Composer Carter Pann will be in residence in the Glenn Korff School of Music the first week of December.
On Tuesday, Dec. 4 at 7:30 p.m. in Kimball Hall, he will present a guest artist recital. One-half of the concert will include Pann’s chamber music. The other half of the concert will feature eight new preludes that composition students have written for pianists in the Glenn Korff School of Music. Pann will be working with the pairings of students during his residency. This concert is free and open to the public.
On Wednesday, Dec. 5 at 7:30 p.m. in Kimball Hall, the Wind Ensemble will celebrate the works of Carter Pann in a concert titled “Precision and Pandemonium.” There will be a pre-concert talk at 6:30 p.m. in the lower lobby of Kimball, where Pann will discuss his compositions with Ron and Carol Cope Professor and Director of Bands Carolyn Barber and Assistant Professor of Composition Greg Simon.
Tickets for the Wind Ensemble concert are $5 adults and $3 students/seniors and available at the door. This concert will also be live webcast. Visit http://arts.unl.edu/music/webcasts the night of the concert for the link.
Composer and pianist Pann has written for and worked alongside musicians from around the world, including performances by the London Symphony and City of Birmingham Symphony, the Tchaikovsky Symphony in Moscow, the Seattle Symphony, the National Repertory Orchestra, youth orchestras of New York and Chicago, and many wind ensembles.
He has received a Charles Ives Fellowship, a Masterprize seat in London and five ASCAP awards. His numerous albums have received two Grammy® nominations to date. In 2016, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music.
“If there was one thing that I was going to describe Carter’s music as being, I would say it’s an exercise in joy,” Simon said. “And that can take all sorts of forms. There are some themes that Carter visits in his music that are very complex and not necessarily light entertainment, but there’s always this undercurrent of joy and gratitude running through it.”
Pann is associate professor of composition at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where Simon received his master’s degree and studied under him.
“He was terrific and one of the best teachers I ever had,” Simon said. “Even before I got to Colorado, he’s been a composer that I looked up to. He’s a tremendously gifted artists and someone who has found what I think of as an unmistakable voice for himself. That admiration for his music led me to always want to find ways to work with him. He’s an incredibly gifted teacher and just a very kind and generous person.”
He brought the idea of a Carter Pann residency to Barber, who agreed to feature Pann’s work at the Wind Ensemble concert.
“She knew his music because Carter has done a really impressive job of making a name for himself in the band world,” Simon said.
The other side of his residency will be the Piano Prelude Project. In addition to being a composer, Pann is also a talented pianist.
“His piano concertos are among his most celebrated pieces,” Simon said. “And I thought to myself when I was thinking about what we could do with Carter as a resident here. How can we welcome the pianists into the process so they can benefit from his residency as well?”
Simon built a project so that Glenn Korff School of Music composers and pianists had the opportunity to collaborate.
“So on Dec. 4, we are having a concert that’s going to consist of half of the concert being Carter’s chamber music. And the first half of the concert is going to consist of new preludes for piano that our composers have written in collaboration with pianists from the department. We paired these composers with these performers back in August, and for the most part, they’ve been working on their own in collaboration with their performers. Carter will work with the composer-pianist pairings at the piano masterclass on Monday.”
Joshua Spaulding, a graduate composition student from Johnson City, Tennessee, has written a prelude titled “Resonance,” for pianist Seung-Kyung Baek.
“The work shifts through three musical environments over about 4 minutes,” Spaulding said. “The first part of the work is really spacious and ethereal, the second section moves into a more harmonically rich space, and the final section takes elements of the first two sections and blends them together with driving rhythmic force to make everything resonate together. In a way, the prelude is a miniature journey from a point of disparity and flux to a point of unison.”
He’s looking forward to the masterclasses with Pann.
“Any chance we get to work with a guest composer is an opportunity to explore different methods on how to write and how to establish ourselves in our careers as creative artists,” he said. “Everybody has a different creative process, and everyone also has taken a different route to get to where they are in their career. Getting the chance to explore those life and music perspectives with the actual composer is always incredibly insightful.”
Christina Ensign, a graduate composition student from Fridley, Minnesota, has composed a prelude for pianist Madeline Rogers.
“The Prelude I have composed for Madeline is a piece to which I am deeply connected,” she said. “I wrote this piece almost entirely in one sitting directly after talking to a friend the night before she began her chemo treatments for stage three ovarian cancer. Around the same time, I was coping with a family member's declining health and a close family friend being deployed to Kuwait. As an avid reader, I often tend to cope with situations by relating to book characters and found the quote ‘One was a book thief. The other stole the sky’ from Markus Zusak’s ‘The Book Thief,’ which gave me the title of this piece, ‘Steal the Sky.’”
Ensign said people should come to the Dec. 4 concert and expect variety in the preludes.
“While a concert filled with piano preludes by student composers could come across as ‘a list of things that all sound the same,’ audiences should know that this concert will be just the opposite,” she said. “Our composition studios, as well as the piano studios, are filled with so many unique and wonderful voices from different backgrounds and with very different influences, emotions and experiences.”
She also is looking forward to Pann’s residency.
“As students at UNL, we are so fortunate to have the opportunity to meet guest artists who can give us insight into the craft into which we have poured our lives,” Ensign said. “I hope to learn about his compositional process, his inspirations for writing, and his thoughts on conveying emotions and stories within a piece, as well as the various subtleties and complexities that are necessary in effectively doing so.”
Simon said students will benefit from Pann’s residency.
“The ostensible thing that students get from a guest artist is that they get to hear a different perspective on music and art. There are an innumerable number of ways to think about art and music at a very high level, so I think that students always benefit from hearing a different perspective,” Simon said. “I also think it’s always just a great privilege to interact with an artist who is working at the highest possible level. And I think of Carter as being one of those artists, not only as a composer and as a musician, but as a pedagogue. Students will get a chance to work with a terrific composer and a terrific teacher.”
Simon said composers get a tremendous amount of value in working on one piece with one teacher and showing it to a different teacher to get a different perspective on the same piece.
“Those different perspectives are not only valuable in the sense that they help you to think about different things as a composer, but also in that they are essential to helping you galvanize what you believe about being an artist and that you prioritize,” Simon said. “The expectation going into a lesson with Carter or any other guest composer is never that our students will come away and change everything. It’s that they will come away, and they will understand the different perspective on music. And through that perspective, they will understand their music better.”
The Glenn Korff School of Music’s composition area continues to grow, and the university recently approved a new Bachelor of Arts degree in composition.
“When I started, we had 17 students,” Simon said. “At the moment, we have 26 students enrolled in composition lessons. I believe we have 24 composition majors across all three degree programs, which is really exciting.”
Simon said the students are excited for Pann’s residency.
“We have a lot of different types of composers in our program. We have a lot of students who have wildly different professional and artistic aspirations,” he said. “All of them, I think, find something to be excited about in Carter’s music, so I think the energy among our composers is one of great excitement that he’s going to be coming.”