 |
Constance Cooper
received first prize in the 2002 Gustav Mahler Competition (Austria)
for Acrobat, her double concerto for improvising solo violinist and
cellist with chamber orchestra. The premiere was later broadcast on
Austrian Radio and Television and an Italian premiere followed. She
was also a semi-finalist in the Queen Elisabeth Competition of 1999
for her piano concerto Carinthia.
The music of Constance Cooper, "astonishingly evocative" (The
Star-Ledger) and "poetic, with quarter-tones fully integrated into
the harmony" (EAR Magazine), and which "more than deserved the
ovation it got" (Intermission), is "carefully crafted . . . with a
sweet longing that shines through like a summer day," and "gives . .
. hope that a new generation of composers can find atonality not
only compelling but also truly beautiful" (Trenton Times). The
performance of her microtonal opera Easter Eve was ". . . a strange
and affecting evening of music. . . great dramatic effect [and]
emotional authority . . . Cooper's music . . . painted every bit as
gaudy and crowded a scene as could be imagined" (The Star-Ledger).
Her reflections about microtonality on string instruments led to her
invention of new hand-positions, notation, and a "pizzicato-bow" for
Coming From Us, commissioned by the American Composers Forum and
premiered in New York in 2001 -- "Music with life and soul" (Sequentia
21), available on Cadence Recordings.
Her piece for two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart, Where the River
Turns Like an Elbow into Dusk, commissioned in 1987 for Opus One
Records' first CD, was broadcast over National Public Radio as one
of the year's best recordings. Works for chamber and full orchestra
have been conducted by Harvey Sollberger, Steven Mackey and Lawrence
Leighton Smith; chamber works have been read or performed by the
Arditti Quartet, Speculum Musicae, the bassist Robert Black, and
the Brentano Quartet. Poem by Marina Tsvetaeva, for electro-acoustic
ensemble and voice, received its premiere at Merkin Hall in 1994.
Maybe I'm Blue Too was performed by the New Jersey Symphony in
April, 1996. Her Divertimento for String Quartet is available on the
Princeton CD label. Amoroso for orchestra was recorded by Harold
Farberman in 2001. Her volume of pieces for organ, synthesizer, and
improvising acoustic bass Repaying Sin-Driven Senators by Not
Thinking About Them, completed during her 2002 residence at ArtOMI,
was premiered at Saint Peter's Church in New York the following
year, along with her new microtonal trio with dialogue Play Within a
Play.
Miss Cooper has appeared as composer, pianist, and singer at Lincoln
Center Out of Doors, the Krannert Center of the University of
Illinois, and the Boston Conservatory with the Princeton University
Composers Ensemble, Continuum, North-South Consonance, and the
American Microtonal Festival, and produced her own contemporary
vocal chamber music recital series in New York for seven years. She
gave the Canadian premiere of Charles Wuorinen's "Piano Sonata
(1969)" and the "hometown" premiere of Charles Ives' Concord Sonata
in Concord, Massachusetts. She was the soprano soloist at New York's
Church of the Holy Communion, where she performed the role of the
Mother in Menotti's "Amahl and the Night Visitors," and later at All
Angels' Church, where she sang Dido in Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas"
and was the soprano soloist in Monteverdi's Vespers and Brahms'
Requiem. She was a soloist and founding member of two early music
groups, Pomerium (Renaissance polyphony) and Schola Antiqua
(Gregorian chant).
Connie received her doctorate in composition from Princeton
University in 2003 jointly for her opera Easter Eve and for her
dissertation about the mature operas of Leos Janacek.
Miss Cooper taught for
eight years at Long Island University and for shorter periods at the
College of New Rochelle and Manhattanville College, as well as
working as a teaching assistant at Princeton University in opera,
chamber music, ear training, and composition.
|
