The initiation of an Annual Festival of New Music will support our immediate goals of increasing community awareness of new music thus strengthening Marshall’s role as a cultural presenter in this region. Such activities are part of a larger plan to develop sustainable programs supporting education, and research in composition and performance of new music creating an environment that motivates music student creators and the development of well-rounded performers. The New Music Festival is a first step in our initiative to acquire national level funding that will assist in building these programs and buoy support contemporary music at a local, and regional level.

BENEFIT TO THE COMMUNITY:

The Festival of New Music is a unique offering of contemporary music that builds upon other College of Fine Arts programs in Theatre (New Works Program), and Art (exhibits of new work in the Birke Art Gallery and in other public Galleries in Huntington). By featuring works of composers living and working today, the festival will present a glimpse of what is new and emerging in the field of contemporary classical music; building recognition for this art which is alive, provocative, and a vital part of our culture. The festival challenges the notion of music as pre-packaged entertainment, focusing instead on work that is representative of what artists are doing today; work which engages every conceivable notion of musical expression in sound and new media, and draws its inspiration from a myriad of, historical, social, cultural, literary, and scientific sources. By its very nature, the festival will engage an eclectic audience and will offer music that may be received by an omnivorous range of tastes from those who genuinely appreciate highly refined expression, to those seeking to experience music that is on the cutting edge of sonic expression today.

BENEFIT TO THE DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC AND COLLEGE OF FINE ARTS:

The Marshall University Department of Music and the College of Fine Arts have long supported the performance of contemporary music through the Edwards Visiting Professor Program, faculty recitals of new music, and performances of new music on department ensemble concerts. Over the past decade the Edwards Visiting Professor program has sponsored residencies featuring the work of Erik Lund, George Lewis, Butch Morris, Lev Kobylkov, Kevin Holm-Hudson, and Due East among others, and the Department of Music’s Society of Composers Student group has supported the activities of Department Festival Band, Chorus, has produced concerts of student work, CD’s of student compositions, and has hosted the Society of Composers inc. National Student Conference in March of last year. The benefit of an annual festival of new music to the department and college will be to increase the profile of Marshall University as a program that consistently seeks to engage emerging trends in our field. The new music festival in turn supports the College of Fine Arts initiative of providing a 21st Century education to our students, thus increasing the value of the education we offer to our current and potential students in West Virginia and ourregion.

EDUCATIONAL BENEFITS:

The immediate tangible benefits of offering a New Music Festival to our student body are increased knowledge of current trends in music, contact/interaction with professional composers from different parts of the country, and participation in the production of a new music festival. In and of themselves, these experiences are invaluable. From my own experience working for the fledgling Minnesota Composers Forum (now the American Composers Forum), experience interacting with guest composers and producing concerts of new music, has provided long-standing benefit to me as an artist and educator. I can report that the activities of the SCI student group on our campus has provided a similar benefit for our student composers and performers. These more formal activities have led to student initiated offshoots including ensembles, the production of concerts, new works, and media. The formalization of an Annual Festival of New Music will provide us a consistent venue and institutional focus for contemporary music which will enable us to build our educational and research programs much in the same way the Marshall jazz area has been supported by the long standing Winter JazzFestival.

WV ARTISTS:

Ann Marie Bingham:

Ann Marie Bingham is an Assistant Professor of Music at Marshall University where she teaches clarinet, oboe, twentieth century music history and woodwind methods. She holds the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in clarinet performance from the University of Kentucky. She is the English hornist with the Huntington Symphony Orchestra and plays clarinet with the Kingsbury Woodwind Quintet. In the summers she teaches woodwinds and performs with the Festival Orchestra and the Festival Band at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp in Twin Lake, Michigan. Before beginning to teach at the collegiate level, shetaught band grades 5-12 in the Grainger County, Tennessee public schoolsystem.

Ann Marie Bingham is an Assistant Professor of Music at Marshall University where she teaches clarinet, oboe, twentieth century music history and woodwind methods. She holds the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in clarinet performance from the University of Kentucky. She is the English hornist with the Huntington Symphony Orchestra and plays clarinet with the Kingsbury Woodwind Quintet. In the summers she teaches woodwinds and performs with the Festival Orchestra and the Festival Band at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp in Twin Lake, Michigan. Before beginning to teach at the collegiate level, shetaught band grades 5-12 in the Grainger County, Tennessee public schoolsystem.

