Byron Adams (b.1955) earned a Bachelor of Music Degree, magna cum laude, from Jacksonville University, studying piano with Mary Lou Wesley Krosnick and composition with Gurney Kennedy. He received a Master of Music degree from the University of Southern California, where his principal composition teacher was Morten Lauridsen. He was awarded his doctoral degree from Cornell University, studying composition with Karel Husa and musicology with William W. Austin. Adams has had performances of his music in Europe, such as at the 26th “Warsaw Autumn” International Festival of Contemporary Music, the Leith Hill Festival in England, the Conservatoire Americain in Fontainebleau, France, and the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra. A recipient of numerous awards and grants, Adams’ music has been performed in America by such institutions as The West Virginia Symphony, the Syracuse Symphony, Cantori New York, Chamber Music Palisades, Pacific Serenades, the new music ensemble Xtet, and at the Colburn School String Orchestra. His principal publishers are Editions BIM, Earthsongs, E.C. Schirmer, and Yelton Rhodes.
Byron Adams’s scholarly work was recognized in 1985 when he was awarded the first Ralph Vaughan Williams Research Fellowship. He has published widely on the subject of English music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, speaking on this topic over the BBC and at three National Meetings of the American Musicological Society. He is co-editor of Vaughan Williams Essays, and has contributed four entries to the revised edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. In 2000, the American Musicological Society bestowed the Philip Brett Award on Adams for his work on British music. He was recently named scholar-in-residence for the 2007 Bard Music Festival, “Elgar and His World.”
Adams is Professor of Composition and Musicology in the Music Department of the University of California, Riverside.
Peter Aldins received a Diploma of Music in Composition from the Longy School of Music in 1980, a Masters Degree from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1983 and he pursued doctoral studies in composition at Boston University from 1985−88. His composition teachers include Leonardo Balada, Joyce Mekeel and Bernard Rands. Mr. Aldins served as past President of Underground Composers from 1992−94 and Composer-in-Residence at the Latvian State Conservatory in the fall of 1989.
He is currently Choral Conductor and Organist at the Latvian Lutheran Church in Brookline, Massachusetts and is on the Composition and Theory faculty at the Longy School of Music, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Robert Applebaum (b. 1941) has written show music featured in professional productions of Six Ages of Man and Hands Around in Love, revues that played nightly in Chicago for more than a year. During the 1970’s and 80’s, he continued to compose songs and incidental music for theatrical productions that took place at Loyola University and the Piven Theatre Workshop in Evanston, Illinois.
In 1980, Applebaum began to write Jewish liturgical music for use in services. Besides creating new settings of prayers, psalms, and other Jewish texts, he has written choral arrangements of many non-liturgical Hebrew and Yiddish songs.
Applebaum’s music has been performed in services at synagogues in the Midwestern United States and in concerts by a variety of vocal ensembles including the Halevi Chorale Society, the University Singers at the University of Missouri (Kansas City), the Chicago Children’s Choir (who sang Applebaum’s setting of V’ahavta at the 2000 White House holiday concerts), Kol Zimrah, the Institute of Music Chorale (Evanston, Illinois), the Rogers Park Children’s Choir (Illinois), Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation Choir (Evanston, Illinois), the Coriolis Ensemble (Evanston, Illinois), SHE (New York City) and Chicago a cappella, who included two of his Chanukah songs on their 2002 CD.
He has been playing piano professionally since 1957. Applebaum is heard on the Maxwell Street Klezmer Band recordings (1992, 1996). He plays his own modern jazz arrangements of Jewish songs on Hora and Blue (1993) with the Modern Klezmer Quartet. The composer and his son, Mark, perform as a jazz piano duo. A CD of their performances, The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far From the Tree, was released in 2002 on the Innova label.
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Giancarlo Aquilanti was born in Jesi, a small town in central Italy where he took his first musical steps. He studied at the Conservatory of Music in Pesaro, Italy, where he received diplomas in Trumpet Performance, Choral Music, and Composition. In 1985, he moved to the United States, where he studied with Glenn Glasow at California State University, Hayward, receiving a Master’s degree in Composition cum laude in 1988. He continued his studies in composition at Stanford University, completing a Doctoral degree in Composition in 1996.
This was a very productive period in his life, which saw the composition of his first opera, Lot’s Woman, and which was premiered under his direction at Stanford University in 1996. At Stanford he started his teaching career in music theory, composition and conducting; a highlight of his teaching career came in 2004, when he was awarded the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching—Stanford University’s highest teaching honor. He is currently director of the Music Theory Program at Stanford University. His responsibilities include directing the undergraduate theory program, developing the curriculum, and training and supervising the graduate teaching assistants. Besides teaching of harmony, theory, and counterpoint, he pursued rigorous studies in modern composition, and worked on computer based technology applied to music and acoustics.
In his music one can hear the profound inspiration of the Italian operatic tradition born of early cultural experiences. Nevertheless, his compositions are much influenced by his American education, revealing a unique and exotic combination of popular melodies of his native region, jazz rhythms and classical traditions. He is a prolific composer and has written compositions for all kinds of combinations of instruments: orchestral, choral and band pieces, three string quartets, concertos and sonatas for cello, violin, flute, clarinet, tuba, woodwind quintets, piano trios, piano quartets and quintets. He has also written commissioned works for the Philharmonic Symphony of the Marche (Introitus); the Stanford Chamber Chorale (Magnificat); the Elfenworks Foundation (La Povertà); the Stanford University Woodwind Quintet, and for The University of California, Berkeley Wind Ensemble (Berkeley Pictures).
He is currently working on several musical projects among which a new CD in collaboration with Paolo Ugoletti and Domenico Clapasson. The musical pieces of this new recording are based on Gianni Rodari’s literary texts – nursery rhymes and poems – conceived and written for a young public. But the heart of his current efforts converges in the composition of a new opera entitled Oxford Companions to a libretto by D.S. Neil Van Leeuwen. The libretto brings back to memory a tragic chapter in European history—World War II and the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany.
Giancarlo Aquilanti is professionally active as a conductor, composer and educator. He is often called to direct concerts outside the academic arena, to give lectures explaining the theory and development of his compositions, and to hold workshops for American Bands and Wind Ensembles. His music has been performed in many European cities, as well as in the United States. He is also in demand both as a pianist and as a conductor, and has performed in international tours in China, Italy, Germany, Hungary, New Zealand, Australia, Spain, Portugal and Morocco with the Stanford Symphony Orchestra and with the Stanford Wind Ensemble, which he has directed since 1996.
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Dr. Ronald Arnatt (b. 1930) has had an exceptional professional career spanning both sides of the Atlantic. After receiving his music education at Trinity College, London, and Durham University in England, he emigrated to the United States.
In the United States, Dr. Arnatt has held professorial or Director of Music positions at Trinity Church in Boston, Westminster Choir College in Princeton, American University, Christ Church Cathedral in St. Louis, the University of Missouri, and with the St. Louis Chamber Orchestra and Chorus.
He is known internationally for his choral, organ, and brass compositions. Dr. Arnatt is past President of the American Guild of Organists. He is currently Director of Music and Organist at St. John’s Church in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts.
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