The Eighteenth Annual Festival/Conference of the American Society of University Composers: The Composer in the University Reexamined

Abstract

Louisiana experienced a burst of musical excitement when the Eighteenth Annual Festival/Conference of the American Society of University Composers was hosted by the Louisiana State University School of Music in Baton Rouge. The conference, which spanned February 23-27, was held in conjunction with LSU's Thirty-Eighth Festival of Contemporary Music, an annual event founded in 1944 by LSU Professor Helen Gunderson with the intention of providing public concerts of twentieth-century music, including classics, avant-garde works and LSU student compositions. The conference exploded into existence with an exuberant concert by the LSU Wind Ensemble under the direction of Frank Wickes. The high points were undoubtedly Richard Brooks' Collage and the spectacular Band Piece (Chromatic Fantasy) by Bruce Taub, both of which were received enthusiastically by the large audience. The quintessentially romantic Collage played upon three ideas, culled from the first four measures of the piece: four chordal sonorities, a crescendo-diminuendo silhouette, and a rapid riff in the marimba. Incessantly repeated six-note segments of the D-maior ascending and C-malor descending scales, derived from the marimba riff, propelled the work forward through a dense frenzy of material. Band Piece, intended as an homage to composer Ross Lee Finney on his seventyfifth birthday, set up a consistent momentum dramatically terminated by stupendous, reiterated sonorities. The program's two remaining ASUC compositions, Variations on a Theme of Guillaume de Machaut by David Keane and Chromatic Suite Concertante by Robert Rollin,