Timothy Weiss conducting the CME at Miller Theatre (Lost Highway, 2007) © Steve J. Sherman '81

Profiles

The Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble
Winner of an award for adventurous programming by the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers and the American Symphony Orchestra League in 2002, Oberlin’s Contemporary Music Ensemble (CME) is perhaps the premiere new music ensemble in higher education in the United States. The CME performs music of all styles and genres, with a repertoire that is as broad as the entirety of contemporary music. In addition to giving first performances of new works by prominent composers, the CME has also premiered works by student, faculty, and alumni composers. Many famous and respected new music performers have been guest soloists with the CME, including Marilyn Nonken, Stephen Drury, Jennifer Koh ’97, Steven Schick, and Ursula Oppens. In May 2005, the CME, under the baton of Timothy Weiss, performed two concerts of works by Sir Harrison Birtwistle, who was in residence at Oberlin. In February 2007, the CME garnered rave reviews as the pit orchestra for Oberlin’s American premiere of Lost Highway, Olga Neuwirth’s opera based on the David Lynch film. “Timothy Weiss’s pit orchestra was terrific,” wrote Bernard Holland in the New York Times. “The performers... were poised and impressive,” wrote Joanne Sydney Lessner in Opera News. “The orchestra executed Neuwirth’s challenging effects with gusto.” Oberlin has long been an undergraduate haven for many nationally acclaimed composers, chamber musicians, and ensembles, and several rising young performers of new music began their careers as members of the CME, including eighth blackbird and the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE).

Timothy Weiss, conductor
American conductor Timothy Weiss was born in Papua New Guinea in 1967 and has gained critical praise for his performances and adventurous programming throughout the United States and abroad. In his 14 years as music director of the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble (CME), he has brought the group to a level of artistry and virtuosity in performance that rivals the finest new music groups. He conducted the CME — the pit orchestra for Oberlin’s American premiere of Lost Highway — to great acclaim. Bernard Holland wrote in the New York Times: “Timothy Weiss’s pit orchestra was terrific.” Joanne Sydney Lessner of Opera News wrote that he “did a fantastic job … the orchestra executed [Olga] Neuwirth’s challenging effects with gusto.” Weiss is also committed to exploring connections within and between pieces in his performances, and he has been the recipient of the Adventurous Programming Award from the American Symphony Orchestra League. His repertoire in contemporary music is extensive, including masterworks, very recent compositions, and an impressive number of premieres and commissions. An active guest conductor, Weiss recently conducted the BBC Scottish Symphony in Glasgow, Scotland, and the International Contemporary Ensemble in New York’s Miller Theatre and San Francisco’s Hertz Hall. He also has conducted the Toledo, Quad City, San Angelo, and Cleveland Chamber symphonies; the Newark-Granville Symphony Orchestra; the Detroit Chamber Winds; the Symphony Orchestra of the Nacional Association de Conciertos in Panama City, Panama; and the ensemble Synergy Vocals at the Almeida Opera Festival in London, England. His collaborations with composers, performers, and choreographers include recent performances with Ursula Oppens, Jennifer Koh ’97, Marilyn Nonken, Harrison Birtwistle, Joan Tower, Tania Leon, Tan Dun, Kevin Volans, James Dillon, Brian Ferneyhough, Lewis Nielson, and John Luther Adams. A committed educator, Weiss is Ruth Strickland Gardner Professor of Music Conducting and Director of the Division of Conducting and Ensembles at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he created and mentored the ensemble eighth blackbird. He holds degrees from the Royal Conservatory of Music in Brussels, from Northwestern University, and the University of Michigan. He is represented by Allied Artists, Ltd., London, UK.
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Wendell Logan, composer
An exponent of both jazz and art music, Wendell Logan is an important compositional presence within his musical generation. Throughout his distinguished career as composer, performer, and educator, he has received numerous commissions and won many awards, including four from the National Endowment for the Arts, a dozen or so ASCAP awards, three Ohio Arts Council grants and, in 1991, the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship and the Cleveland Arts Prize in Music. In 1994, he was a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Italy. A soprano saxophonist, he has performed in Africa and the Caribbean, in Europe, and throughout the United States. His work can be heard on the Orion, Golden Crest, and RPM Records labels, among others. Logan is Chair of the Jazz Studies Department at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and Professor of African American Music. He has been a member of the faculty since 1973.
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Tom Lopez, composer
Tom Lopez teaches at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he is Associate Professor of Computer Music and Digital Arts, Chair of the TIMARA Department (Technology in Music and Related Arts), and Director of the Contemporary Music Division. Lopez has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Aaron Copland Fund, the Betty Freeman Foundation, the Mid-America Arts Alliance, the Knight Foundation, the Disney Foundation, Meet the Composer, and ASCAP, and he received a Fulbright Fellowship as composer-in-residence at the Centre International de Recherche Musical in Nice, France. He has appeared at festivals and conferences around the world as a guest lecturer and composer, and he has been a resident artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Copland House, Villa Montalvo, and Djerassi. His compositions have received critical acclaim and peer recognition; including a Grant for Young Composers from ASCAP and CD releases by Vox Novus, SCI, and SEAMUS. His music has been performed around the world and at numerous venues throughout the United States, including at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
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Lewis Nielson, composer
Lewis Nielson studied music at the Royal Academy of Music in London, Clark University in Massachusetts, and the University of Iowa, earning a PhD in music theory and composition in 1977. His music appears through American Composers Edition, and CDs of his music are available from Albany, MMC, Centaur, and Innova Recordings. He has received numerous honors, including the prestigious Cleveland Arts Prize in Music for 2007, and grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Delius Foundation, Meet the Composer, the Georgia Council for the Arts, the Groupe de Music Expèrimentale de Bourges in France, the Ibla Foundation in Sicily, Pi Kappa Lambda, and the International Society of Bassists. He has received many commissions from solo performers and such important orchestral and chamber ensembles as the Minneapolis Guitar Quartet, the Iowa Center for New Music, the new music group Thamyris, and the Aurora Brass Quintet, and his works have been performed throughout the United States and Europe. Among the more notable performances of his large works have been those by the Lake Placid Sinfonietta, the American Composer’s Orchestra, the Fresno (Calif.) Philharmonic, and recent CD recording and performance projects with the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra of Bratislava, the Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the Tchaikovsky Symphony of Moscow Radio. He served as Professor of Music Theory and Composition at the University of Georgia, where he directed the University of Georgia Contemporary Chamber Ensemble for 21 years. In 2000, he joined the composition faculty of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he is currently Professor of Composition.
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Peter Swendsen, composer
Peter V. Swendsen explores the capacity of electroacoustic sound and digital media to challenge and extend our engagement with performance. His music has been called “highly skillful” by the San Francisco Bay Guardian and “the sonic equivalent of ether” and “marvelous” by the San Francisco Chronicle. He is Assistant Professor of Computer Music and Digital Media at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. He spent the 2006-07 academic year on a Fulbright Fellowship at the NoTAM computer music studios in Oslo, Norway, where he worked on a large project based in soundscape composition and ecoacoustics. Swendsen is a Ph.D. candidate in Composition and Computer Technologies at the University of Virginia, where he was in residence as a Jefferson Scholars Fellow and Instructor in the McIntire Department of Music from 2002-2006. He earned a master of fine arts degree from the Mills College Center for Contemporary Music and a bachelor of music degree from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. His music has been heard throughout the United States and much of Europe, and also in South America and Asia in recent years. His work most recently appeared on events in Norway, the UK, and Australia and is part of a recent CD release called Resonance: Steel Pan in the 21st Century.  He also serves as Assistant Editor for Journal SEAMUS. Swendsen is the co-artistic director of Prospect Dance Group and works extensively in collaboration with choreographers.
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Steven Schick
Steven Schick was born in Iowa and raised in a farming family. For the past 30 years he has championed contemporary percussion music as a performer and teacher. He studied at the University of Iowa and received the Soloists Diploma from the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg, Germany. He has commissioned and premiered more than 100 new works for percussion and has performed these pieces in major concert series such as Lincoln Center’s Great Performers and the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella concerts as well as in international festivals including Warsaw Autumn, the BBC Proms, the Jerusalem Festival, the Holland Festival, the Stockholm International Percussion Event, and the Budapest Spring Festival, among many others. He has recorded many of those works for SONY Classical, Wergo, Point, CRI, Neuma, and Cantaloupe Records. He has been a regular guest lecturer at the Rotterdam Conservatory and the Royal College of Music in London. Schick is Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego, and Lecturer in Percussion at the Manhattan School of Music. Schick was the percussionist of the Bang on a Can All-Stars of New York City from 1992-2002. From 2000 to 2004, he served as Artistic Director of the Centre International de Percussion de Genève in Geneva, Switzerland. Steven Schick is the founder and Artistic Director of the percussion group, “red fish blue fish.”

