Standing in the Stream - John Lane John Lane

This episode features a conversation that I had with composer Zachary Wadsworth and singer Tony Boutte during New American Voices, an initiative Tony put together for the 56th Annual Contemporary Music Festival on the campus of Sam Houston State University.

Composer Zachary Wadsworth writes music that is vivid and sometimes an evocative mixture of old and new. His music has been performed around the world by groups including the Boston Metro Opera, the Tokyo Cantat, and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. With recent publications by Novello, G. Shirmer and E.C. Shirmer and airings on NPR’s Performance Today, his music has been widely broadcasted and distributed. Recordings are available on Gothic Records, Albany Records, and Innova.

Tenor Tony Boutte has established himself as a first-rate singer of many styles, including opera, art song, oratorio, and chamber music from the Baroque to the music of our time. Tony is also the artistic director of New American Voices, an initiative created to champion and perform new American works for voice through the collaboration of singer and composer. And it is that project, which was a featured component of our Contemporary Music Festival, that brought us together for our conversation.

Libby Larsen is one of America’s most performed living composers. Her catalogue of some 500 compositions spans every genre from vocal to chamber music to massive orchestra and operatic works. Including a Grammy winning album in 1993, she has over 50 recordings to her credit. She continues to be in demand for commissions and premieres by artists worldwide.

She is the co-founder of the Minnesota Composers Form, now the American Composers Forum, and has held residencies with the Minnesota Orchestra, the Charlotte Symphony, and the Colorado Symphony.

Percussionist and composer Scott Deal’s work is characterized by a deep interest in technology. His curiosity of new and emerging technologies spurred his founding of two collective projects. Scott founded the Telematic Collective, an Internet performance group of artists and computer specialists, and he is a founding member and percussionist with the computer-acoustic trio Big Robot.

As a performer, Scott has concertized worldwide and has recordings on labels including Albany, Centaur, Cold Blue and SCI. He has received funding for his research from organizations including Meet the Composer, Indiana Arts Council, and the Arts and Humanities Institute at IUPUI, where he is also a Professor of Music and Director of the Donald Louis Travel Arts and Technology Research Center.

Poet Dean Rader and I share an interest in engaging with socio-political themes in our creative work. In our previous conversation (Ep. 47), we ended with the idea that we’d come back and revisit this idea in a part 2. We are also both curious about interdisciplinary work and how one practice brushes up against another, so it seemed like a good follow up conversation. Instead, Dean ended up having a lot of questions about my work as a percussionist/composer and I ended up having some long answers. So, there you have it. I want to say a special thanks, again, to Dean for his interest in my work and the terrific conversation. Stay tuned for a potential part 3 with Dean down the road.

This week’s guest, Dean Rader, has published widely in the fields of poetry, American Indian Studies, and visual culture. His poetry has garnered a number of awards and recognitions including the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize. His newest collection of poetry, Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, was recently published by Copper Canyon Press. A native of Western Oklahoma, he is now based in San Francisco where he is professor of English at the University of San Francisco.

Andrea Polli is an environmental artist who works at the intersection of art, science and technology. Often her works express, in some way, the scientific data obtained from collaborations with scientists. She has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Science Foundation and Fulbright. Her latest book is Far Field: Digital Culture, Climate Change and the Poles. She is currently Professor of Art and Ecology at the University of New Mexico.