The VSO turns 80 this year! To celebrate that milestone, we've commissioned eight Vermont composers to write 80-second fanfares, which will open each of our full-orchestra programs during this 80th Anniversary Season.
For the January concerts we are excited to feature Allen Shawn who is #4 in our series of seven composers. He has such an interesting story we had to share!
(This biography and photo was taken from:
http://allenshawn.com/ )
ALLEN SHAWN (born 1948) grew up in New York City in a
literary environment. His mother was a former journalist, and his
father, William Shawn, was the editor of the New Yorker Magazine for
thirty-five years. His older brother, Wallace Shawn, who eventually
became a playwright and actor, was already writing puppet show texts for
the two brothers to perform when they were children, productions for
which Allen wrote the music. A formative aspect of Shawn’s childhood was
that his twin sister, Mary, was autistic, and was sent to live in a
home for intellectually disabled children at the age of nine. She was
subsequently moved to a larger institution where she still lives.
Shawn began composing small pieces as a ten year old. He asked his
parents for piano lessons, and was soon studying with a teacher from the
Mannes College of Music, Francis Dillon, who encouraged his composing
and introduced him to the music of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, Bartok,
Prokofiev and other early twentieth century composers. He was
particularly attracted to Bartok and was electrified by Stravinsky’s
Le Sacre du Printemps.
He learned the Berg Sonata at the age of fifteen, and it was the piece
he found easiest to memorize and most enjoyable to perform. In the
summers he studied with piano teacher Emilie Harris, and attended
Kinhaven Music Camp, in Weston Vermont, where the camp directors, David
and Dorothy Dushkin, gave him opportunities to hear his fledgling
chamber and orchestral compositions. When he was seventeen, he conducted
the Vermont Philharmonic in one of his orchestra pieces. Attending the
Putney School in Vermont, he had a momentous musical experience
performing as soloist in Mozart’s C Minor piano concerto, K. 491, with
the school orchestra conducted by the remarkable music teacher, Norwood
Hinkle.
Shawn’s father was a gifted amateur jazz pianist and took the family
to night clubs where they heard musical giants Thelonious Monk, Duke
Ellington, and Charlie Mingus live. As a child and teenager, Shawn also
benefitted from being able to regularly attend chamber music concerts,
the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, and the New York City
Ballet, in the heyday of George Balanchine’s tenure there. After his
years at Putney, Shawn continued his studies at Harvard University,
studying composition with Earl Kim and Leon Kirchner; he also studied
privately with composer Francis Judd Cooke. Following college, he spent
two years studying with the legendary Nadia Boulanger, in Paris.
After his return from Paris, Shawn, now financially on his own, began
a hard-working life in New York, teaching, playing the piano for dance
classes, and working as a theater pianist and musical director. He
studied counterpoint privately with Carl Schacter, and composition with
composer Peter Pindar Stearns, and then attended the Master’s program at
Columbia University, where he studied composition with Jack Beeson and
Vladimir Ussachevsky. His Master’s thesis was a one-act chamber opera,
“In The Dark”, for two characters and seven musicians, to a libretto by
his brother, Wallace, that was performed in the summer of 1976 at the
Lenox Art Center in Lenox, Massachusetts. After his graduation from
Columbia, Shawn continued to compose concert music, but also wrote
incidental music for a number of plays, including productions directed
by James Lapine, Joseph Papp, and Wilford Leach at the Delacorte Theater
in Central Park, The Public theater, and Lincoln Center. During this
period, along with teaching, he performed in contemporary music
concerts, played the piano in two Broadway shows,
The Pirates of Penzance, and
The Human Comedy,
composed the music for the film, My Dinner With Andre, wrote a score
for the Lucinda Childs Dance Company, composed a short musical skit to a
text by poet Derek Walcott, and wrote an hour of music for a chamber
opera,
The Music Teacher, to a libretto by his brother, that
was not produced until twenty years later. In 1985 Shawn moved to
Bennington, Vermont, and joined the music faculty of Bennington College.
He has lived in Vermont and taught at Bennington since that time.
Shawn’s long years as a student initially left him self-conscious
about composing and more distant from the urgent need he had felt as a
ten year old to express himself musically. He dates his mature music
from 1978, the moment when he began reintroducing jazz elements into his
musical language, which led to a rekindling of his spontaneity as a
composer and the development of his own kind of harmony, lyricism and
sense of form, now wedded to much greater sophistication and
craftsmanship than he had when he was an untutored teenager. His music
from this point on blended his various influences, drawing to varying
degrees on Stravinskian transparency and concision, the intense
expressivity of the Second Viennese School, and the rhythms and
harmonies of jazz. His work list as of 2014 includes four piano sonatas
and many additional piano pieces, including several for piano four-hands
and two pianos; much chamber music; vocal music; a children’s opera;
and a dozen orchestral works including a Symphony, two Piano Concertos, a
Violin Concerto, and a Cello Concerto. His recordings include numerous
chamber music CDs; three volumes of piano music; his piano concerto
performed by Ursula Oppens, with the Albany Symphony, conducted by David
Alan Miller; and his chamber opera, The Music Teacher, to a libretto by
Wallace Shawn, on Bridge Records. In 1995 Shawn was the recipient of a
Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and
Letters. In 2001 he received an Academy Award from the same institution.
He remains an active performer as a pianist.
Shawn’s career as a writer began in the 1980s with articles on
contemporary music in the Atlantic Monthly. Since then he has written
for the Musical Times, New York Times Magazine and the Times Literary
Supplement, program notes for Carnegie Hall, liner notes for the string
quartets of Leon Kirchner, and four books:
Arnold Schoenberg’s Journey, which won the 2003 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award,
Wish I Could Be There,
Twin and
Leonard Bernstein, due out in 2014 from Yale University Press.
Shawn’s music follows no single system. He writes for acoustic
instruments, and whenever possible for specific performers. His work is
unified by its emotional and visceral directness, and his predilection
for a closely argued musical language.
In a review of a 2001 concert devoted to his music at the Longy
School of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Richard Dyer, writing in
the Boston Globe, called the music “a body of work built to last”,
adding that the “overall impression of Shawn’s music is of work that is
clearheaded, craftsman-like, nostalgic, tuneful, accessible, yet
profoundly subversive; it never sets you down where you think it will.
Shawn is always turning signposts into weather vanes, pulling the map
out from under you—he never loses his bearings, but he wants the
listener to.”
Shawn feels that his work is best described as both personal and
objective, the private put into objective form. He has remarked that his
music is “much more expressive and outgoing” than he is, and that he
feels uncharacteristically “unencumbered, bold and free” when he is
composing.
Asked by writer Dennis Bartel, in a Chamber Music Magazine article of
December 1997, if his work constituted a kind of “musical
autobiography,” Shawn said that it certainly did, but qualified the
idea: “ On the one hand, as so many musicians and composers have tried
to say over the centuries, music is music; its meanings and emotions are
perceived and felt, but can’t be translated into words. Yet at the same
time, somehow the music we write captures the essence of our lives,
what one might call our “inner evolution”. There is a quality of
existing that music seems to chronicle–the texture and quality of
living, of time itself passing. External events are somehow magically
embedded within it, as is, somehow, one’s very progress through life. ”
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