Meet the Composer - New Residencies

New Residencies Round IV

In January 1997 Round IV began in communities from coast to coast. The five composers and the executives of their host organizations had already come to New York City for a Training Institute in November, gathering at the historic Henry Street Settlement on the lower east side to build skills and exchange ideas on integrating arts and community concerns. In February and March, each partnership was inaugurated with a celebratory event in its own community.

Phillip Bimstein: Springdale, Utah

Phillip Bimstein, composer and mayor of Springdale, combines acoustic instruments with digital samplers, making the spoken word part of an innovative sonic texture. For the Utah partnership, he has been composing music that celebrates and explores the intimate relationship between the landscapes of the desert southwest and the many cultures that have inhabited the area, creating pieces from recorded oral histories of community elders and involving local people in performances. Bimstein has also been working with teenagers at the Washington County Youth Crisis Center, helping them tell their life stories through the creation of music. Performances of residency works will take place at the Tuacahn Center for the Arts, built into a stunning box canyon, and at other local venues. The partnership has brought the Sierra Winds of Las Vegas and the Abramyan String Quartet of Salt Lake City into this rural community for regular appearances in schools and other venues. Bimstein and his music have also become a regular presence on statewide Utah Public Radio.

Joseph Julian Gonzalez: San Diego, CA

Film and theater composer Joseph Julian Gonzalez has been creating new works of cross-cultural, interdisciplinary music-theater, chamber, and electroacoustic music, to express and respond to the heritages, issues, needs, and dreams of the cross-border metropolis of San Diego-Tijuana. Gonzalez is serving his residency with the San Diego Repertory Theater, The Children’s Museum/Museo de los Niños, Centro Cultural de la Raza, and Centro Cultural de Tijuana and Orquesta de Baja California in Tijuana. He has also been a regular presence on the campus of Southwestern College, a junior college just five miles from the Mexican border, where he works with students and performing ensembles on both sides of the international border.

Diedre Murray: Queens, NY

Diedre Murray, who grew up in Queens and was the recipient of the first New Residencies grant awarded in New York City, is a cellist, composer, and improviser on the leading edge of the jazz tradition. Murray has been working with leading figures of New York’s performance poetry movement on a grand Mass for the Millennium, including sections created and performed by new "poetry choirs" of youth recruited through the Southern Queens Park Association, African Poetry Theatre and Langston Hughes Community Library and Cultural Center. She is also composing several works for her ensemble Mu-Lan-Pi. In addition to these activities, she is actively involved in community outreach in her local community.

Anthony Kelley: Richmond, VA

Composer Anthony Kelley (who grew up in the gospel church of North Carolina before studying music at Duke University) has been composing music for the Richmond Symphony’s formal and informal concerts, a musical for the family-oriented Theater IV, music for events at the Richmond Public Libraries, as well as choral works for a new Boys Choir of Richmond. (The chior performed with Catskill Composers-in-Residence Jay Ungar and Molly Mason at the 1997 Life of Virginia Concert.) By bringing both Symphony lectures and Boys and Girls Clubs activities to libraries in neighborhoods throughout the city, Kelley’s efforts promise to connect every community of Richmond to their cultural resources (libraries, orchestra, theater, youth programs); refresh the link between literary and musical arts; and connect the youth of Richmond with the history and the potential of their own culture.