Charles B. Griffin
The Quintet of the Americas will perform my Three Miniatures for Wind Quintet, which was inspired by the poetry of Juan Ramon Jiménez on:
Sunday, May 15, 2011 at 3:00 PM
Princeton Public Library
Admission FREE
See the Princeton Library magazine article here.
Pre-concert talk with Judah Adashi.
Judah Adashi: Songs and Dances of Macondo based on Gabriel Garcia Marques’ One Hundred Years of Solitude
“Freeing the Caged Bird” (2006) by Barbara Harbach
Community Room, 1st floor, 65 Witherspoon St., Princeton, NJ 08542 Phone: 609.924.9529
All Quintet concerts are ADA accessible
My Weaving Olden Dances: Concerto for Chamber Orchestra will be given its North Carolina Premiere performance by the Western Piedmont Symphony, John Gordon Ross, Music Director and Conductor, on Saturday, April 9 – 8 PM at P.E. Monroe Auditorium on the campus of Lenoir-Rhyne University, 625 7th Avenue NE in Hickory, North Carolina. Other works on this Masterworks V program will be Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35, with soloist Stefani Collins and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade.
Weaving Olden Dances was commissioned by a consortium consisting of the Westchester Chamber Orchestra (NY), Barry Charles Hoffman, Director, Western Piedmont Symphony (NC), John Gordon Ross, Director, San José Chamber Orchestra (CA), Barbara Day Turner, Director and Appalachian State University Orchestra (NC), James Allen Anderson, Director. The four-movement version was premiered in May 2008 by Barry Hoffman and the Westchester Chamber Orchestra at Iona College in New Rochelle, NY. Much more about the piece, including sample pages of the score, at http://charlesgriffin.net/archives/204.
Tickets for the April 9 concert are $15, $30 and $40, and can be ordered online here. For more information, call the Symphony 828-324-8603.
Pianist and staunch new music advocate Teresa McCollough will include the finale from my Vernacular Dances on her “Music for Hammers and Sticks II” concert at Santa Clara University’s Center of Performing Arts in Santa Clara, California on Saturday, February 5, 2011 at 8PM.
Teresa recorded the entire work for her Innova CD New American Piano Music in 2001 (see Discography) and gave the California premiere of the piece at Santa Clara University in 2000.
For this concert, Teresa is joined by Luanne Warner Katz and Chris Froh, percussion. Other composers included on this concert include Belinda Reynolds, Christos Hatzis, Steve Reich, John Psathas & Thierry de Mey.
I composed Weaving Olden Dances in 2007 as a finale piece for a small concert tour I did in Latvia with my own ensemble. Originally scored for clarinet, string quartet, piano 4-hands and bodhrán, I later orchestrated the piece as part of a multi-movement Concerto for Chamber Orchestra. At the request of Charlotte Chamber Music I tweaked the instrumentation of the chamber version once more, and they will premiere this new version on February 1st.
From CCM’s website:
The clarinet takes center stage as the Blue Ridge Chamber Players and clarinetist John Sadak perform 20th century works including Prokofieff’s beloved Overture on Hebrew Themes and Alan Shulman’s Rendezvous, written for the King of Swing, Benny Goodman. The program concludes with American composer Charles Griffin’s homage to Irish and Appalachian folk music, Weaving Olden Dances, in a new arrangement commissioned by Charlotte Chamber Music.
Prokofieff: Overture on Hebrew Themes
Alan Shulman: Rendezvous
Gerald Finzi: Five Bagatelles
Charles Griffin: Weaving Olden DancesMusicians – Blue Ridge Chamber Players: John Sadak, clarinet; Peter deVries and Tatiana Karpova, violins; Martha Geissler, viola; Nick Lampo, cello; Emily Urbanek, piano
First Presbyterian Church, 200 West Trade Street, Charlotte, North Carolina. 12:10 p.m. & 5:30 p.m.
Free. 704/335-0009
The Colorado State University Percussion Ensemble, directed by Eric Hollenbeck, accepted an invitation to perform at the 2010 Percussive Arts Society International Convention (PASIC) in Indianapolis, IN. A performance at PASIC is the highest award a collegiate percussion ensemble can achieve; CSU is slotted for the new music literature session which offers the longest playing time, and is the most attended concert at the conference with 1000 patrons expected.
To mark the event, CSU commissioned a new piece from me, scored for trumpet and percussion quartet, called Rub-a-dub-dub-DUB. The title references Dub, a sub-genre of (mostly) electronic music originally derived from Reggae. I spent a large portion of the piece exploring reggae rhythms and motives, but I also attempted to emulate with acoustic instruments some of the digital delay effects so common to Dub as a style.
They gave a preview concert on Sunday, November 7, 2010 at 3:00 PM at CSU’s Griffin Concert Hall, University Center for the Arts, in Fort Collins, Colorado. The PASIC performance will take place on Thursday, November 11 at 4:00 PM. PASIC’s New Percussion Literature Session is sponsored by Pearl and Innovative Percussion.
Following on the success of her Juan Rulfo project, pianist Ana Cervantes has put together another multi-composer themed commissioning project entitled Song of the Monarch: Women in Mexico. Nearly 20 composers from around the world were commissioned to respond to the theme, which conflates the varied historical roles played by women in Mexican history and the annual autumn migration of Monarch butterflies into Mexico. This new collection of solo piano music includes my …Like Water Dashed From Flowers…, a piece that borrows elements from the folkloric song La Zandunga and Nahuatl poetry. The piece is somewhat demanding and includes aspects of ritual and song, where the pianist is asked at times to recite text, sing, play a rattle, stomp her foot (wearing ankle bells), or utilize other extended techniques, often while playing the piano at the same time.
