Featuring some of New York’s finest brass players, the group is the first to hold the position at the College. New York Chamber Brass was formed in 2009 by New York based trumpeter Graham Ashton, Chair of Brass at the Conservatory of Music. “New York is one of the most eclectic and cosmopolitan cities in the world,” said Ashton “the idea was to create a dynamic, modern ensemble that would reflect that energy and edginess with the best players the city had to offer.  We promise unparalleled, virtuosic performances featuring the finest of original, contemporary music for brass.”

Ashton, who trained at the Royal Academy in London, has had a long and impressive international career as a performer and educator. He joined the faculty of Purchase College in 1999 to host the International Trumpet Guild’s 25th  Anniversary Conference.  Ashton has appeared as a soloist with such notables as the BBC Symphony, London Philharmonic, English Chamber Orchestra, New York Virtuosi, and Australian Chamber Orchestra.

The members of the New York Chamber Brass are Graham Ashton and Rich Clymer (trumpets), Peter Reit (horn), Timothy Albright (trombone) and Kyle Turner (tuba) who are all on the faculty of Purchase College.  “How exciting for our students and the public to enjoy this marvelous new music,” said Thomas J. Schwarz, President of Purchase College.  “Through this residency, these distinguished musicians will bring a new dynamic to the cultural scene at Purchase, with new sounds for a generation eager to embrace contemporary brass chamber music.”

The group’s repertoire is compellingly diverse, encompassing all the significant quintets specifically written for brass from the 1950’s to the present day, from the lyrical quintets of Malcolm Arnold, Charles Collier Jones and Michel Leclerc, to the more complex and virtuosic works of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Luciano Berio and Alvin Etier.  The ensemble currently has over 30 works in their repertoire.

“Where else can you hear music-making at this level for free,” said Dr. Robert Thompson Interim Director of the Conservatory of Music.  “This is an awesome opportunity for students, and for the wider community, to join us on campus to really enjoy, and appreciate, the talents and expertise of our faculty.”

Integral to their performance schedule is an education program sponsored in part by Rayburn Music and based at Purchase College. Each season hundreds of students from New York State, New Jersey and Connecticut will hear the New York Chamber Brass in seminars, workshops, and concerts.  The education program is closely linked to a weekly Brass Chamber Music Seminar at Purchase which is open to all students and the public from surrounding communities.  Admission is free.

Seminars for the fall of 2009 will take place in the Recital Hall of the Purchase College Conservatory of Music at 2:30 PM. Dates are: Sept. 14, 21  Oct. 5, 12, 19, 26. Admission is free. For details call 914-251-6987 or go to www.newyorkchamberbrass.com

In addition to Purchase, the group will give regular performances at the Neuberger Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, LaGuardia High School for the Arts, Merkin Hall, and the National Cathedral, Washington, DC.  International tours include performances at the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts in China from October 31-November 8 2009, and UK, France and South America in 2010/11.

In April of 2010, they will give the New York premiere at Manhattan’s Merkin Hall of the Brass Quintet by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Master of the Queen’s Music in UK".

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Profs. Suzanne Farrin and Ted Pilzecker (Chairs of Composition & Studio Composition at Purchase College, State University of New York) have appointed Brian Lawler and Andrey Ankudinov to the inaugural NYCB Composers-in-Residence program. Mr. Lawler is a student of Prof. Du Yun. Mr. Ankudinov is a student of Prof. Joel Thome. 

About the composers:

Andrey Ankudinov was born in 1980 in Ukraine and raised in Moscow, Russia. He started his musical education at the age of 9 as classical guitarist. In his teenage years he became interested in jazz and started learning jazz piano and composition with Alexander Lavrov.  Mr. Ankudinov later studied harmony and classical composition privately with Alexander Atarov, a Moscow-based composer. In 2004 he graduated from All-Russian Institute of Cinematography as a film sound major, focusing on semantics and information theory studies with Professor Roland Kazarjan, and classical phonography with Igor Veprintsev. In 2007 Mr. Ankudinov was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to pursue a Master of Music degree in Composition at Purchase College, State University of New York.

