1998 June In Buffalo Festival Will Be One of Largest And Liveliest In History

"...one of America's most ambitious contemporary music festivals...introduces audiences to emerging artists of innovative and uncompromising vision."

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Warm evenings, superb music, world-class performances, the world's finest conductors -- sounds like JUNE IN BUFFALO '98.

The celebrated festival and conference dedicated to emerging composers of new music will be held June 1-7 at the University at Buffalo.

It will be an event at which audiences will come face to face with some of the most daring, articulate, errant and death-defying young artists of our time -- composers who challenge our very sense of sound and heighten our aural awareness with novel instrumentations, musical tools and unusual, but arresting, explications of the principles of composition.

Always engaging, relaxed and sophisticated, the festival concerts will be in every way unique, as well as free and open to the public.

This year, 30 young composers of new music have been invited to participate. They were selected by audition from a wide field of applicants and will comprise one of the largest JUNE IN BUFFALO classes in the festival's 12-year history.

"We have a really fine group this year," said festival director David Felder, himself one of the outstanding composers of his generation and chair of the UB Department of Music. "They're from Japan, Australia, New Zealand, England, South Africa, Canada, Thailand, the U.S. and, of course, California."

Participants will meet their peers and eminent professionals in their field, hear new work and participate in seminars, master classes and lectures.

Each has submitted a new composition for discussion and criticism by an outstanding faculty of composers, conductors and musicians. The work then will be deeply rehearsed and presented in concert by world-class performers throughout the festival week.

All events will be held in Baird and Slee halls and in the Center for the Arts on the UB North (Amherst) Campus.

This year, the festival composition faculty will include seminal post-war violinist-composer Mario Davidovsky; the superb and long-celebrated American composer Donald Erb; six-time NEA fellow David Felder, also Birge-Cary Professor of Music at UB and one of the country's most widely celebrated and commissioned composers of new music.

The faculty also will include wild-man Vinko Globokar, France's unconventional proponent of the "established" avant-garde and advocate of music's critical role in the life of society, and Kevin Volans, the distinctive South African composer and librettist. Volans' work incorporates traditional African elements, as well as the influences of painters Matisse and Pollock; the late UB composer Morton Feldman (founder of the JUNE IN BUFFALO festival), and Indian mathematician Srinvasa Ramanujan.

Faculty biographies can be found on the JUNE IN BUFFALO Web site at . When completed, the festival program will be posted there as well.

JUNE IN BUFFALO '98 will feature performances by the New York New Music Ensemble, Amherst Saxophone Quartet, Bugallo/Williams Piano Duo, JUNE IN BUFFALO Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Magnus Martensson and Erik Oña, and the JUNE IN BUFFALO String Quartet.

The JUNE IN BUFFALO String Quartet is made up of four of the country's most respected interpreters of contemporary music: violinists Curtis Macomber and Calvin Wiersma, violist Lois Martin and cellist Christopher Finckel. This is their second appearance at the festival.

The June in Buffalo Chamber Orchestra again will be made up of "hot-shot new-music players from around the country," all of them distinguished solo performers in their own right, said Felder.