist father is visible in many aspects of her work, most specifically her “mineral works” including Black Topaz (1976) and Silver Ladders (1986). She returned to the United States as a young woman to study music, first at Bennington College, in Vermont, and then at Columbia University where she studied under Otto Luening, Jack Beeson, and Vladimir Ussachevsky and was awarded her doctorate in composition in 1968.

In 1969, Tower, along with violinist Joel Lester and flautist Patricia Spencer, founded the New York-based Da Capo Chamber Players where she served as the group’s pianist. Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s Tower wrote a number of successful works for the Da Capo Players, including Platinum Spirals (1976), Amazon I (1977) and Wings (1981). Though the group won several awards in its early years, including the Naumburg Award in 1973, Tower left the group in 1984, buoyed by the immediate success of her first orchestral composition, Sequoia (1981). In 1972 Tower accepted a faculty position at Bard College in composition, a post she continues to hold today. Tower received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1976.

In 1985, a year after leaving the Da Capo Players, Tower accepted a position at the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra where she was a composer-in-residence until 1988.

Tower became the first woman recipient of the Grawemeyer Award for Music in 1990 for her composition Silver Ladders. In 1993, under commission from the Milwaukee Ballet, Tower composed Stepping Stones, a selection from which she would go on to conduct at the White House. Other compositions from the 1990s include the third Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, several piano concertos (notably 1996’s Rapids (Piano Concerto No. 2) and Tambor (1998) written for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. In 1999 Tower accepted a position as composer-in-residence with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and in 1998 she won the Delaware Symphony’s prestigious Alfred I. DuPont Award for Distinguished American Composer.

In 2002 Tower won the Annual Composer’s Award from the Lancaster (Pennsylvania) Symphony. During the 2003-2004 season two new works were debuted, DNA a percussion quintet commissioned for Frank Epstein, and Incandescent. In 2004 the Nashville Symphony’s recording of Tambor, Made in America, and her Concerto for Orchestra earned a Grammy nomination. In 2004 Carnegie Hall’s “Making Music” series featured a retrospective of Tower’s body of work, performed by artists including the Tokyo String Quartet and pianists Melvin Chen and Ursula Oppens. In 2005, Tower became the first composer commissioned for the “Ford Made in America” program, the only project of its kind to involve smaller-budget orchestras as commissioning agents of new work by major composers, in which her 15-minute Made in America was performed in every state of the union during the 2005-2007 season. In 2008, Tower’s Made in America and the recording of it by the Nashville Symphony conducted by Leonard Slatkin won three Grammy Awards: in the categories Best Orchestral Performance, Best Classical Album and Best Classical Contemporary Composition.

She is currently the Asher B. Edelman Professor of Music at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and serves on the Artistic Advisory panel of the BMI Foundation.