 

Ed Bingham:

Dr. Ed Bingham is Professor of Saxophone and Director of Jazz Studies at Marshall University. He holds degrees from the University of Tennessee, The Juilliard School and The University of Kentucky. In addition to the large saxophone studio at Marshall University, he directs the Marshall University Jazz Ensemble and coordinates two jazz festivals each year. Marshall’s winter jazz festival is one of the

longest-running collegiate jazz festivals in the country having just celebrated its 38th anniversary. In early summer, Dr. Bingham directs the Jazz-MU-Tazz Festival that features high school and college students with prominent jazz artists and clinicians. He is a founding member of Marshall’s faculty jazz ensemble Bluetrane. Bingham is Fellow of the Drinko Honors Academy Marshall. His research into the creative process was featured at Marshall’s Drinko Symposium and at the International Association for Jazz Education International Conference in Long Beach, California. Dr. Bingham maintains an active performance schedule in addition to his teaching responsibilities at Marshall and at Blue Lake. He is a bassoonist and saxophonist with the Huntington Symphony Orchestra and has performed with the Lexington (KY) Philharmonic, the West Virginia Symphony Orchestra, the River Cities Symphony Orchestra and the Ohio Valley Symphony. Current projects include a presentation at the national conference of the College Music Society in Salt Lake City and the release of Bluetrane’s first CD.

 

Alanna Cushing

has earned degrees from Marshall University and Bowling Green State University. She has appeared as a soloist and chamber musician throughout West Virginia and Ohio. Ms. Cushing has a strong interest in playing new music. While playing with Bowling Green’s New Music Ensemble, she premiere

works by Kristen Kuster, Dante de Silva, and Scott Hawkinson. She has also worked with composers such as Mark Zanter, Erik Lund, and Graham Lynch. In 2006, Ms. Cushing attended the Contemporary Music Festival in Cortona, Italy where she premiered a work by Mr. Lynch. She is also an active teacher and was invited to be a guest instructor at Bowling Green’s Summer Music Institute in 2008. Ms.

Cushing recently returned to Huntington, WV and is currently teaching piano and theory at Marshall University.

Dr. Şölen Dikener

received high praise from renowned cellists Paul Tortelier (“with his artistic personality, Dikener possesses the affection of his masters”) and Janos Starker (“a wonderful cellist!”). He enjoys a concert career as a cello soloist with special projects in the USA and Europe. His recent activities featured him at Princeton University Chapel performing his solo arrangement of Greensleeves, a collaboration with Westminster Choir College and WWFM The Classical Network in an international radio broadcast on December 19, 2009. His 2009-2010 concert engagements also includes a concert tour with Capital Piano Trio in New York, Maine and W. Virginia, celebrating the 200th anniversary of F. Chopin. In January, he presented the world premiere of his discovery, the String Trio (1945) by Turkish composer Necil K. Akses in Ohio and W. Virginia. In 2006 Şölen founded the International Music Academy, Akademi Datça and Datca Music Festival in Turkey. He continues to serve as the artistic director of the Akademi and works

with a renowned faculty from USA, Turkey and Germany. Şölen is a specialist in discovery, performances and the world premiere recordings of the cello and chamber music works by major composers from Turkey. He has recorded works by Adnan Saygun, Ilhan Usmanbas, Cengiz Tanc, Ilhan Baran and Necil K. Akses. Most of his recordings are digitally available on iTunes, Lala.com and cdbaby.com websites. Şölen received his Bachelor's degree at age of 18 from State Music Conservatory in Ankara, Turkey in the class of “Highly Gifted Students”. He was one of the final assistants of legendary Paul and Maud Tortelier in Nice, France where he also obtained his chamber music degree from Conservatoire de Nice. He holds a doctorate degree from Michigan State University.

 

Branita Holbrook

Mark Zanter:

Mark Zanter, an active composer/performer, has received commissions from the UIUC Creative Music Orchestra, CU Symphony, the American Composers forum, the WV Commission on the Arts, WVMTA, Due East, Solen Dikener, Rick Kurasz, Cetin Aydar and many others. He has appeared as a composer and performer on NPR’s Live at the Landmark, WILL, IPR, Second Sunday concerts, on WVPN In Touch With The Arts, is published by Les Productions d’OZ, and his works have been performed nationally and internationally at festivals including, MUSIC “X” (Cincinnati Conservatory) June in Buffalo, The Cortona Contemporary Music Festival, NYCEMF and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. He is the recipient of grants/awards from The American Society of Composers and Publishers, The American Music Center, The American Composers Forum, The West Virginia Division of Culture and History, and WV Music Teachers Association.

As a performer Dr. Zanter is equally at home performing standard repertoire, creative music, and jazz and has appeared with orchestras, chamber groups, and improvisers, including the Huntington Symphony Orchestra, the Ohio Valley Orchestra, Sinfonia Da Camera, Anthony Braxton, RoscoeMitchell, Leroy Jenkins, Vinko Globokar, George Lewis, Butch Morris, and Alphonse Mouzon. He has recorded with Deborah Richtmeyer, Vinko Globokar, and his work with Anthony Braxton received special mention in DownbeatMagazine.

Dr. Zanter’s research interests include Algorithmic Composition, Structural Models for Improvisation, and Conduction(r) the music of Butch Morris. Mr. Zanter completed his A. Mus. D. in composition at the University of Illinois where he studied with, Salvatore Martirano, William Brooks, Paul Martin Zonn,and Erik Lund. He is Coordinator of Music Theory and Composition at Marshall University, Huntington, WV.