Pikes Peak Young Composers

Aspiring young composers will gain tips from the top
By Karen Lim
Special to The Denver Post
Thursday, July 18, 2002

The ancient Greeks practiced it. So did Bach and Beethoven. Great composers of the past looked to outside cultural influences - literature, dance, history, religion - for inspiration, and Russian composer Joseph Dorfman hopes students of the Pikes Peak Young Composers will make use of those influences, too. They'll have four days of opportunities to do just that at a workshop under the auspices of the sixth New Music Symposium.

The symposium - bringing together esteemed working composers and students - will be held at Colorado College in Colorado Springs today through Sunday. Public performances will be offered each day.

"Because the symposium has been so successful for the past five years, the organizers decided to expand it by inviting all the Pikes Peak Young Composers to participate," said Ofer Ben-Amots, music director of the symposium and associate professor of music at Colorado College.

"The students of Pikes Peak Young Composers will get the chance to use the facilities and participate in workshops for composers, lectures and demonstrations. Also, they get to hang out and interact with other professional musicians," Ben-Amots said.

For the first time since the symposium's inception, the Pikes Peak Young Composers will be able to take advantage of group and individual mentoring from the 11 distinguished composers attending the symposium. They are Dorfman, Janice Misurell-Mitchell, Jennifer Higdon, David Colson, David Crumb, Carlton Gamer, Richard Lavenda, Jonathan Lee, Robert Patterson, Stephen Scott and Ben-Amots.

"It will offer our young students not only the chance to work with a unique body of composers in order to develop their craft, but also give the students the opportunity to attend rehearsals of their music and direct their own music themselves," said Leonard Rhodes, founder and director of the Pikes Peak Young Composers.

The symposium also offers young composers the chance to attend concerts featuring contemporary works by local and visiting composers and discussion panels on new developments and aesthetics in music. The workshop will culminate in a concert featuring the students' works on Sunday. Dorfman, who will be one of the judges evaluating the young composers' works, looks forward to working with the young composers. He noted that inspiration is an integral part of the creative process of composition.

"I'll be looking for musical form, themes and inspiration because the music in ancient Greece looked to literature, dance, theater, poetry, drama and history for inspiration," Dorfman said. "(Also) we must not forget the importance of language and how phonetics is related to sounds."

Dorfman will be performing his own works, "Verses From Klezmer-Ballade" and "Trio (in memory of Dmitri Shostakovich)" for the opening and closing concerts of the four-day workshop. The decision to program Dorfman at the beginning and at the end was deliberate.

"It is rare that we have composers who are also accomplished and virtuoso performers," Ben-Amots said. "Joseph Dorfman is one of those. In asking him to play, I wanted to present him as a composer-performer and demonstrate to the young composers the importance of mastering an instrument."

Dorfman looks forward to listening to works performed by the Pikes Peak Young Composers.

"Because I believe musicians involved in the creative processes of composition must be active performers themselves, I can't wait to hear the pieces by the young musicians and how they perform," Dorfman said.

Eager to hear his new works performed Sunday is 16-year-old Collin Stoddard, who will be presenting four contrasting pieces. The student wants to take advantage of mentoring at the symposium to develop his own ideas about composition.

"All of them come with a different view," said Stoddard, who has been composing since age 10. "What I want to do is pick all of their brains, understand what they mean and form my own thoughts. Everyone can contribute something to my development."

When he attends the discussion panels, Stoddard would like to find out how one combines classical traditions with New Age influence. The symposium will also present the world premiere of Jennifer Higdon's "Sky Quartet." Never one to conform to pre-existing forms, Higdon's "through composed" piece deviates from the standard form of the genre.

"I let the music itself dictate the development of the form," she said.