Each year at UNM, living composers of new music get their time in the spotlight.
The 33rd annual John Donald Robb Composers Symposium is an assembly of nationally and internationally renowned composers who are invited to UNM to share three days of composition seminars, panel discussions, demonstrations and concerts with UNM music students and anyone else interested in music's avant garde.
The symposium runs through March 31, at Keller Hall in the Center for the Arts. Performances are today at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.
"It's the longest running, largest festival of its kind in the state of New Mexico," said Chris Shultis, artistic director of this year's symposium. "It's a great chance for the community to see what's happening in the current compositional scene with composers from all over the world."
The featured composers are Robert Cogan and Pozzi Escot, both internationally acclaimed scholars and composers. Escot, president of the International Society of Hildegard von Bingen Studies and director of Tufts University Talloires International Composers Conference, has won critical acclaim for her compositions.
In 1971, she was selected as one of five outstanding women composers of the 20th century, along with Lili Boulanger and Ruth Crawford.
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"These guys (Cogan and Escot) are a wonderful introduction to a type of music that the symposium has never really represented," Shultis said. "It's really the first chance Albuquerque has had to hear firsthand what the East Coast new-music scene is all about."
Aside from the five concerts and the extensive workshops that have come to be the standard of every symposium, there will be two sound installations by Linda Dusman and Panaiotis. Dusman's piece "Mixed Messages" can be interacted with via an old fashioned switchboard at the UNM Art Museum. Panaiotis's piece, SoundCycler, also an interactive work, is in the Center for the Arts lobby. Sensors installed throughout the building will allow the listeners to affect the composition.
Coinciding with this year's symposium are the awards for two contests open to UNM composers. Deel Jacobsen is the winner of the 2004 Scott Wilkinson Composition Award. Carl Donsbach, a computer technician who works at UNM's Zimmerman Library, won the first biennial John D. Robb Composition Competition. The winning pieces will be performed at the symposium.
"At every symposium we only perform music by living composers in attendance," Shultis said. "That means every piece you hear is by a composer who is sitting in the audience with you."
Alda de Jesus Oliveira, one of the composers featured in this year's symposium, expressed her gratitude for the opportunity to present her works after organizing music education programs in her home in Bahia, Brazil.
"I composed a lot in the '70s and '80s and not so much in the '90s," she said. "I am only beginning to come back to composition, and I am grateful that UNM and this exchange is giving me its blessing. It's inviting me back to composition."
This year's symposium began Sunday with a duo concert featuring trombonist and jazz legend Roswell Rudd and finger-style guitarist Duck Baker at the Outpost Performance Space.
All events are free and open to the public.
