NOCCA Classical Instrumental Alum Nominated For International Composer Award
NOCCA congratulates Classical Instrumental Alum Christopher Trapani for his recent recognition by the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors for his work Visions and Revisions in the category of International Award in their annual celebration of the art of contemporary music composition. Competitors for the prize include acclaimed artists Elliott Carter and Kaija Saariaho.
The British Composer Awards celebrate the music of today’s composers living and working in the United Kingdom and also United Kingdom premieres of work by composers from outside the United Kingdom. The 12th annual British Composer Awards will take place at Goldsmiths’ Hall, London on Tuesday 2 December 2014.
About Christopher Trapani
http://www.christophertrapani.com/
Christopher Trapani was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1980. Christopher first studied composition under Dr. Stephen Dankner at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, where he was awarded a Certificate of Artistry in 1998 as the school’s first graduate to specialize in composition. He holds a Bachelor’s degree from Harvard, where he studied composition with Bernard Rands and poetry under Helen Vendler.
He spent most of his twenties overseas: a year in London, working on a Master’s degree at the Royal College of Music with Julian Anderson; a year in Istanbul, studying microtonality in Ottoman music on a Fulbright grant; and seven years in Paris, where he studied with Philippe Leroux and worked at IRCAM, both on the composition cursus and later on a musical research residency.
Christopher is currently based in New York City, where he is working on a doctorate at Columbia University, studying with Tristan Murail, Georg Friedrich Haas, Fred Lerdahl, and George Lewis. His compositions have been performed in Carnegie Hall and London’s Royal Festival Hall, and he has received prizes from BMI and ASCAP, as well as the 2007 Gaudeamus Prize in Amsterdam, the first American in over 30 years to win the young composers’ award.
About The Work
Visions and Revisions is a piece about circular thinking, a recurring focus bordering on the obsessive. Memory, rather than offering signposts for development, plays an intrusive role, as if the music is always trying to move elsewhere but gets continually stuck, distracted by involuntary slips into the past…
The template is Bob Dylan’s 1965 song ‘Visions of Johanna’. Five verses, five variations. Each pushes further into the new harmonic territory, but is always dragged back to three basic chords and their just intonation extensions. Gestures inspired by what Dylan later called ‘that thin, that wild mercury sound’ surface throughout: plucked guitars, expressive vocal slides, harmonica swells and bends…Just as Dylan’s fifth verse spills over the established form (you can hear the Nashville session musicians scrambling to follow him on Blonde on Blonde), the fifth variation breaks through the frame, as loops and cycles pile up and recollections calcify, then crumble… Christopher Trapani
Commissioned by Wigmore Hall with the support of Andre Hoffmann, it received its UK premiere performance on 23 January 2014, at Wigmore Hall, London. Performed by the JACK Quartet.