The University of New Mexico music department will host the 47th Annual John Donald Robb Composers’ Symposium from March 23 to 29.
The symposium brings distinguished composers from around the world to campus. This year it is hosting a larger-than-usual number of composers, including Betsy Jolas, Cort Lippe, Hilda Paredes, Augusta Read Thomas, Hans Tutschku and Hildegard Westerkamp. To get an idea of the individual voices of these composers the Symposium has put together a YouTube playlist.
Featured alongside the guest composers will be UNM faculty and student works and performances. The student composers featured include Scott Wilkinson Student Composer award recipient Annie Merrill and colleagues Patrick DeBonis, Steven Diaz, Gabriel Gonzales and Nephele Jackson, all studying composition and theory at UNM.
Co-artistic directors Peter Gilbert and Karola Obermüller have been organizing this substantial symposium annually since 2013, after assisting former director Chris Shultis for two years prior.
Student performers and faculty will work with the German-based guest ensemble E-MEX, hosted by the symposium. Providing exposure and opportunity to students is one of the main focuses of the symposium, Gilbert said.
The symposium “gets a lot of the department focused on more recent music, and we bring in players from outside who are specialists in doing this and then we can get a sort of concentrated dose of what music has been up to in the past 50 years,”Gilbert said.
This year’s symposium is loosely themed around environments.
“This theme, ‘environments,’ we thought would be more encompassing. There are a few pieces that deal exclusively with the environment as in activism. Then there are some composers who have focused their output on art and ecology, specifically Hildegard Westercamp. Her compositions are all about that sense that you can hear climate change happening,” Obermüller said.
Originally from Canada, Westercamp will be giving the first composer lecture of the conference Monday morning followed by a soundwalk. Westercamp was one of the first composers to coin the idea of a soundwalk and describes it as a journey into our everyday world with a focus on sound.
The first event of the symposium also focuses on the environment, featuring a music installation in the UNM Art Museum as part of the C19 literary conference. This event is affiliated with the English department, covering scholarship from the 19th century about climate and comparing it to modern writing. The reception will feature the UNM Art Museum exhibit, “Meridel Rubenstein, Eden Turned on Its Side” with a live Moog synthesizer demonstration and electronic works inspired by water.
Both guest composers Cort Lippe from the U.S. and Hans Tutschku from Germany focus on interactive electronic music.
Tutschku will give a talk at the ARTSLab Monday evening and Lippe on Thursday morning on campus. Both Lippe and Tutschku have taught and participated in various new and electronic music programs like the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique Musique in France.
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“Most of the music that our average fellow citizen is used to listening to is very electronic-sounding and very produced, whereas classical music is really not. It is a much more acoustically pure sound, so I think for some people that they may find that a new music concert is a more readily available experience than a classical music concert might be,” Gilbert said.
Guest composers Betsy Jolas from France and Augusta Read Thomas from the U.S. are not only experienced, but they also well-known for new instrumental music.
Although not as well-known, Paredes is a Mexican composer living in London, writing complex instrumental works as well.
Composition students will have the opportunity to have a lesson with Thomas and interact with Jolas and Paredes in master classes and rehearsals.
Obermüller describes the impact of the symposium as “kind of intimidating and exciting and life-changing in some cases. It is a meeting of different people and all of these are really distinguished artists.”
With these varied compositional voices and styles, the symposium hopes to engage both the community and students in a wide range of musical thought. The symposium interacts with the Albuquerque community through educational programs like the UNM Children’s Chorus and local venues like Outpost.
“You come here as someone who just lives in town, you will surely hear something fascinating, interesting, confusing, controversial, unsettling, maybe you will fall in love with something you see or hear. But it is certainly something, unless you are really inside the new music scene already, you probably have never heard things like the pieces that we present here, and met composers like we bring. It is a really small niche and we are bringing them all together,” Obermüller said.
Composition student Nina Bursch has been to a two of the previous symposiums before and said, “We always get to learn a lot about each composer and their background and how they started composing.”
Annie Merrill described her previous experiences as incredible.
“There (are) just a lot of very interesting things to hear, to learn, to see. It’s a lot of information and just so much you can gain from it, just thoughts, opinions and just new perspectives,” she said.
Robb Trust Graduate Assistant Steven Diaz said, “It is a great place to meet and exchange ideas with living composers, as well as gain exposure and insight into the minds of contemporary composers and musicians from all over the world”
The symposium is an international event in Albuquerque, and many visiting composers and events are not mentioned here. There are master classes, lectures, readings and workshops, as well as a panel discussion with the Female Voices in Music Composition class directed by Ana Alonso-Minutti, Ph.D.
“There is always finding people who will be useful to the students in that they are fantastic teachers, inspiring for master classes,” Obermüller said. “They have great connections if someone wants to study with them in the future. There is also the international aspect; I always try to at least a little bit have someone from the U.S. but also elsewhere, not always the same country, although Germany has turned up a lot. Since (Gilbert and I) took over (the symposium), we are paying more attention to diversity. We don’t want to just do only white men. That is part of it, getting used to the unusual. Choosing who comes is a complex thing, and of course who came last year we don’t want to repeat this year. Next year we still want to do something different. It is a big puzzle.”
The next John Donald Robb Symposium will be a larger event, as UNM will be hosting the Society of Composers, Inc. National Conference. This entails more attending guest composers, more concerts and more student works.
“A thing like this (symposium) can provide a strong outlet, a strong support and indicate to the public that this stuff does have meaning. It’s communicating and saying, ‘Hey, this is worthwhile.’ We want you to know all about this stuff,” she said.
All symposium daytime talks, workshops, lecture concerts, master classes, panels and receptions are free and open to the public. Most of the concerts are also free. Anyone interested in learning more can visit robbtrust.org.
Aubrie Powell is a culture reporter at the Daily Lobo. She can be contacted at culture@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @AubrieMPowell.
