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famous brand music Clark Suprynowicz |
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Clark Suprynowicz composer
Janos Gereben, in the San Francisco Classical Voice, wrote of the premiere production: "Chrysalis is an important event, signaling the arrival of a new, fresh, authentic voice." And Joshua Kosman said, in his San Francisco Chronicle review, "When Suprynowicz goes all out with lyrical, melodic writing, the effect is ravishing. The final duet for Ellen and Nelle - a sinuous weave of arching phrases and piquant dissonances - is all all the more astounding for being so morally unsettling." Mr. Suprynowicz spent many years in the trenches as a jazz musician before decamping to compose full-time. His work as a bassist includes performances and recordings with John Zorn, Bill Frisell, Art Lande, Max Roach, and Tom Waits. Moving to the San Francisco Bay Area from the East Coast in 1982, Suprynowicz founded the Bay Area Jazz Composers Orchestra with composer Paul Nash and wrote numerous scores for that ensemble. The Bay Area Jazz Composers Orchestra met with critical acclaim and performed widely, including an appearance in the 1987 San Francisco Jazz Festival. Suprynowicz has written theme music and incidental music for National Public Radio. He has composed songs and chamber music, as well as jazz works. A quintet for percussion, winds and strings, commissioned by the American Composers Forum, premiered in 2003, one of a series of works commissioned by ACF. But his output as a composer for the last decade has focused on work for the stage. Suprynowicz is a founding member of the New Music Theatre Project, a forum for new work in the singing theatre at Z Space Studios in San Francisco. His opera Ariadne, with librettist Ken Prestininzi, was developed at Z Space, and was premiered in 1998 by City Summer Opera at the Diego Rivera Theater, City College, San Francisco. Kevin Ottem reviewed Ariadne in 20th Century Music: "The score is not just a collection of songs woven into a literate script, but a rich punch of sound, sometimes lyric and explicit, sometimes wordless and mysterious. At its best, Suprynowicz extends the idea of a traditional musical score into the realm of a soundscape." Joshua Kosman, reviewing the 1987 collaboration with Rinde Eckert, Paramus New Jersey and Other Places, in the San Francisco Chronicle, called Suprynowicz' music "Powerful and often distinctive." A recording of this work, entitled In Sleep A King, featuring vocalists Rinde Eckert and Jai Uttal, is available from the German label Sound Aspects, and from Famous Brand Music. Works for the stage include an original score for the West Coast premiere of Eisa Davis bulrusher, which was earlier nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; also scores for Amanda Moody's Serial Murderess, Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party (Shotgun Players production),and The Taming of The Shrew (for the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival). Through his work as director of the New Music Theater Project at Z Space, Clark has overseen the creation of new work by more than two hundred Bay Area performers, composers, librettists, and directors. The opera Caliban Dreams, with librettist Amanda Moody, was commissioned from Suprynowicz by the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival. It is an adaptation of Wm. Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Caliban Dreams was made part of the Z Space / Magic Theater New Works Initiative, and was given its first complete public reading in May of 2003 at the Magic Theater in San Francisco. Clark Suprynowicz earned his B.A. in music from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and received additional training in composition with Elinor Armer and David Conte (SF Conservatory Faculty), with Ken Durling, Joel Lindheimer. Piano studies with Jim Carmichael and Thomas Wyse. Electronic music with Wayne Organ at Contra Costa College.
