Faculty Update

Meredith Brammeier spent her 2023-24 sabbatical composing new music for Canzona Women’s Ensemble, Cal Poly’s Cantabile chorus, the San Luis Obispo Symphony and the San Luis Obispo Master Chorale. In March, Cantabile premiered “Charity Begins Today” in San Luis Obispo and performed it again at the ACDA Western Division conference in Pasadena. Canzona premiered “Beautiful, Proud Sea” in San Luis Obispo in March and then took the piece on tour to Ottawa and Montreal, Canada, in June. The San Luis Obispo Symphony premiered “Suite on Paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe” in May, and the San Luis Obispo Master Chorale will premiere “That Music Always Round Me” on Nov. 24, 2024.

Julie Herndon spent the academic year collaborating with the Architecture Department, composing for strings and electronics and developing a new collection of original work for keyboard instruments called “Electronic Etudes.” A grant from the College of Architecture and Environmental Design supported an immersive sound installation in Poly Canyon called the Biophilic Instrument Pavilion. The year-long project was a partnership with architecture Professor Tom Fowler and five interdisciplinary students and it opened at Design Village in April. Also in April, Herndon’s new piece for string duo and electronics, “Together,” was premiered by andPlay at JACK Studios in New York City. She then traveled to Belfast, Ireland, to perform at Sonorities Festival. Her California tour of “Electronic Etudes” included performances at University of California Santa Barbara, Indexical in Santa Cruz, Solarc in Los Angeles, and will be presented at the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival at The Lab in September.

Alyson McLamore shared the launch of “The Periodical Overtures in 8 Parts,” a series of 18th-century symphonies that she has co-edited with British colleague Barnaby Priest. This music was originally published between 1763 and 1783, when the London printer Robert Bremner issued music for small orchestras in a “symphony-of-the-month” format — the first enterprise of this type in England. Bremner’s prints consisted of parts without scores since ensembles of the time did not employ conductors. To make this music accessible and affordable for orchestras today, McLamore and Priest have created scores, parts and commentaries for all 61 of the symphonies issued by Bremner and his successor, Preston and Son. These modern editions of the “Periodical Overtures” are being issued on a monthly basis over the next five years by the Munich-based publishing house “Musikproduktion Höflich,” and three of the symphonies are now in print: “Periodical Overture No. 1” by Johann Christian Bach, “No. 2” by Francesco Pasquale Ricci, and “No. 3” by Johann Stamitz. McLamore was also the author of the music curriculum for the 2023-24 U.S. Academic Decathlon competition. The theme for the competition was “Technology and Humanity,” so the music curriculum focused on the film scores of science-fiction movies. Decathletes studied repertory that included selections from “Metropolis,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,” “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “Forbidden Planet,” “Blade Runner,” “TRON,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Star Wars,” “WALL•E,” “Mars Attacks!” and other films.