2020 Composer-In-Residence
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Derek BermelComposer and clarinetist Derek Bermel has been widely hailed for his creativity, theatricality, and virtuosity. Artistic Director of the American Composers Orchestra, Bermel is also curator of the Gamper Festival at the Bowdoin International Music Festival, Director of Copland House's emerging composers institute Cultivate, and recently enjoyed a four-year tenure as artist-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton. Bermel has become recognized as a dynamic and unconventional curator of concert series that spotlight the composer as performer, including ACO's SONIC Festival. Alongside his international studies of ethnomusicology and orchestration, an ongoing engagement with other musical cultures has become part of the fabric and force of his compositional language, in which the human voice and its myriad inflections play a primary role. He has received commissions from the Pittsburgh, National, Saint Louis, and Pacific Symphonies, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, WNYC Radio, La Jolla Music Society, Seattle Chamber Music Festival, eighth blackbird, Guarneri String Quartet, Music from Copland House and Music from China, De Ereprijs (Netherlands), violinist Midori, and electric guitarist Wiek Hijmans among others. His many honors include the Alpert Award in the Arts, Rome Prize, Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, American Music Center's Trailblazer Award, and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; commissions from the Koussevitzky and Fromm Foundations, Meet the Composer, and Cary Trust; and residencies at Yaddo, Tanglewood, Aspen, Banff, Bellagio, Copland House, Sacatar, and Civitella Ranieri. His discography features three critically-acclaimed discs: an all-Bermel orchestral recording that includes the Grammy-nominated performance of his clarinet concerto Voices, (BMOP/sound); Soul Garden, his small ensemble/solo music (New World/CRI); and his most recent disc, Canzonas Americanas, with Alarm Will Sound (Cantaloupe). Recent appearances include the Intimacy of Creativity Festival in Hong-Kong; Seattle, La Jolla, and Lincoln Center Chamber Music Societies, Migration Series with the Seattle Symphony, Elixir with the Boston Symphony, Hyllos, his evening-length collaboration with The Veenfabriek and Asko | Schönberg Ensemble in Amsterdam, as well as composer-in-residence stints at Kempten Classix (Germany) and Nuova Consonanza (Rome). Two upcoming Bermel discs feature recordings with the JACK quartet and Albany Symphony Orchestra.
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2020 Special Guest Faculty
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Barry Finnerty (Composition, Jazz Studies, and Improvisation)A native of San Fransisco, Barry Finnerty studied classical piano from age 5, and received his first guitar at age 13. After living in Hong Kong at a young age, his family returned to the Bay area where he got his first electric guitar and began playing professional gigs, including opening for Herman's Hermits and performing at the Fillmore West and the Avalon Ballroom. He attended the Berklee School of Music in Boston in 1971 and afterward moved to New York City where he began playing and recording for the renowned Brecker Brothers Band (Heavy Metal Bebop), the Crusaders (Street Life), Miles Davis (The Man With The Horn), Chico Hamilton, Airto and Flora Purim, Hubert Laws, Joe Farrell, Ray Barretto, Billy Cobham, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Taj Mahal. Didier Lockwood, Thad Jones/Mel Lewis, Teruo Nakamura, and The Negatives, among others. Finnerty continues to work professionally, tour and record worldwide. His two "Serious Jazz" practice books, published by Sher Music, have been internationally acclaimed.
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2020 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 is currently Associate Professor of Music Composition, Theory, and Technology at Roger Williams University.
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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.
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