I came up with rock, with singer-songwriters, and with the music of other countries (Wesleyan University, where both my father and my brother went to school, has a great world-music program). Then, too, I’m a jazz musician. And, then once again, I fell in love with classical music in my college years. It was the last music I came to rather than the first. Because of all this, I seem to have a different sensibility than most composers writing for the singing theater. The world that we call opera is a musical world that is in transition: The musical vocabulary, of course, and, to an extent, the subject matter. But, at least as importantly, pieces are actually made differently than they once were. There is more collaboration, more process and development. Sometimes, too, a designer or a choreographer may shape the end-result as much as the composer or librettist. These are ways in which I feel an aliveness, a sense of flux, in this art. Another change we are witnessing is that there is a huge audience of younger people who have grown up with rock ‘n roll, and some of them are reaching out. They are ready to experiment. They’ll go out to the theater if they hear it is something wild and wonderful. Yet they are not (usually) the same people who are giving a half-million dollar bequest to the Opera, and so the Artistic Director - at SFO, at Long Beach, in Houston and so on - they’re in a challenging position. They not only can’t please everyone, they are more or less guaranteed to be pissing off some of their customers while pleasing the rest. This will sort itself out. And it’s kind of entertaining, meanwhile. I don’t know if, twenty years from now, you’re likely to see Ligeti’s Grande Macabre at SFO back-to-back with Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. It’s a tough time to be an Artistic Director. Who can afford to alienate anybody? Who can avoid it? Yet, to counter the concern some of us feel when we look at the state of contemporary classical music, there are new operas being commissioned and put up every year, and people do come out to see them. Maybe it's that we need to see something huge and risky that deals with the enormity of life when so much of the everyday doesn't connect us with that. Maybe it's the spectacle, or that most everybody loves songs and stories. Whatever is lending this medium life as so many of the arts in America are struggling for viability, I feel blessed to be coming into contact with so many fine musicians and performers, to be getting a chance to see and hear my work onstage.
Clark Suprynowicz
2009
Eidolon, for orchestra.
In residence
with the Berkeley Symphony as part of their Under Construction series. Down In The Hole, choral arrangement of the Tom Waits song, for the Pacific Mozart Ensemble view score listen
2007 Eidolon, concerto for piano and string orchestra. View score Elegance and Superstition for string quartet. Listen here. View score.
Adagio for Strings 2006 Mantra, for String Quartet
Global Warming: Duets for soprano
saxophone and piano Chrysalis, a new opera with librettist John O’Keefe. premiered by the Berkeley Opera at the Julia Morgan Theater in Berkeley, California April 22 - April 30 2005
Dog Songs for Woodwind Quintet:
Performed by City Winds, San Francisco. May. 2004 Chrysalis, an opera, with playwright John O'Keefe, commissioned by the Berkeley Opera. Watch: Chrysalis Video Clips Affirmative Action for String Quartet Mmm for solo piano Caliban Dreams, staged workshop at Sonoma State College, conducted by Lynne Morrow. Quantum Summer Opera. 2003 Outright Radio. Theme & incidental music for the nationally syndicated radio-show on NPR. Caliban Dreams, an opera commissioned by the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, with libretto by Amanda Moody. The first complete workshop of this opera was presented at the Magic Theater In San Francisco in May, 2003 with John Duykers as Caliban, and Amanda Moody playing Ariel. The Caliban Quintet, for violin, cello, flute, clarinet and percussion. Premiered May 31, 2003 by the Left-Coast Ensemble at Trinity Church, Berkeley. Commissioned by the American Composers Forum. 2002 Now You're Talking for woodwind quintet. Premiered by City Winds in Berkeley, California, Spring of 2002. A commission from the American Composers Forum. Dog Songs. Five pieces for piano solo 2001 Super String Theory, for string trio. Premiered at Tuva, Berkeley, California, December, 2001. The Amanda Variations for flute, clarinet, violin, cello. Premiered May 19, 2001 at St. Johns Church, Berkeley, California. A commission from the American Composers Forum, Bay Area Chapter. Serial Murderess (a play in 3 axe), commissioned by writer/actor/singer Amanda Moody, scored for solo oboe and electronics. Premiered San Francisco, Venue 9, Winter. 