This concert will take place on Thursday, October 28th at 8 PM in Jonsson Performance Hall on the campus of the University of Texas at Dallas. The concert is co-sponsored by the UT Dallas Center for Translation Studies. The remaining nine pieces are by noted composers: Carlos Cruz de Castro (Spain), Jack Fortner (U.S.A.), Tomás Marco(Spain), Alba Potes (Colombia), Marcela Rodríguez (Mexico), Paul Barker (United Kingdom), Pilar Jurado (Spain) and Silvia Berg (Brazil).
Following on the success of her Juan Rulfo project, pianist Ana Cervantes has put together another multi-composer themed commissioning project entitled Song of the Monarch: Women in Mexico. Nearly 20 composers from around the world were commissioned to respond to the theme, which conflates the varied historical roles played by women in Mexican history and the annual autumn migration of Monarch butterflies into Mexico. This new collection of solo piano music includes my …Like Water Dashed From Flowers…, a piece that borrows elements from the folkloric song La Zandunga and Nahuatl poetry. The piece is somewhat demanding and includes aspects of ritual and song, where the pianist is asked at times to recite text, sing, play a rattle, stomp her foot (wearing ankle bells), or utilize other extended techniques, often while playing the piano at the same time.
The world premiere of ten works from Monarch will take place on 19 October in the Festival Internacional Cervantino, at 12:00 noon in the Salón del Consejo Universitario. The remaining nine pieces are by noted composers: Carlos Cruz de Castro (Spain), Jack Fortner (U.S.A.), Tomás Marco(Spain), Alba Potes (Colombia), Marcela Rodríguez (Mexico), Paul Barker (United Kingdom), Pilar Jurado (Spain) and Silvia Berg (Brazil).
I had to check out from making any posts here for a while, but for good reason. With about 4 weeks lead time, about 6 weeks ago I left Latvia to begin a new teaching position at Full Sail University, a school focussed primarily on digital media arts just outside Orlando, Florida. I’m the Course Director for Music Composition, a newly created position within the MPBS (Bachelor of Science in Music Production) program, itself a newly launched program within Full Sail’s online division. I had to pretty much hit the ground running, but after a month’s time to adapt, I can honestly say I’m having fun teaching again. In the meantime I’ve been trying to furnish my apartment (Overstock, Target, Office Depot, Ikea, Craig’s List… I’ve assembled more home furnishings in this month than my entire life) in anticipation of my family’s arrival from Latvia (Saturday!). Can’t say I’ve experienced much reverse culture-shock, though coming back to American grocery stores was a little strange. Too many choices, not to mention that in Latvia I didn’t have to deal with the notion that a chicken that was not also somehow a cannibal during its short life is here treated as a selling point worthy of an explosion-shaped sticker and a loud font. On the flip side, I’ll never miss Latvia’s the-customer-is-always-wrong mentality. Walking into a Target with a receipt and an item to return with the confidence of knowing there will be no argument is a blessing worth a moment of reflection by us all. Finding the time for creative work has been a bigger challenge at the moment, as I try and squeak in work on a commission from the Colorado State University Percussion Ensemble, also roughly due next week. Gulp. Getting there.
In case anyone experiences a similar unhappy morning coffee surprise:
I just upgraded my WordPress to version 3.0. I used Automatic Upgrade, and, as one should, I deactivated all plugins before enacting the upgrade. The upgrade was successful, and then I started reactivating the plugins. After activating WP Super Cache, I found myself with a blank Dashboard/Admin screen, something I haven’t experienced before. But at least I was confident about the culprit.
The solution: go into your FTP program and open up the wp-config.php file in the first WordPress folder with a text editor. Then “comment out” the line that defines WP Super Cache.
If you don’t know what that means, about 10 lines into the file’s code, you should find something that looks like this:
define(‘WP_CACHE’, true); //added by yourname on somedate
change it to this (add two hashmarks to the beginning of the line):
//define(‘WP_CACHE’, true); //added by yourname on somedate
and then save the file. That should restore your dashboard.
San Francisco Choral Artists are marking their 25th anniversary season with three concerts, featuring 25 works by 25 composers, directed by Magen Solomon. The program includes my Rekviem, a setting in Russian of a short but beautiful and moving text by Anna Akhmatova.
You can read Ken Bullock’s preview of the program in San Francisco Classical Voice, which describes my piece as “a beautiful requiem — dark, almost threatening.”
SAN FRANCISCO Sunday, June 13, 2010; 4 PM, St. Mark’s Lutheran, 1111 O’Farrell Street, San Francisco
PALO ALTO Saturday, June 19, 2010; 8 PM, St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 600 Colorado Avenue, Palo Alto
OAKLAND Sunday, June 20, 2010; 4 PM, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 114 Montecito Avenue, Oakland
Instant Audio
Most pieces can be auditioned on their post pages. But you can sample some audio here.Quick Bio
Charles Griffin recently returned to the U.S. after spending 5 years living and working in Latvia. His compositions and arrangements have been performed at festivals and concert halls throughout the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, Asia, Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Recent projects include commissions from pianist Ana Cervantes and the Colorado State University Percussion Ensemble.
Read more in the biography section.
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