FARMINGTON – The University of Maine at Farmington Faculty Ensemble, a newly-formed network of artists and performers gathered from members of the UMF faculty and the greater Western Maine creative community, will be joining with two leading international composers of avant-garde music in a series of collaborative performance workshops and concerts to be held at Harvard University and UMF.
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As part of a rare U.S. visit as composers-in-residence at Harvard University, Romanian composers Iancu Dumitrescu and Anna-Maria Avram invited the UMF Faculty Ensemble to perform with them in a private workshop and a public concert, last weekend on the Harvard campus.
In return, Dumitrescu and Avram will be coming to the UMF campus to work with the Farmington Faculty Ensemble and students of the UMF Department of Sound, Performance and Visual Inquiry in a series of exploratory workshops and events from Oct. 14-18.
Dumitrescu and Avram’s UMF residency will culminate with a free and open-to-the-public concert of the composers’ works, sponsored by the UMF Department of Sound, Performance and Visual Inquiry, at 7:30 p.m., Oct. 16, at Nordica Auditorium, UMF Merrill Hall.
According to Gustavo Aguilar, UMF’s new assistant professor of experimental performance, Dumitrescu and Avram are considered by many to be among the most important Romanian composers of our time. “This is a unique opportunity for UMF students and faculty to learn and contribute at the forefront of today’s experimental music scene,” said Aguilar. “We are so excited to be able to connect professional musicians of international stature with our students and music appreciators in Maine.”
Aguilar, a percussionist, composer and improviser, has worked closely with some of the most innovative composers of our time for well over a decade and has performed at major festivals throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia and the Pacific.
For this series of events, the UMF Faculty Ensemble will include: Steven Pane, UMF professor of music on piano; Philip Carlsen, UMF professor of music on cello; Gustavo Aguilar, UMF assistant professor of experimental performance on percussion and Yuri Funahashi, Colby college assistant professor of music on piano.
Dumitrescu studied conducting and philosophy with Sergiu Celibidache. It was under Celibidache that he began his engagement with the philosophy of Edmund Husserl and the effort to apply the principles of phenomenology to music. He began composing his mature works in the early 1970s, and in 1976 he founded the Hyperion Ensemble, a group dedicated to experimental music. Dumitrescu has composed a large body of works for acoustic instruments and ensembles as well as works combining acoustic and electronic sounds and works composed entirely for tape or computer. In their emphasis on long tones that undergo transformations of timbre, his compositions are based on ultra-spectral and acousmatic forms with a phenomenological point of view, in which sound is subject to analysis and dissociation. He received his master’s degree in composition in Bucharest, with Alfred Mendelssohn among his teachers.
A composer, pianist and conductor, Avram has maintained a close collaboration with Dumitrescu since 1988, while also continuing to forge her own direction in music. Along with Dumitrescu, she represents the hyper-spectral trend in contemporary avant-garde music. She is co-conductor of the Hyperion Ensemble, along with Dumitrescu. After graduating from The National Conservatory of Music in Bucharest, she obtained a degree from Paris-Sorbonne University in 1992. In 1994 she was awarded the Grand Prize in Composition from the Romanian Academy.