Mr. Ankudinov is currently working on his musical show "Love: Triptych", which incorporates tonal jazz, contemporary dance and contemporary academic elements, engaging some top jazz players like Jean Caze (Herbie Hancock) and Mike Pope (Chick Corea Elektrik Band), as well as prominent classical performers like Emily Thomas, Alexey Gorokholinsky and Tina Guo.

Mr. Ankudinov is interested in exploring resources of chromatic tonality of early 20th century Russian music - Shostakovitch, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, as well as developing his own concept of contemporary academic music as a transcendence beyond human reality.

Brian Lawlor is a composer and pianist exhibiting a myriad of musical styles.  He holds a BM in Composition from Cornish College of the Arts, where he studied with Janice Giteck, Amy Rubin, and Robin Holcomb.  Mr. Lawlor also briefly attended the Royal Conservatory of Music in Den Haag, the Netherlands, studying composition with Louis Andriessen and Gilius van Bergeijk.

While a student at Cornish, he received a grant from Jack Straw Productions to record his solo piano song-cycle, Short Pieces for Short People, and was selected as a resident artist at Atlantic Center for the Arts, studying composition and conducting with Harold Farberman.

Recent projects include collaborations for the stage, Pot au Noir (2006) for electronics, prepared piano, electric guitar and electric bass; Weiber (2007) for 2 dancers, prepared piano, and obnoxious valley girl; and Reconstructing my Deconstruction (2008) for solo piano.  Mr. Lawlor also recently collaborated with Los Angeles deathcore band Winds of Plague, composing and arranging for their latest album The Great Stone War.  As a pianist, he is featured on recordings and frequently performs live with California's Los Inquietos del Norte. 

Mr. Lawlor is the composer for Implied Violence, an experimental performance group from Seattle, and is currently composing the music for their 24-hour opera Flinch Not and Give Not Back. Sections of this opera are set to premiere at the New Island Festival, New York City (2009), and the Donau Festival, Austria (2010). 

Brian Lawlor is the Minister of Music at Fordham Lutheran Church, Bronx, New York, where he conducts the Voices of Victory Gospel Choir and leads the instrumentalists for all services.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Christopher Dobrian, Professor of Composition at UCLA, Irvine, has accepted a commission from New York. Chamber Brass. Prof. Dobrian is the first American composer to be commissioned by NYCB.

Recognized for his innovative programming as Director of the Gassman Electronic Music Music Studio, Prof. Dobrian's new work, Emergence for brass quintet and computer, will be premiered in the Recital Hall, Purchase College State University of New York,  on April 19th 2010, with a repeat performance at Merkin Hall (66th/Broadway) in NYC, on April 26th.  Both concerts will include Luciano Berios Call and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies' Brass Quintet (1981).

More details to follow shortly...........

About the composer:

Christopher Dobrian is Professor of Music at the University of California, Irvine, where he directs the Gassmann Electronic Music Studio and the Realtime Experimental Audio Laboratory (REALab). He specializes in compositions that pair instrumentalists with interactive computer systems. He holds a Ph.D. in Composition from the University of California, San Diego, where he studied composition with Joji Yuasa, Robert Erickson, Morton Feldman, and Bernard Rands, computer music with F. Richard Moore and George Lewis, and classical guitar with the Spanish masters Celin and Pepe Romero. He is on the advisory board of the Electronic Music Foundation, a non-profit organization for the preservation and distribution of electronic music, and is the author of the original technical documentation and tutorials for the Max, MSP, and Jitter multimedia programming environments.

Recent works include Microepiphanies: A Digital Opera (2000), a completely computer-controlled performance; Invisible Walls (2001) for dancers, motion tracking system, and computer-controlled synthesizer; (2001) for two computer pianos in remote locations connected via internet; Distance DuoIn Tongues (2002) for flute and interactive computer system, premiered by virtuoso James Newton in Havana; Mannam (2003) for Korean flute (daegeum) and interactive computer system, premiered at the Seoul International Computer Music Festival; and JazzBot (2005) for piano and musical robots, premiered by Kei Akagi at the Beall Center for Art and Technology.