And He’ll Be Mine

Chester Biscardi’s music has been performed throughout Asia, Europe, and North and South America. Recent works include Sailors & Dreamers, commissioned by The Serge Koussevitsky Music Foundation and the Library of Congress. The 27-minute song cycle for voice and chamber ensemble is a collaboration between Biscardi and poet/artist Shirley Kaplan, and was premiered September 2011 at Merkin Concert Hall in New York City. Footfalls (after Beckett) for flute, oboe, two guitars, tingsha, violin, and violoncello is a musical response to Samuel Beckett’s 1975 play Footfalls, and was commissioned by the Roger Shapiro Fund for New Music for “Sounding Beckett”, a collaborative project between The Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C. and the Cygnus Ensemble. The piece was premiered in September 2012 alongside a production of the Beckett play featuring actors Kathleen Chalfant and Holly Twyford.

Born in 1948 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.

Learn more at ChesterBiscardi.com.

Find the score to Modern Love Songs here.

With the composition in 1976 of Final Alice, David Del Tredici’s hour-long setting of Lewis Carroll for high soprano and large orchesra, a new movement in music – New-Romanticism – was born. A number of Alice settings followed over the next 25 years, including In Memory of a Summer Day, which was awarded the 1980 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Post-Alice, he has taken a very different track: to create a body of music celebrating the LGBT community, which includes Gay Life (2001), Love Addiction (2007), and Bullycide (2013). Del Tredici has also been active in the world of chamber music. His recent works include two string quartets, Magyar Madness for clarinet and string quartet (for David Krakauer and the Orion Quartet), and Grand Trio for violin, cello and piano (composed for the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson trio). In recent years, he has embarked on a series of works for solo piano, which harken back to his musical beginnings as a piano prodigy, including S/M Ballade and Ode To Music, which were written for Marc Peloquin.

Learn more at DavidDelTredici.com.

Find the score to Gay Life here.

Zachary Wadsworth’s “vivid, vital, and prismatic” music has established him as a leading composer of his generation. Praised for its “evocative mixture of old and new,” his music has been heard in venues around the world, from the Kennedy Center in Washington to Takinogawa Hall in Tokyo.

Originally from Richmond, Virginia, Wadsworth (b. 1983) earned graduate degrees from Cornell University (DMA) and Yale University (MM), and is an honours graduate of the Eastman School of Music (BM). His principal composition teachers have included Steven Stucky, Martin Bresnick, Ingram Marshall, Ezra Laderman, and David Liptak. He has taught at the Interlochen Center for the Arts and the University of Calgary, and he is currently an Assistant Professor of Music at Williams College. He also maintains an active performing life as a tenor and pianist.

Learn more at ZacharyWadsworth.com.

Find the score to Three Lullabies here.

Darien Shulman is a composer and musician, born and raised in New York City. He received his B.Mus. from Northwestern University, and his M.Mus from the Juilliard School, where he composed concert music that spanned a wide range of scope and forces, from large scale orchestral works to art songs for voice and piano. After he finished school, Darien’s focus shifted to music for picture. He has composed scores for numerous films and documentaries, and his music can be heard in national commercials, web advertisements, industrials, promos, and viral videos. In addition to composing for film and television, Darien has collaborated as a songwriter, producer, and remix artist, with some of the most accomplished musicians in New York.

Darien lives in Astoria, NY, with his husband Dennis Tobenski, and their two cats, Pistachio and Midget.

Learn more at DarienShulman.com.

Inquire about the score to Three Poems of Thomas Moore here.

Dennis Tobenski is a composer of acoustic new music whose work has been described by Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times as “distinctive and engaging”.

Dennis’s 20-minute work for high voice and orchestra, Only Air, which memorializes the gay teenagers who have taken their own lives in recent years, was commissioned and premiered by the Illinois State University Symphony Orchestra in 2013. A chamber version of the piece was premiered in May 2014 by The Secret Opera in NYC. The chamber version received its West Coast premiere in November 2014 by members of the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony as a part of the American Psychiatric Association’s annual Institute on Psychiatric Services.

In 2016, Dennis will begin composing his first opera in collaboration with poet and playwright Barbara Grecki. The hour-long chamber opera, commissioned by The Secret Opera, will explore the harsh realities of sex trafficking in the United States, and is based on a short story written by the composer.

Called a “dynamic vocalist” by Mr. Tommasini, Dennis’s focus as a vocalist is primarily on the works of the 21st and late 20th centuries. He has premiered works by David Del Tredici, Chester Biscardi, Ricky Ian Gordon, and Darien Shulman.

In November 2014, he and Marc Peloquin recorded their first album together: a disc of 19 art songs by living gay American composers. The album, titled And He’ll Be Mine, will be released by Perfect Enemy Records, and features works by David Del Tredici, Chester Biscardi, Zachary Wadsworth, Darien Shulman, and Dennis Tobenski.

Dennis lives in New York City with his husband Darien Scott Shulman and their cats Midget and Pistachio.

Learn more at DennisTobenski.com.

Find the score to And He’ll Be Mine here.