2021 Etchings faculty Composers
Trevor Weston | David Rakowski
Emily Koh | Martin Brody
Composition fellows will participate in numerous activities throughout the festival, including:
Compose a work to be performed and recorded on a festival concert.
Work with members of the ensemble on a work-in-progress that will be sketched, workshopped and rehearsed as a collaborative project through the week.
Participate in group lessons and masterclasses with all faculty, guest composers, and performers.
Tuition: $800
The Festival is currently negotiating group rates for single and double rooms at the Northampton Fairmount Inn. We will be happy to assist in fellows in booking a reservation there. Fellows are also welcome to arrange their own accommodations.
Etchings Composers’ Rehearsals, 2019
Etchings 2019 Woodwind Workshop
Trevor Weston’s music has been called a “gently syncopated marriage of intellect and feeling.” (Detroit Free Press) Weston’s honors include; the George Ladd Prix de Paris from the University of California, Berkeley, a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and residencies from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the MacDowell Colony. Weston co-authored with Olly Wilson, “Duke Ellington as a Cultural Icon” in the Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington, published by Cambridge University Press.
Carnegie Hall co-commissioned Weston’s Flying Fish, with the American Composers Orchestra, for its 125 Commissions Project. The Bang on a Can All-Stars premiered Weston’s Dig It, for the Ecstatic Music Festival in NYC in 2019. The Grammy-nominated Choir of Trinity Church Wall Street, under the direction of Julian Wachner, recorded a CD of Trevor Weston’s choral works. Weston’s work Juba for Strings won the 2019 Sonori/New Orleans Chamber Orchestra Composition Competition. Dr. Weston is currently Professor of Music and Chair of the Music Department at Drew University in Madison, NJ.
David Rakowski has received a large number of awards and fellowships, including the Elise L. Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Rome Prize, and he has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music (for pieces commissioned by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the US Marine Band). He has composed nine concertos, six symphonies, 100 piano études, 74 piano préludes, eight song cycles, and a large amount of wind ensemble music, chamber music, and vocal music for various combinations, as well as music for children. His music has been commissioned, recorded, and performed widely and is published by C.F. Peters. He is the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Composition at Brandeis University, having also taught at New England Conservatory, Harvard, Columbia, and Stanford. In 2016, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Emily Koh (b.1986) is a Singaporean composer and double bassist based in Atlanta, GA. Her music reimagines everyday experiences by sonically expounding tiny oft-forgotten details. In addition to writing acoustic and electronic concert music, she enjoys collaborating with other creatives in projects where sound plays an important role.
Described as ‘the future of composing’ (The Straits Times, Singapore), she is the recipient of awards such as the Copland House Residency Award, Young Artist Award, Yoshiro Irino Memorial Prize, ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, Prix D’Ete, and PARMA competitions. Emily’s works have been described as “beautifully eerie” (New York Times), and “subtly spicy” (Baltimore Sun). This season, her work “After Igor” was chosen to be performed by the Aguascalientes Symphony Orchestra as part of the American Composers Orchestra’s first international Earshot Program.
A new saxophone, live electronics and video work, “b(locked.orders)”, in collaboration with video artist Michiko Saiki and Noa Even, was performed across the US in Noa Even’s solo tour in Fall 2019. In March 2020, she performed as the double bass soloist in her wind ensemble work “divercity”, with the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater on the Isaac Stern Stage at Carnegie Hall as part of the New York Wind Band Festival. Emily is currently Assistant Professor of Composition at the Hugh Hodgson School of Music, University of Georgia in Athens, GA.
Primarily a composer of concert and theatrical chamber music, Martin Brody has also written extensively for film and television. He has received various awards and commissions, among them the Academy-Institute Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and commissions from the Fromm Foundation at Harvard, the MacArthur Foundation's Regional Touring Program, the Artists Foundation, and the Massachusetts Arts and Humanities Council. In the fall of 2001, he was Fromm Composer-in-Residence at the American Academy in Rome. Brody is president of the Stefan Wolpe Society and has also served as a Director of the League of Composers-ISCM, the Composers Conference, and Boston Musica Viva. In 1987 he collaborated with the ethnomusicologist Ted Levin to initiate a US-USSR composers exchange sponsored by the International Research and Exchanges Board, the first such exchange to occur in 25 years. He has written extensively on contemporary music and serves on the editorial board of Perspectives of New Music.