ECCE/L'arsenale Call for Scores (Boston)
Northeastern University presents Ensemble L'arsenale, a chamber music ensemble from Treviso, Italy, and the East Coast Contemporary Ensemble (ECCE), a Massachusetts-based chamber music ensemble, in a concert featuring music by contemporary composers. The program includes What the Wave Meant (2007) by Nicolas Tzortzis, and Self, Analyzed (2010) by Travis Alford (both winners of the ECCE/Aresenale 2011 call for scores) as well as music by Lorenzo Tomio and Filippo Perocco.
Founded in Treviso by young musicians and composers under the artistic/musical direction of Filippo Perocco, L'arsenale aims to bridge the divide between writing music and making music, between conceiving a sound and the gesture needed to produce that sound, between the lifetime of a sound and the space it lives and dies in. A special feature of the group is its flexibility, easily changing personnel in its keenly attentive explorations of the new work coming from young composers in the vast field of contemporary music.
ECCE (www.eccensemble.com) was founded in 2005 with the mission of supporting the creation and performance of contemporary music through concerts, symposia, and outreach events. ECCE’s goal is to help revitalize the connection between contemporary music and diverse communities, and to promote new forms of engagement with modern music.
Since its creation, ECCE has committed itself to the most adventuresome programming with special emphasis on contemporary European repertoire not often heard in the states. ECCE performers have worked closely with composers such as Fabien Levy, Louis Karchin, Helmut Lachenmann, George Tsontakis, and David Rakowski in realizing powerful interpretations of their music.
L’arsenale will perform with Ecce pieces selected from our call for scores:
Travis Alford – Self, Analyzed (2010)
Nicolas Tzortzis – What the Wave Meant (2007)
Travis Alford (b. 1983) is a composer, trumpet player, and improviser in the Boston area. Growing up in Spring Hope, NC, he began playing the trumpet at the age of 11 in school concert and jazz bands, community groups, and in church. In college he discovered he was much better at composing than playing the trumpet (though he still tries). His compositions have been performed at venues across the United States and beyond including the June in Buffalo Festival, Symphony Space in NY, the Composers Conference at Wellesley College, the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice, the International Trumpet Seminar in Kalavrita, Greece, the NewMusic@ECU Festival, Jordan Hall in Boston, Slosberg Hall at Brandeis University, and Taplin Auditorium at Princeton, by groups such as the Meridian Arts Ensemble, the Lydian String Quartet, Benjamin Herrington’s “Little/ Big Project”, the New York Virtuoso Singers, Second Instrumental Unit, and members of the New York New Music Ensemble. He was recently awarded a 2010 ASCAP Young Composers Award for his work, Breathing Room.
As a performer, Travis remains active as a freelance musician and is committed to the promotion of new music, playing regularly for concerts and premieres of his colleagues. He is co-founder and Artistic Director of the experimental & collaborative COMPROVISED Music Series (Boston & NY), and is director of the Park Street Brass, based at Park Street Church in Boston.
Travis is currently Adjunct Instructor Gordon College and an Affiliated artist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds degrees in theory and composition from the New England Conservatory and East Carolina University, and is currently an Irving Fine Doctoral Fellow at Brandeis University. He has studied composition with Eric Chasalow, David Rakowski, Lee Hyla, Edward Jacobs, Mark Richardson, and Melinda Wagner. He has studied trumpet formally with Britton Theurer, and informally with Brian McWhorter and Jon Nelson. He has also studied Contemporary Improvisation with Tanya Kalmanovitch.
Travis resides in West Newton, MA with his lovely wife, Lauren and their dog, Toby.
Born in Athens, Greece in May 1978, Nicolas Tzortzis has been living in Paris, France, since 2002. He studied instrumental and electronic composition with Philippe Leroux at the CRD de Blanc Mesnil, musical theatre composition with Georges Aperghis at the Hochschule der Kunste in Bern, Switzerland and Computer Aided Composition at the University of Paris 8 under the direction of Horacio Vaggione and José Manuel Lopez-Lopez. In 2009-2010 he attended the CURSUS 1 of composition and computer music at the IRCAM and he has been selected to do the CURSUS 2 for the years 2010-2012.
He has taken part in master classes with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Brian Ferneyhough, Beat Furrer and François Paris, as well as computer music seminars at the IRCAM. In 2010, he was selected for the 6th New Composers Forum of the Ensemble Aleph.
His music has been performed in France, Greece, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Great Britain, the Netherlands, the USA, Canada, Argentina, Peru, South Korea and Australia, and has been selected and awarded in competitions worldwide (USA, South Korea, Germany, France, Austria, Greece, Italy, Great Britain, Argentina).
Immediate future projects include a commission by the French Government for the Ensemble Proxima Centauri, a new piece for voice and large ensemble, commissioned by the Italian Ensemble Divertimento and a large-scale work for silent piano and live electronics for the IRCAM.
Furthermore, his work “Desaxé”, for ten musicians, will receive its US premier in May 2011, during the upcoming MATA festival.