Brian Ferneyhough
Brian Ferneyhough was born in Coventry, England, on January 16, 1943. He received formal musical training at the Birmingham School of Music and the Royal Academy of Music, London. In 1968 he was awarded the Mendelssohn Scholarship, which enabled him to continue his studies in Amsterdam with Ton de Leeuw, and the following year he obtained a scholarship to study with Klaus Huber at the Basel Conservatoire. Following Ferneyhough’s move to mainland Europe, his music began to receive much wider recognition. The Gaudeamus Composers’ Competition in Holland awarded him prizes in three successive years (1968-70) for his Sonatas for String Quartet, Epicycle, and Missa Brevis, respectively. The Italian section of the ISCM at its 1972 competition gave Ferneyhough an honorable mention (second place) for Firecycle Beta and two years later a special prize for Time and Motion Study III, which was considered the best work submitted in all categories. Ferneyhough has taught composition at the Musikhochschule in Freiburg, the Civica Scuola di Musica, Milan, the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague, and the University of California, San Diego. In January 2000 Ferneyhough joined the faculty at Stanford University and was named William H. Bonsall Professor in Music there shortly afterwards. Students from all over the world have benefited from his classes at, among others, the biennial Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt and the Fondation Royaumont near Paris. Ferneyhough’s music has been performed throughout the world and has been featured at all the major European festivals of contemporary music. His first opera, Shadowtime, was premiered in May 2004 at the Munich Biennale to great acclaim. Based on the life and work of Walter Benjamin, Shadowtime explores some of the major themes of Benjamin’s work, including the nature of language, the possibilities for a tranformational leftist politics, and the role of materiality in art. A CD of Shadowtime was released by NMC records in 2006. Recent work has included a Fifth String Quartet, written for the Arditti String Quartet and premiered in Witten in 2005, and a new orchestral piece, Plötzlichkeit, which was premiered at the Donaueschingen music festival in October 2006.