sparr

D. J. Sparr’s music merges current practices of art-concert composition with influences from vernacular American music, which he grew up performing and studying as a guitarist. For the performance of Sparr’s BMI/Boudleax Bryant Fund Commission for Eighth Blackbird, the Albuquerque Tribune wrote: “…in the sextet's piece ‘The Glam Seduction’, the 1980s rock music of Eddie Van Halen meets the instrumentation of Niccolo Paganini... The result - Paganini on coke.”
Sparr studied classical music and jazz guitar at the Baltimore School for the Arts. During the summer years, he attended the Walden School and the Boston University Tanglewood Institute and developed a love of composition for orchestral instruments. Sparr then enrolled at the Eastman School of Music where he completed his Bachelor of Music degree and studied with Sydney Hodkinson, Augusta Read Thomas, and Pulitzer prize winners Joseph Schwantner and Christopher Rouse. He is the recipient of numerous awards including a BMI Student Composer Award, First Place in George Washington University’s Alan Tyndall Hutchinson Competition, the Howard Hanson Large Ensemble prize and Howard Hanson Orchestra prize from Eastman, The BMI Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra Premiere, and the $10,000 Grand Prize in the orchestra category for the BMG/Williams College National Young Composers Competition (a prize awarded only once) for his work, Wrought Hocket. Pulitzer Prize winner Yehudi Wyner, one of the judges who reviewed Wrought Hocket, described it as “intelligently organized, full of interesting opposites and exotic couplings and groupings... strong in its tenacious development of the material.” Subsequently, Wrought Hocket was premiered by the Berkshire Symphony at the Berkshire New Music Festival in October, 1997. The Williams College Record wrote, “This work was the highlight of the Berkshire New Music Festival. One had to admire the startling contrasts between the textures Sparr created.”
D. J. then matriculated at the University of Michigan, where he held a Regents Fellowship and completed a Doctor of Musical Arts degree and studied with Michael Daugherty, Andrew Mead, Susan Botti and Pulitzer winner William Bolcom. Sparr was also a graduate teaching instructor in the music theory department as well as the graduate assistant for the class “Turning Points”, which was designed as a cross-disciplinary project for graduate students and upperclassmen and fostered the creation of works of art that were collaborations between composition students from the School of Music, creative writing students from the Department of English, and art students from the School of Art & Design.
During this time, he was awarded an alternate spot for the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a second BMI award, and the inaugural BMI/Boudleax Bryant Fund Commission. He studied with Pulitzer Prize winner Aaron J. Kernis as an associate composer-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and Pulitzer Prize winner John Harbison at the Aspen Music Festival. Woodlawn Drive, a piece commissioned as part of the Aspen Advanced Masterclass was premiered with Sydney Hodkinson as the conductor was later performed in Washington, DC by the Contemporary Music Forum for which the Washington Post wrote, “D.J. Sparr's Woodlawn Drive is a full-of-tricks sextet that begins with engulfing, clustered yet delicate nature sounds. To oversimplify: Yesteryear – Sparr's grandmother's house in Woodlawn, Md. – materializes; there are fiddling and other rusticities that gradually fade, displaced by a racket of suburban disturbance (traffic, etc.). Joel Lazar conducted this little charmer, which for all the uproar was immediately accessible to anyone who doesn't mind amicable dissonance.”
He also received commissions and performances from the Los Angeles ‘Debut’ Orchestra, the Albany Symphony, North/South Consonance, the Eberli Ensemble, and the Late-Show with Jay Leno Band, among others. 2002-2003 found Sparr teaching at Carroll College in Westminster, MD while concurrently composing his work, “General Electric, a concerto grosso for electric guitar, electric bass, synthesizer, percussion and large chamber ensemble,” a piece which is indebted to Baroque processes and modern timbres. General Electric was later premiered in November, 2006 with Sparr as guitarist in the concertino by the Great Noise Ensemble at the Charles Sumner School in Washington, DC. In the spring of 2003, the critically acclaimed ensemble, Eighth Blackbird, featured “The Glam Seduction” on their west-coast tour.
Having completed a two-year long term in Los Angeles from 2003-2005 where he was the manager and in-house orchestrator for upstart record label Hard Soul Records and taught music at West Los Angeles College, Sparr now resides in the Mid-Atlantic region – moving between New York City and Ocean City, MD where he composes and teaches. In December 2006, his latest orchestral work “Larghetto Cum Loco” was premiered by the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra at the Chicago Cultural Center. Sparr was a composer-in-residence at California State University Stanislaus in May, 2007 for the premiere of the winds-only version of “General Electric.”
Recently, D. J. has performed Steve Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint” to great avail on two occasions for the Great Noise Ensemble: their “70th Birthday Celebration of Steve Reich”, and their appearance at the Hirshhorn After-Hours, a packed house event at the Smithsonian Institute. He is currently completing a piece which positions three percussionists on a five-octave marimba, “Magnum Organum” for the Attacca Percussion Group. He also continues to play guitar in the band Sugar Me Sweet.

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