2000 Commission from San Francisco Shakespeare Festival: Caliban Dreams, an opera with libretto by Amanda Moody. Samalhaut, for string quartet, commissioned by the American Composers Forum, Bay Area Chapter. Premiered Berkeley, St. Johns Church, April, 2000 The Taming of the Shrew, original score for accordion, clarinet, mandolin, tuba and percussion. Commissioned by the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival. Premiered San Francisco, Gershwin Theater, May, 2000 1999 July 23 - Aug. 1 : Ariadne, an opera in 2 acts, scored for piano, woodwinds, trumpets, percussion and choir. Libretto by Ken Prestininzi. 1999 summer season premiere produced by City Summer Opera at the Diego Rivera Theatre in San Francisco. February 11 - 19 : Workshop production of Ariadne at Z Space Studios in San Francisco. 1998 Excerpt from Ariadne programmed as part of the Common Sense Composers Collective Composers Marathon Yerba Buena Center, SF. Original score for Shakespeare's The Tempest: Flute, clarinet and percussion. Chabot College, Hayward. March 1, 1988 : Act One excerpts from Ariadne @ Open Studio, Z Space Studios, , San Francisco. Ariadne, workshop production at Z Space Studios, February, 1998. 1997
Workshop production of Ariadne, The
Urban School, S.F., Production of Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party with original score for bassoon and clarinet. The Shotgun Players, Berkeley. Love Does Not Heal All Wounds for piano and soprano voice, to a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay. 1997 The Care and Breeding of Flying Horses, an original musical. 1992 - 1996 Songs for ECM recording artist Aina Kemanis and OZ (piano, violin, bass, steel pedal guitar and drums) Numerous Bay Area performances. Recording available. 1987 - 1995 Collaborations with Rinde Eckert: score for Paramus, New Jersey and Other Places at the New Performance Gallery. Release of In Sleep A King, a suite of songs, on the Sound Aspects label. For winds, percussion, guitar, bass and voice, featuring Rinde Eckert and Jai Uttal. Commissions for the Bay Area Jazz Composers Orchestra, an 18-piece jazz ensemble with strings. Numerous Bay Area performances: Song and Dance; Desperate Measures; Feather River Suite. Eidolon for vocal quartet (Laurie Amat and Ensemble). Music for String Quartet, Soprano Saxophone and Trumpet. The Composers Cafeteria, Berkeley, Ca.
1981 B.A. in Music from Hampshire College Composition and Score Analysis with Randall McClellan Theory with Roland Wiggins 82 - present
Composition
with Elinor Armer and David Conte (SF Conservatory Faculty), with Ken
Durling, Joel Lindheimer. Piano
studies with Jim Carmichael and Thomas Wyse. Electronic music with Wayne
Organ.
AWARDS 2004 The Gerbode Fondation made an award to Suprynowicz, and to playwright John O'Keefe, commissioning a new opera, Chrysalis, to be premiered by the Berkeley Opera. 2003 Z Space / Magic Theater New Works Initiative from Columbia Foundation to support Caliban Dreams (major funding from the James Irvine Foundation and the Columbia Foundation) The Margaret Fairbank Jory Copying Assistance Program, for Caliban Dreams. The American Composers Forum, Bay Area Chapter, a Subito grant for Caliban Dreams. 1999, 2000 Commissions from SF Shakespeare Festival 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 Commissions from American Composers Forum 1998 LEF Foundation 1998 REX Foundation 1996 Commission from Laurie Amat, soprano 1987, 1997 Grants from Zellerbach Family Fund 1987 Commissions from Meet The Composer, California
2009 - 2010 2007-2009
Faculty, San Francisco Conservatory of Music:
Summer Music West Composition Intensive 1999-2004 Teacher of Composition at Berkeley High School as part of the American Composers Forum "Composers in the Schools" Project. Mr. Suprynowicz was one of four composers chosen by the American Composers Forum to take part in this program from 1999 – 2004. 1990 Taught symposium on grantsmanship for artists at Hampshire College. 1978 Employed in the CETA program, State of Connecticut, teaching music in the schools (grades 6 - 9), and to inmates of Somerville State Prison.
Mr. Suprynowicz is a bassist. He worked in New York in 1979 - 1980 in ensembles with John Zorn, Robin Holcomb, Wayne Horvitz, Joel Forrester, and others. After moving to San Francisco in 1982, Suprynowicz founded the Bay Area Jazz Composers Orchestra with composer Paul Nash, and served as musical director of that group for several years. In 1990, he was part of Tom Waits' ensemble for the recording of the soundtrack to the Jim Jarmusch movie A Night On Earth, later released on Island Records. Suprynowicz was a student of renowned jazz bassist Dave Holland in New York, with bassist Michael Moore, and also with Lou Bruno of the American Symphony. He has worked and recorded with John Zorn, Max Roach, Herb Ellis, Art Lande, Bill Frisell, and many other fine jazz musicians, some famous, some obscure, some now dead and sorely missed. Mr. Suprynowicz was a founding member of the Music Theatre Project at Z Space Studios, a forum for new work in the singing theatre.
Reviews HERE
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