We are very proud to present a concert of piano works by the very talented members of the Central Florida Composers Forum. We will showcase selected works for piano solo and piano-four-hands. The featured performers are the award-winning pianist Rose Grace and resident pianist for the Alterity Chamber Orchestra, Will Daniels.
The concert will take place on October 21, 2018 at 7:30 p.m. The venue is the Timucua Arts Foundation, 2000 Summerlin, Orlando, Florida. Suggested donation is $10-$20
Please join us for a beautiful night of music!
ABOUT THE COMPOSERS AND THEIR COMPOSITIONS
Eric Brook is a classically trained pianist who has degrees in music composition from Oberlin Conservatory (B.M) and the University of Minnesota (M.A). He composes music in many genres including art music, popular music, and electronic dance music. Currently, he is Course Director of Musical Structure and Analysis at Full Sail University in the Music Production department. Eric also serves as Music Director at Unity on the Space Coast in Titusville, FL.
Diginary is a minimalist composition explores the combination of the harmonic overtone series merged with the mathematics of the binary number system. Compositional strategies of additive rhythmic patterns and indeterminacy are also interwoven throughout the texture.
Alex Burtzos is an American composer and conductor based in New York City and Orlando, FL. His works, which bristle with “biting contemporary edge” (Berkshire Eagle) have been performed across four continents. Alex has collaborated with some of the world’s foremost contemporary musicians and ensembles, including JACK Quartet, Yarn/Wire, Contemporaneous, ETHEL, loadbang, Jenny Lin, RighteousGIRLS, and many others. He is the founder and artistic director of ICEBERG New Music, a New York-based composers’ collective, and the conductor of the hip-hop/classical chamber orchestra ShoutHouse. Alex holds a DMA from Manhattan School of Music, where his primary teachers were Reiko Fueting and Mark Stambaugh. He serves as Assistant Professor of Composition at the University of Central Florida.
Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) was a British poet. He composed almost all of his poems while serving in the army during World War I, and his writing directly addresses the ground-level experience of an infantry soldier during a brutal, horrific conflict. Owens’ poems are raw, visceral, and occasionally shocking, even to someone reading more than a century after their creation. In Wilfred Owen at the Gates, I’ve taken six of these works as a starting point, marrying them to a structure based on Dante’s Inferno. Wilfred Owen was killed in battle in November, 1918, just one week before the armistice. He was 26 years old.
A composer, writer, and voice actor, Charlie Griffin was born and raised in New York. He teaches in Full Sail University’s Bachelor of Science in Music Production degree program. His original music has been performed in 20 countries in venues like Washington DC’s Kennedy Center, New York’s Merkin and Weill recital halls, the American Cathedral in Paris, festivals such as Aspen, SpoletoUSA, and Mexico’s International Cervantino, and conferences such as the WPPC (World Piano Pedagogy Conference), PASIC (Percussive Arts Society), ACDA (American Choral Directors Association) and NFA (National Flute Association). Recent commissions include works for the Orlando Philharmonic and for guitarist Robert Phillips. He is the founder and first president of the Central Florida Composers Forum, and has been a large budget panelist for United Arts of Central Florida, a radio show host on WPRK 91.5fm, and the music columnist for Artborne Magazine. Griffin embraces creativity in many forms: improv comedy, standup comedy, and acting. In May of 2017, his one hour sketch-prov comedy show, enjoyed a 5-show run at the Orlando Fringe Festival. Shortly thereafter, he embarked on a second degree: a BFA in Creative Writing for Entertainment on faculty scholarship at Full Sail University.
A composer can only express their perception of the world through the filter of their own experience, and since my earliest musical experiences revolved around singing and drumming, I often incorporate in my writing elements of popular and/or world music that are most compelling to me, within the context of continuing a concert music tradition. Vernacular Dances is a three-movement work that comes from this impulse. The first movement blends jazz and latinesque motor rhythms with melodic material loosely derived from Webern’s Variations for Piano, Op. 27, Mvt. 2. The second movement is gentle and arioso, orchestrally conceived. The third contrasts blues rhythms with some I picked up listening to Latin Jazz. The piece was premiered by Perry Townsend at Steinway Hall in New York, and has since been recorded by Tomoko Deguchi for Capstone Records and by Theresa McCollough for Innova Records.
Sharon Omens is a prolific composer who is the current acting president of the Central Florida Composers Forum. She has produced six albums with her original compositions and regularly showcases her original music at the Timucua White House. Ms. Omens is also a spiritual performer of both piano and voice and a music educator/therapist who has devoted 40 years to training young musicians and using music as a source of healing with those in need. Sharon holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Music (piano performance) and a Certificate of Music Therapy.
Visions is a solo piano composition which has a central jazz theme that is revisited diatonically, atonally and rhythmically throughout the piece. Since Ms. Omens is a pianist herself and also studied and played jazz extensively throughout her youth, she enjoys using jazz harmonies and experimenting with them to create contrasting moods and emotions. Visions moves through many temperaments including lazy, playful, energetic, gentle, determined, passionate, turbulent and resolute. Counterpoint, parallel thirds and varied rhythms and tempos are also utilized in some sections in order to create added intensity, texture and color.
Damien Simon is an internationally known composer for ballet/contemporary dance companies, orchestras/ensembles, tv/film companies. As a graduate of the Purchase Conservatory (NY) and the University College of Dublin (Ireland), Damien relocated to Orlando from Buffalo, NY. In addition to writing scores; Damien is a private music teacher in multiple instruments and composition. Damien has written dozens of scores from contemporary ballets in Holland, to ensembles in Austria, to independent films in Australia. Many of his scores become internationally touring pieces, touring all over Europe, Russia and the US.
Sick People, Leroy, and Happiness are three solo piano scores written at different times. As a composer for multiple genres and mediums (dance, film, theater); I keep a prolific catalogue, ever expanding in developing my maturity as a composer. Much of my scores have been written just for the sake of writing, not for specific projects. Exploring different genres, mediums and other cultures musics’ excites my hunger for seeing, hearing, and experiencing new sounds and cultures with their music.
