Acclaimed composer Jeffrey Mumford will present recorded examples of his music, discuss his inspiration and process of composing, and share insights about the paths to becoming a published and performed composer today. Questions and answers and reception to follow.
What the critics say:
"has an unerring knack for fashioning rigorous works as changeable as cloudscapes, bursting with color, nuance and poetry."
~ Steve Smith, N.Y. Times
"The harmonies are dense but never impenetrable, the orchestral colors are downright prismatic, the dissonances are aggressive and angular yet brimming with poetry and nuance."
"...a fine strong piece...a near Medieval purity of line..."
~ Tim Page, Washington Post
Composer Jeffrey Mumford has received numerous fellowships, grants, awards and commissions including the "Academy Award in Music" from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, a Fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, a Fellowship and an ASCAP Aaron Copland Scholarship. He was also the winner of the inaugural National Black Arts Festival/Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Composition Competition. Other grants have been awarded by the Ohio Arts Council, Meet the Composer, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music Inc., the ASCAP Foundation, and the University of California.
Mumford's most notable commissions include those from Washington Performing Arts, Duo Harpverk (Iceland), the Sphinx Consortium, the Cincinnati Symphony, the VERGE Ensemble/National Gallery of Art/Contemporary Music Forum, the Argento Chamber Ensemble, Ole Bohn, the Haydn Trio Eisenstadt (Vienna), the Network for New Music, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, a consortium of presenters consisting of the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Chamber Music Columbus (OH) and Omus Hirshbein, the Nancy Ruyle Dodge Charitable Trust, the Meet the Composer/Arts Endowment Commissioning Music/USA the National Symphony Orchestra (twice) Cincinnati radio station WGUC, cellist Joshua Gordon, the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation, the Fromm Music Foundation, and the McKim Fund in the Library of Congress.
His music has been performed extensively, by major orchestras, soloists, and ensembles, both in the United States and abroad, including London, Paris, Helsinki, and Vienna.
Mumford is a former faculty member at the Washington Conservatory of Music, served as Artist-in-Residence at Bowling Green State University, and as assistant professor of composition and Composer-in-Residence at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. He is currently Distinguished Professor at Lorain County Community College in Northern Ohio.
