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Jane
Brockman, Composer
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Music for Chamber Ensembles, Soloists,
Orchestra and Dance |
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Music
- Listen
Press
Recordings,
Publications, and
Credits
Purchase
Commissioning
Email--feel
free to write, let me know your thoughts.
Links
The past few weeks have been marked by the deaths of three very dear friends:
Bebe Barron (1925-2008), "first lady of electronic music": composer with husband, Louis, of the score to Forbidden Planet. The Score Interview with Bebe, and my memoire of her, New York Times obit.
Leonard Rosenman (1923-2008), prolific composer of film and concert music scores. Jon Burlingame's obit. Coming soon: my 1993 interview with Leonard for The Score.
Miriam Silverberg (1951-2008), Japanese scholar and passionate teacher.
They are already terribly missed.
Hi--thanks for visiting. Here's other news.
The DVD/CD of my piece, Feast of Fives has just been released on AIX Records performed by Chamber Music Palisades. The marvelous performers are Delores Stevens and Susan Greenberg (founders of Chamber Music Palisades) and Peter Stumpf (Principal Cello, Los Angeles Philharmonic). This is the first music I've had recorded in 5:1 Surround-Sound and both performance and audio result are splendiferous.
My new piano trio will be premiered on Chamber Music Palisades concert Mar. 25th, with Delores Stevens (piano), MarK Menzies (violin) and John Waltz (cello).
And you can hear me discussing this concert with Martin Perlich on KCSN (88.5FM) at 4PM, Mon. Mar. 24th.
Mar. 15th, 2008, 7:30 PM: first concert in the new season for Music & Conversations (our seventh!) at the custom performance space of Alan Goldman in the Mt. Washington district of Los Angeles.
In our third season, we are presenting performances by artists of international stature in an intimate setting, instead of their usual huge venues like Disney Hall or the Hollywood Bowl.
I had been thinking about the process which distanced classical music performers and composers from their audience. It seems that it all began with the procenium stage--raising musicians up and away from listeners. Before the late 18th century, music was always presented in a home (actually, a mansion). The duke would invite his friends for an evening of music, food, wine, etc. It was a social occasion, but also a serious listening adventure.
Then Beethoven came along and had to be larger than life. After that of course, every composer wanted to be Beethoven. But Haydn, himself not too shoddy a composer, was none of that. In his day, composers and musicians wore servants' livery. We don't plan to adopt the dress code, but we are excited about returning the listening experience to its roots--and including listeners in stimulating conversations about the music, the performance experience, the instruments and the composing experience.
So hope you will join us, as we chart out this adventure in listening. We are now incorporated as a 501-c3 charitable organization. Stay tuned and see you on June 9th.
If you have questions, comments or thoughts, feel free to email me. Isn't that the beauty of the internet?
Jane Brockman
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With a single note, the nightingale
Makes me notice the rose
Falling into that place
Where everything is music.
—Rumi |
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BIOGRAPHY |
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Brockman's concert music is informed by her experience with other media: dance, film, and
television, as well as the formal structure of teaching in academia.
Raised
in upstate New York, Jane Brockman was the first woman to
earn a Doctorate in Music Composition in the 150-year history
of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She also
studied in Paris with Max Deutsch on a Fulbright/Alliance
Française fellowship and in Vienna on a Rackham
Prize fellowship. She has been awarded honors and fellowships
from the MacDowell Colony (3 years), the State of
Connecticut, Meet the Composer, and the Composers
Conference (directed by Mario Davidovsky). Her first orchestra
piece won the Sigvald Thompson Prize for orchestral
composition. Brockman's mentors include Pulitzer Prize
winners Ross Lee Finney and Leslie Bassett, as well as George
Balch Wilson, Wallace Berry and Eugene Kurtz.
Brockman taught music
theory and composition at the University of Connecticut
for 9 years, where she founded the University's Computer Music
Studio and produced electronic music concerts. She has also
been on the faculties of the Hartt School of Music, the
University of Rhode Island and the University of Michigan.
She was one of four composers selected nationally for a Sundance
Institute Film Composers' Lab fellowship, working with
Henry Mancini, Bruce Broughton, Alan Silvestri, David Newman
and the Utah Symphony.
Afterward,
she left her tenured professorship at the University of Connecticut
to freelance as a composer in the Los Angeles area, scoring
films and television, as well as writing concert music. Today,
in Santa Monica, her focus is entirely on concert music. Her
music is recorded on the Leonarda, Opus One, Coronet, Drimala, Centaur
and Capstone labels, and published by Arsis Press,
Washington, D.C. and Diaphanous Music, which is
distributed by Theodore Front Musical Literature Inc.
Her music has been in the touring repertoires of Continuum
and the New Music Consort in NYC, and virtuoso clarinetists
F. Gerard Errante, William Powell, and Roslyn Dunlop (Australia).
She
has served on the Boards of Directors of New York's Composers
Concordance, as well as Women in Film, and the
Society of Composers and Lyricists in Los Angeles.
She also served for three years on review panels for the National
Endowment for the arts, Washington, D.C. and produced
concerts with the LoCal Composers Ensemble. She is the director/CEO of Music and Conversations, Inc.
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Jane's Studio |
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© 2007 by Diaphanous Music. All rights reserved. |
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"Listen...and
find yourself in the exotic realm of imagination.
Let your ears soar to music of expansion, spaciousness, and dissolution."
J.B.
"The
world speaks to me in pictures,
my soul answers in music.
Rabindranath
Tagore (1861-1941)
"Take
a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons,
and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is
to the body."
Oliver
Wendell Holmes (1841-1935)
"Men
profess to be lovers of music
but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and
lives that they have ever heard it.
It would not leave them narrow-minded and bigoted."
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
"To
study music,
we must learn the rules.
To create music, we must forget them."
Nadia
Boulanger
(1887-1979)
"Musical
harmony softens hard hearts,
and a song goes through you so that you understand perfectly."
Hildegard
von Bingen (1098-1179)
"In
the beginning was the note,
and the note was with God.
And whosoever can reach for that note,
reach high and bring it back to us on earth,
to our earthly ears--he is a composer.
And to the extent of his reach,
partakes of the divine."
Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)
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