ARLENE SIERRA
Composer, born in 1970 in Miami, Florida
Game of Attrition
Arlene Sierra grew up in Miami and New York and studied at Oberlin College-Conservatory, Yale University School of Music, and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. After initial composition lessons with Michael Daugherty, her principal teachers were Jacob Druckman and Martin Bresnick. She gained international recognition with her first score for large orchestra — Aquilo — which won the 2001 Takemitsu Prize and was performed by the Tokyo Philharmonic, Susanna Mälkki conducting. Sierra has gone on to fulfill numerous international commissions, winning several fellowships and awards, most recently from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Based in London, she taught composition at Cambridge University in 2003–04 before her current appointment as lecturer in music composition at Cardiff University School of Music.

Arlene Sierra’s dramatic, vivid music is inspired by unusual sources including game theory, blueprints for ancient weapons, Darwinian evolution, and historical and mythical conflicts. This is music in and of the world, wrought with conviction and logic as well as an intricate sense of color and momentum. Movement is a continuing preoccupation that has grown out of Sierra’s lifelong interest in dance, a physicality of music through rhythm, syncopation, and kinetic energy. Early training in electroacoustic composition remains an influence as well, notably through the use of densely layered, flexible ostinato patterns and virtual samples from nature that feature in pieces including Birds and Insects, The Art of Lightness, and Colmena. A recent series of works, including Surrounded Ground, Cicada Shell, and the new piano concerto, Art of War, builds musical structures and motivic interactions from the military strategy of Sun Tzu — as an expression of protest against present-day conflicts and a plea for rationality and resolution. Natural forces of competition, evolution, and large-scale change, a modern sense of the pastoral as a source of scientific wonder and conscience rather than naive romanticism, have informed works, including Colmena, Hearing Things, Aquilo, and the recent New York Philharmonic commission, Game of Attrition.

Sierra studied with Magnus Lindberg at the Aldeburgh Festival in England and also Tanglewood. She says: “Having grown up attending the Philharmonic’s performances, it is a great honor and thrill to have the chance to write a commission for the New York Phil. I am delighted that this has been made possible by the excellent composer and teacher Magnus Lindberg, as part of a residency program that promises great things for new music in New York.”

LEI LIANG
Composer, born in 1972 in Tianjin, China
Verge
Chinese-American composer Lei Liang was raised in a family of music scholars—receiving his first piano lessons at the age of four, and starting to compose at age six. His piano teacher Zhou Guang-ren encouraged him to begin without formal training. Lei Liang received several awards for composition and piano performance during childhood. In 1989 Beijing Youth Daily named him one of its ten “Persons of the Year.” In 1990, as a high school student, he left his family for the United States. He studied piano before shifting his focus to composition, receiving degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music and Harvard University. His composition teachers included Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Magnus Lindberg, and Bernard Rands, among others. Lei Liang has received commissions from a wide variety of organizations, ensembles, and soloists, and his music has been performed throughout Europe, East and Southeast Asia, North and Latin America, as well as on National Public Radio, Radio Free Asia, and TV and radio programs in China. He has written film and incidental music, and works that were later choreographed. As a scholar, Lei Liang is especially interested in the research and preservation of traditional Asian music, including historical recordings, and his articles about traditional and contemporary Asian music have appeared in numerous journals in China and the U.S. Lei Liang also frequently lectures at universities and conservatories in China and in the United States. He is currently assistant professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego. About this commission, Lei Liang said, “When I got the call from the New York Philharmonic offering the commission, I thought it was a dream. Though I don’t have a title yet, the work is inspired by Mongolian music.”

“Lei Liang’s music is different from that of Western composers, and distinct among those of his Chinese compatriots. Underneath his exquisite and unadorned melodies, there is a wealth of timbral nuances…During a time when most contemporary music seems to alienate the audience, such elegant and tranquil music surprises and refreshes the listeners. ” (People’s Music)

“Liang’s haunting Gobi Gloria featured spectacular, declamatory passages, which the Ying Quartet performed with passion and grace.” The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

