2012-13 Season

Brian Satterwhite is a professional film composer based in Austin, Texas. He earned a Bachelor of Music with dual majors in Film Scoring and Composition from the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. Brian has written scores for over one hundred short and feature films including SUSHI: THE GLOBAL CATCH (2012), SWITCH (2012), MAN ON A MISSION (2012), CELL: THE WEB SERIES (2010), ARTOIS THE GOAT (2009), QUARTER TO NOON (2008), THE CHILDREN’S WAR (2008), COWBOY SMOKE (2008), MR. HELL (2006), and the award-winning IMAX™ film RIDE AROUND THE WORLD (2006). Brian’s accolades include twelve gold medals and four silver medals from the Park City Film Music Festival.

Brian is on faculty at the University of Texas at Austin where he teaches a course on film music for the Radio-Television-Film Department. He’s also the producer and host of the film music radio program “Film Score Focus” on 89.5 KMFA and is a highly regarded film music journalist who writes for several popular web sites including his own professional blog. Brian also pens soundtrack album liner notes for major soundtrack labels and his work in the field of film music journalism has earned Brian membership into the International Film Music Critics Association.

Composer, conductor, and creative thinker – John Adams occupies a unique position in the world of American music. His works, both operatic and symphonic, stand out among contemporary classical compositions for their depth of expression, brilliance of sound, and the profoundly humanist nature of their themes. Over the past 25 years, Adams’s music has played a decisive role in turning the tide of contemporary musical aesthetics away from academic modernism and toward a more expansive, expressive language, entirely characteristic of his New World surroundings.

Born and raised in New England and educated at Harvard, Adams moved in 1971 to California, where he taught for ten years at the San Francisco Conservatory and was composer-in-residence at the San Francisco Symphony.

Adams’s operatic works are among the most successful of our time. Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, and Doctor Atomic, all created in collaboration with stage director Peter Sellars, draw their subjects from archetypical themes in contemporary history.

On the Transmigration of Souls, written for the New York Philharmonic to mark the first anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Music, and won a rare “triple crown” of Grammy awards: “Best Classical Recording”, “Best Orchestral Performance”, and “Best Classical Contemporary Composition”.

City Noir, a 35-minute orchestral work that takes as its jump-off point the “noir” sensibility of Los Angeles culture, was premiered by Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a concert that was televised worldwide and toured the US.

Adams has been awarded honorary degrees and proclamations by Cambridge University, Harvard University, Yale School of Music, Phi Beta Kappa, the National Endowment for the Arts, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, the French Legion of Honor, and Northwestern University, where he was awarded an honorary doctorate and the first Michael Ludwig Nemmers Prize in Music Composition.

Nonesuch Records released Adams’s Harmonielehre in 1985, and all of his works since then have appeared first on that label. A ten-CD set, “The John Adams Earbox”, documents his recorded music through 2000.

Adams’s much praised autobiography Hallelujah Junction (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) was named one of the “most notable books” of 2008 by the New York Times and was the winner of the 2009 Northern California Book Award for creative nonfiction. Adams also maintains a popular and controversial blog “Hell Mouth” about music, literature and politics.

John Adams is active as a conductor, appearing with the world’s greatest orchestras. A regular guest at the BBC Proms, in recent seasons he has also conducted the London Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and New York Philharmonic as well as orchestras in Atlanta, Amsterdam, Berlin, Stockholm, Pittsburgh, Montreal San Francisco, and Detroit. In 2011 he conducts six performances of Nixon in China, including a live international HD telecast, at the Metropolitan Opera.

The Chamber Symphony, written between September and December of 1992, was commissioned by the Gerbode Foundation of San Francisco for the San Francisco Contemporary Chamber Players, who gave the American premiere on April 12. The world premiere performances was given in The Hague, Holland by the Schoenberg Ensemble in January of 1993.

Written for 15 instruments and lasting 22 minutes, the Chamber Symphony bears a suspicious resemblance to its eponymous predecessor, the Opus 9 of Arnold Schoenberg. The choice of instruments is roughly the same as Schoenberg’s, although mine includes parts for synthesizer, percussion (a trap set), trumpet and trombone. However, whereas the Schoenberg symphony is in one uninterrupted structure, mine is broken into three discrete movements, “Mongrel Airs”; “Aria with Walking Bass” and “Roadrunner.” The titles give a hint of the general ambience of the music.

I originally set out to write a children’s piece, and my intentions were to sample the voices of children and work them into a fabric of acoustic and electronic instruments. But before I began that project I had another one of those strange interludes that often lead to a new piece. This one involved a brief moment of what Melville called “the shock of recognition”: I was sitting in my studio, studying the score to Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony, and as I was doing so I became aware that my seven year old son Sam was in the adjacent room watching cartoons (good cartoons, old ones from the ’50′s). The hyperactive, insistently aggressive and acrobatic scores for the cartoons mixed in my head with the Schoenberg music, itself hyperactive, acrobatic and not a little aggressive, and I realized suddenly how much these two traditions had in common.

For a long time my music has been conceived for large forces and has involved broad brushstrokes on big canvasses. These works have been either symphonic or operatic, and even the ones for smaller forces like Phrygian Gates, Shaker Loops or Grand Pianola Music have essentially been studies in the acoustical power of massed sonorities. Chamber Music, with its inherently polyphonic and democratic sharing of roles, was always difficult for me to compose. But the Schoenberg symphony provided a key to unlock that door, and it did so by suggesting a format in which the weight and mass of a symphonic work could be married to the transparency and mobility of a chamber work. The tradition of American cartoon music–and I freely acknowledge that I am only one of a host of people scrambling to jump on that particular bandwagon–also suggested a further model for a music that was at once flamboyantly virtuosic and polyphonic. There were several other models from earlier in the century, most of which I come to know as a performer, which also served as suggestive: Milhaud’s La Creation du Monde, Stravinsky’s Octet and L’Histoire du Soldat, and Hindemith’s marvelous Kleine Kammermusik, a little known masterpiece for woodwind quintet that predates Ren and Stimpy by nearly sixty years.

Despite all the good humor, my Chamber Symphony turned out to be shockingly difficult to play. Unlike Phrygian Gates or Pianola, with their fundamentally diatonic palettes, this new piece, in what I suppose could be termed my post-Klinghoffer language, is linear and chromatic. Instruments are asked to negotiate unreasonably difficult passages and alarmingly fast tempi, often to inexorable click of the trap set. But therein, I suppose, lies the perverse charm of the piece. (“Discipliner et Punire” was the original title of the first movement, before I decided on “Mongrel Airs” to honor a British critic who complained that my music lacked breeding.)

John Adams
Berkeley
June 1994