New American Works: 1993

About the Composers:

Ricky Ian Gordon has worked both nationally and abroad as a composer and performer. An affiliation with the Battery Dance Company has yielded four ballets. He has written over 100 songs for singers including Carol Vaness, Patricia Schuman, Teresa Sratas, Harolyn Blackwell, Kurt Ollman, Will Parker and many others. In August of 1990, hs show Sweet Song bowed at the Perry Street Theater in New York’s Greenwich Village, directed by Metropolitan Opera’s Fabrizio Melano and starring soprano Angelina Reaux. Ricky Gordon’s work also includes Autumn Valentine for Opera Omaha’s Fall Festival ’92, The Telephone Show and Close Harmony Holidays for Skylight Opera with writer/director Stephen Wadsworth. He also contributed to the AIDS Quilt Songbook, which was performed at Alice Tully Hall in June, 1992, and recorded by Harmonia Mundi. He has received numerous awards through ASCAP and Meet the Composer. 1989 he was awarded a fellowship from the National Institute for Music Theater and, in 1991, the Stephen Sondheim award through the American Music Theater Festival last June, Harper-Collins published a book about Mr. Gordon’s family entitled Homefires, written by Donald Katz. The world premiere of his States of Independence, with a text and conception by Tina Landau, opened April 30th at the American music Theater Festival in Philadelphia and is running through may 8th. His music is published by the Rodgers and Hammerstein Foundation

Steven Sametz is a professor of Music and Director of Choral Activities at Lehigh University.  After completing undergraduate studies at Yale University and the Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Frankfurt, he received Masters of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Sametz is active as a conductor, composer, and editor. He has received commissions from the national Endowment for the Arts, Connecticut Council for the Arts, and Santa Fe Music Festival to create new works for Chanticleer, the Dale Warland singers, Philadelphia Singers, Pro Arte Chamber Choir, as in Europe at the Salzburg and Schleswig-Holstein Music Festivals. This summer he will conduct the premiere of a newly commissioned piece of his at the Santa Fe Festival and guest conduct at the Berkshire Choral Institute.

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