MARC-ANDRÉ DALBAVIE
Composer, born in 1961 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France
Melodia
Born in a Parisian suburb, Marc-André Dalbavie started piano lessons when he was just six. He entered the Paris Conservatory during his teens and was awarded a number of major prizes, even having premieres in France and Luxembourg while a student. There were two main influences on his musical development. The first, in the 1980s, was the compositional style of spectralism. He explains by offering a comparison with a painter like Monet, who broke down colors into components; similarly, he told The New York Times, spectralist composers break down colors and timbres of sound, using computer technology. “We de-compose sound and then redeploy it.” Second, he was influenced by the technology-based music championed by Pierre Boulez at IRCAM, whose musical research department he entered in 1985. Marc-André Dalbavie came to prominence in 1986 with his Diadèmes, one of his most frequently performed compositions. From the 1990s until about seven years ago, he created music that kept the performance space in mind, and explored the relationship between audience and musicians; and over the last 15 years he has been writing mainly for symphony orchestras around the globe. He describes with excitement his current composition process. “I start very slowly, globally. I think about the sound of the ensemble that will play my work, as that will give identity to my piece. I live in that sound until my composition emerges. At that moment I know exactly what I want to write, because I quite literally ‘feel’ the piece; then I organize it at the ‘atomic’ level…the melody, harmony, technique.” As for his commission, he is very excited that his work will be performed “by the great artists of the Philharmonic.”

ARTHUR KAMPELA
Composer, born in 1960 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
MACUNAÍMA
Arthur Kampela is internationally recognized as both a composer and a virtuoso guitarist. He studied privately with renowned British composer Brian Ferneyhough, and received his doctorate in composition from Columbia University, where his teachers included Mario Davidovsky and Fred Lerdahl. Arthur Kampela’s works have been performed in leading forums for contemporary music around the globe. An active participant in the New York new music scene, he has been composing and performing with his band in the Americas and Europe in prestigious music halls and in unorthodox venues. He has also broken new ground: first, in his native country he has fused popular and vernacular styles with contemporary textural techniques by, for example, deconstructing samba, jazz, and musical theater with new music resources, creating a truly hybrid genre. Second, he has developed innovative extended techniques for acoustic instruments. In his series of Percussion Studies for solo guitar, he has created a new playing technique named Tapping Technique, which exploits timbre, pitch, texture and complex rhythmic designs. He has received commissions and awards from important organizations such as the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Fromm Music Foundation, the Rio Arte Foundation, and fellowships from the Brazilian Government and Columbia University, among others, and has won two guitar composition competitions. Some recent achievements include Elastics II and Percussion Study V performed by the Linea Ensemble in Strasbourg (France), and the premiere of Antropofagia at World Music Days 2006 in Stuttgart by the Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin. He believes that with these Philharmonic commissions, “Alan Gilbert and Magnus Lindberg want to touch base with music that does not make concessions to expectations, explores new modes of articulating musical discourse and novel techniques for playing, and shows a desire to re-focus hearing—amplifying its conventions and creating energy, joy, and adventure.”

“Extraordinary pieces (...) Kampela’s effects were fascinatingly inventive. The best was his use of a spoon to give the guitar a wavery, underwater sound.” (The New York Times )

“...Ironclad technique (...) It seemed only natural that someone so imaginative might find the standard guitar repertory constricting.” (The New York Times )

MAGNUS LINDBERG
Conductor, born in 1958 in Helsinki, Finland
Beginning in the 2009–2010 season, Magnus Lindberg begins two years as the New York Philharmonic’s Composer-in-Residence. He will write music for and perform with the Orchestra, conduct, give pre-concert talks, participate in adult and youth educational programs, and have a curatorial and performance role with CONTACT, the Philharmonic’s new music series. During his first year the Orchestra plays world premieres of two commissioned works, the U.S. premiere of his Clarinet Concerto, and performs his 1995 Arena. Magnus Lindberg studied at the Sibelius Academy, where his composition teachers included Einojuhani Rautavaara and Paavo Heininen. The latter encouraged his pupils to look beyond the prevailing Finnish conservative and nationalist aesthetics, and to explore the works of the European avant-garde. This led, around 1980, to the founding of the informal group known as the Ears Open Society that sought to encourage a greater awareness of mainstream modernism, and which also included the by-now-familiar Finns, Kaija Saariaho and Esa-Pekka Salonen. In 1981 Magnus Lindberg traveled to Europe for studies with the continents major musical figures. In the early to mid-1980s he made his compositional breakthrough with Action-Situation-Signification and Kraft, linked to his co-founding (with Salonen) of the experimental Toimii Ensemble, also begun in 1980. This group, in which Magnus Lindberg plays piano and percussion, has provided him with a laboratory for his sonic development, allowing him to combine experimentalism, complexity, and primitivism, and to work with extremes of musical material. Near the end of the 1980s his compositional style morphed towards a new modernist classicism, in which many of the ingredients of a vibrant musical language (harmony, rhythm, counterpoint, and melody) were reinterpreted afresh for the post-serial era. In the last decade Magnus Lindberg has continued to compose large-scale works and concertos for cello, violin, and clarinet. His music is widely recorded, and his many honors and prizes confirm his substantial contributions to the classical music field.