2017 Composer-In-Residence

Lansing McLoskey

Lansing McLoskey’s music has been performed around the world, and has won more than two dozen national and international awards, including the prestigious Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the International Joint Wind Quintet Project Commission Competition, and most recently the 2014 Red Note Festival Composition Competition and a 2013 Aaron Copland Recording Grant. In 2009 he became the only composer in the 45 year history of the ISU New Music Festival to win both the chamber music and orchestral composition awards; both blind-juried national competitions with two independent panels. Recent performances include concerts in Berlin, Finland, Italy, Spain, Mexico, Colombia, the UK, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Miami and performances at over a dozen music festivals in the past two years alone. Recent commissions include a concerto for Triton Brass and a consortium of wind ensembles, and new works for the Cincinnati Vocal Arts Ensemble, the newEar Ensemble for their 20th anniversary season, Chatham Baroque, the JWQP consortium of wind quintets, the soundSCAPE Festival in Maccagno, Italy, Ensemble Berlin PianoPercussion, and ensemberlino vocale in Berlin. He has been a Guest Composer or Composer-in-Residence at Aspen, the Tanglewood Institute, the soundSCAPE Festival, Missouri Chamber Music Festival, Carolina Chamber Music Festival, and the Charlotte New Music Festival. McCloskey is Professor of Composition at the University of Miami, Frost School of Music.

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2017 Visiting Composer

Giacomo Platini

Giacomo Platini studied piano and composition at the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi in Turin, and the Accademia Internazionale di Musica in Novara (Italy). He attended I.R.C.A.M. in Paris and the courses of the Académie d’Été. His compositions have been performed at the Cité Internationale Universitaire of Paris, at the Théatre Des Lisières and Italian Cultural Institute of Strasbourg, at the Chartreuse de Villeneuve-lez-Avignon, at the Museum of Art of Lugano (Switzerland), at the Centro para la Difusión de la Música Contemporánea of Madrid, and the Sala Mozart in Bologna. His music has also been performed in New York at the Guggenheim Museum, and at the Jack Space of Brooklyn.  He is one of the founders of the PRISMA project, an international group of composers which works on computer-aided composition and new directions in musical research. Currently he is on faculty at the Conservatoire de Musique de Montbéliard (France) .

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2017 Resident Composition Faculty

Elliott Miles McKinley

Roger Williams University

BIOGRAPHY

Elliott Miles McKinley has had music performed in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Commissions include those from the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, the Czech Philharmonic Chamber Music Society, the SOLI Chamber Music Ensemble, the Whatcom Symphony Orchestra, the Martinů String Quartet, the Mirari Brass Quintet, and the Janaček Trio. The Minnesota Orchestra, the Warsaw Philharmonic, and the Czech Radio Symphony have performed his orchestral music, and his works have been featured in international festivals;  he is the recipient of a number of awards, grants, and fellowships including those from BMI, ASCAP, SCI, Meet the Composer, the American Music Center, the American Composers Forum, and Indiana University. McKinley earned degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music, University of Michigan, and University of Minnesota. He has taught at the University of Tennessee, Washington and Lee University, and currently is Assistant Professor of Music Composition, Theory, and Technology at Roger Williams University.

Peter Farmer

Freelance (Boston)

BIOGRAPHY

Peter Russell Farmer is a composer whose musical roots are varied. In his early teens, he discovered jazz, and he credits his love of polyphony to the influence of traditional jazz. It was, he states, ""the improvisational element of jazz that led me to composition." Farmer received degrees from the Boston Conservatory and the University of Minnesota. He attended the Ferienkurze für Neue Musik in Darmstadt, Germany where he worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen. Primarily working as a freelance composer and copyist, Farmer has taught music theory/composition at Berklee College of Music and Lowell State University. As a composer, his work has been performed by The Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, the Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra of Prague, the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Slovak Radio Symphony. In 2012, his Ragout for Four was commissioned, premiered, and recorded by the SOLI Chamber Ensemble. This work was released in 2014 on New Dynamic Records. Farmer also has a number of sacred works ranging from Psalms to Parables, and his faith continues to be a source of great inspiration.

Carl Schimmel

Illinois State University

BIOGRAPHY

Praised by The New York Times as “vivid and dramatic,” the music of Carl Schimmel is dense with literary and musical references, often humorous, and combines intensity of expression with a structural rigor which draws upon his mathematics background.  Winner of the Bearns Prize and the Lee Ettelson Award, Schimmel has received honors and awards from many organizations, including MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Copland House, New Music USA, and ASCAP.  His works have been performed in Carnegie Hall’s Weill Hall, Merkin Hall in New York, Severance Hall in Cleveland, the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London, Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis, and at other venues throughout North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia.  He has received performances and commissions from the American Composers Orchestra, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Alarm Will Sound, and many others.  He is Associate Professor of Music Theory and Composition at Illinois State University.

Joseph Dangerfield

University of Florida

BIOGRAPHY

Joseph Dangerfield has lived and worked professionally in Germany, Russia, Holland, and New York. He is the recipient of many awards and recognitions, including the Aaron Copland Award, the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra's Composition Prize, the Henry and Parker Pelzer Prize for Excellence in Composition, and the Young and Emerging Composers Award. He was a Fulbright Scholar to the Russian Federation and the Netherlands (2009-10), where he served as composer-in-residence with the Ensemble Studio New Music at the famed Moscow Conservatory, and lectured at Maastricht Conservatorium. He has been a resident in the Leighton Studios of the prestigious Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada, and the Yaddo Colony in New York. Over the past several years his creative voice has garnered much attention, with performances of his works throughout the United States and abroad. His instrumental and chamber compositions have been performed at such international venues as the Moscow Conservatory, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Frankfurter KuenstlerKlub, the Conservatorio di Giuseppe Tartini (Trieste, Italy) and in Carnegie Hall (Merkin), NY.