David Liptak

Talk Description

Music exists all around us, and the sounds of the world abound with personal and societal meaning. What does it mean to create 'new' music? Is it possible to construct music which is at once original and connected to larger understanding? How does music excite and animate imagination? Composers respond to questions like these through their creative work, and this talk will explore this process.

Biography

David Liptak's music has been described as 'luminous and arresting,' 'richly atmospheric,' and having 'transparent textures, incisive rhythms, shimmering lightness.' His compositions have been performed by the San Francisco Symphony, the Montreal Symphony, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Eastman Wind Ensemble, the New York New Music Ensemble, the Ying and Cassatt String Quartets, and many other orchestras, ensembles, and soloists. His music appears on numerous recordings, including Rhapsodies (commissioned by the Meet the Composer/Reader's Digest Consortium Commissioning Program) on the Innova CD American Masters of the 21st Century; three Albany Records releases spanning his work for violinist Catherine Tait, the chamber piece Giovine vagha, i' non senti, and Songs for Persephone for soprano, flute, and guitar; two Bridge Records issues, including an all-Liptak album pairing Ancient Songs (with baritone William Sharp) with Serenade for saxophone and strings, Forlane for guitar, and Broken Cries for cello octet; and Ice Flowers, for violin and Japanese koto, recorded by the duo vio-LINK-oto for Centaur Records. In 1995 he was awarded the Elise L. Stoeger Prize by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition (2002), the 2006 Lillian Fairchild Award, and commissions from the Fromm Foundation, Meet the Composer, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the California Music Center, and the Hanson Institute for American Music. His recent work Folgore's Months, a setting of 14th-century sonnets by the Italian poet Folgore da San Gimignano for soprano and wind ensemble, was premiered in 2009 by Mark Scatterday and the Eastman Wind Ensemble with soprano Tony Arnold; much of his recent music has explored the poetry and magical quality of stars and starlight, imagined and real. A dedicated teacher of composition students for the past three decades, David Liptak is Professor of Composition at the Eastman School of Music, where he has taught since 1986. He lives in Rochester with his wife, violinist Pia Liptak.