Chester Biscardi • Composer profile picture

Chester Biscardi • Composer

About Me

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Chester Biscardi’s music has been featured at the Gaudeamus Festival in Rotterdam, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in England, Moscow Autumn, Music Today-Japan in Tokyo, the Thailand Composition Festival in Bangkok, the Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors Festival, the North American New Music Festival in Buffalo, the Festival of New American Music in Sacramento, Piccolo Spoleto, the International Guitar Festival of Morelia, and the Bienal of São Paulo, Brazil. Performances of his music have also been sponsored by the American Composers Orchestra, the BBC-London, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Ensemble TIMF of Korea, the Gothia Percussion Ensemble of Sweden, the Houston Symphony, the National Flute Association, the New Jersey Percussion Ensemble, the Orchestra della Radiotelevisione Italiana in Rome, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, Sequitur, and UNESCO/International Music Council.
Biscardi’s catalog includes works for opera, chorus, voice and piano, orchestra, chamber ensembles, and solo piano, as well as incidental music for theater, dance, and television. His work is published by C. F. Peters, Merion Music, Inc. of Theodore Presser Company, and Biscardi Music Press, and is distributed by Classical Vocal Reprints and Theodore Front Musical Literature, Inc. Recordings appear on the Albany, American Modern Recordings, Bridge, CRI (New World Records), Intim Musik (Sweden), Naxos, New Albion, New Ariel, North/South Recordings, and Sept Jardins (Canada) labels. He is a Yamaha Artist .
Biscardi is a recipient of the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Academy Award in Music and a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Aaron Copland Award, fellowships from the Bogliasco Foundation, the Djerassi Foundation, the Japan Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Rockefeller Foundation (Bellagio), as well as grants from the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard, the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Foundation, Meet the Composer, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Born in l948 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, he received a B.A. in English Literature, an M.A. in Italian Literature, and an M.M. in Musical Composition from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an M.M.A. and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Yale. He is Director of the Music Program at Sarah Lawrence College, where he was the first recipient of the William Schuman Chair in Music (1994-2007) and currently holds the Margot C. Bogert Distinguished Service Chair.

My Interests

Music:

Member Since: 25/02/2007
Band Website: chesterbiscardi.com
Influences:
My compositional activity continues along the path I began in the mid-70’s with a broader sense of integrating styles and exploring new materials. In the mid-70’s I was concerned with integrating the theoretical and technical elements of music with philosophical and literary ideas. For instance, At the Still Point, for orchestra (1977), and Mestiere, for piano (1979), use the technique of “frozen registration” to illustrate a poetic image: the “still point” where past and future meet in T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton; and the integrity of one’s life and work implied in the title of Cesare Pavese’s Il mestiere di vivere (The Business of Living). Tenzone, for two flutes and piano (1975), relies on the interplay of extended techniques and timbral devices between two flutes, mirroring a lyric interchange between two poets in medieval Italy. The dramatic tension in Trasumanar, for twelve percussionists and piano (1980), reflects Dante’s struggle to understand the sensual pull of being human and the spiritual aspiration to transcend human experience at the beginning of the Paradiso. All of these works also contain strong characteristics of Japanese music: transparent textures and delicate nuances; sounds frozen in space; circular musical forms, a kind of mobile fixity where tensions expand and contrast against a background of stillness.
In the 1980’s, I wanted to explore other materials and began to think in different harmonic languages. For example, my Piano Concerto (1983) acknowledges a lifelong passion for the music of George Gershwin and Aaron Copland and incorporates their sounds without imitating them. At the same time, I developed new structural bases, as in Piano Sonata (1986; revised 1987), which adopts the modular arrangement of a triptych lithograph by Jasper Johns. Incitation to Desire (Tango), for piano (1984), and Companion Piece (for Morton Feldman), for contrabass and piano (1989), follow these stylistic directions. In Traverso, for flute and piano (1987), I blend a 'Japanese landscape,” in the sense of stillness, with an "open landscape,” in the sense of American harmonies of the 1930's and '40's. The title of Resisting Stillness, for two guitars (1996), suggests a way of listening to the work and reflects my creative struggle at the time - a personal “pulling up from silence”, as well as my interest in the power of pure sound wedded to lyrical line.
I am increasingly turning to text setting as one of my major compositional concerns. The Gift of Life, for soprano and piano (1990-1993), a song-cycle based on texts by Emily Dickinson, Denise Levertov and Thornton Wilder, along with numerous songs setting texts by Allen Ginsberg, Muriel Rukeyser, Carl Sandburg, in one way or another grew directly from my work with text and characters in Tight-Rope, a chamber opera I wrote with Henry Butler in 1985. Modern Love Songs, for voice and piano (1997-2002), written with William Zinsser, reflects our shared passion for American popular song, and the cycle that results sits somewhere between cabaret/standard tunes and art songs.
Record Label: Albany, Bridge, CRI, Intim Musik, New Albion, etc.
Type of Label: Indie

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