Tawnie Olson
Tawnie Olson
Described as "especially glorious… ethereal" by Whole Note, and "a highlight of the concert" by the Boston Musical Intelligencer, the music of Canadian composer Tawnie Olson draws inspiration from politics, spirituality, the natural world, and the musicians for whom she composes. She has received commissions from the Canadian Art Song Project, Third Practice/New Music USA, the Canada Council for the Arts, Mount Holyoke College/The Women’s Philharmonic, the Blue Water Chamber Orchestra, Ithaca College, the American Composers Forum, and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music’s Robert Baker Commissioning Fund, among others. In 2017, she received an OPERA America Discovery Grant to develop a new work about Hildegard of Bingen and Eleanor of Aquitaine with re:Naissance Opera (libretto by Roberta Barker), and a Canada Council for the Arts Professional Development Grant to study field recording at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. In 2018 she is the Composer-in-Residence of the Women Composers Festival of Hartford and an American Composers Forum BandQuest Composer-in-Residence at E.C. Adams School in Guilford, CT. She is the winner of the 2018 Barlow Prize and the 2015 Iron Composer Competition, and her Three Songs on Poems by Lorri Neilsen Glenn took second prize in the 2018 NATS Art Song Competition. She received a 2018 Connecticut Artist Fellowship, and has won awards from SOCAN and The Guelph Camber Choir/Musica Viva.
Recent projects include Reformation, for SATB, mezzo-soprano and tenor soloists, brass quartet, and organ, commissioned by the University Church in Yale for the UCY Chapel Choir, Pop!, for concert band, commissioned by the American Composers Forum for the E.C. Adams 8th grade band, Susan Oakley, director, an arrangement/recomposition of "Know the Way" (by electronica artist Grimes), commissioned by Geof Holbrook and the Cluster Festival for the Plumes Ensemble, Incantation, for eight voices, violoncello, and continuo organ, commissioned by Third Practice, Meadowlark, for marimba and fixed media, composed for Ian David Rosenbaum, Three Songs on Poems by Lorri Neilsen Glenn, for soprano and piano, commissioned by the Canadian Art Song Project for Magali Simard-Galdès, and Magnificat, commissioned by Karen Clute for the Elm City Girls Choir and Yale Schola Cantorum.
Olson's music is performed on five continents; it can also be heard on recordings by Parthenia (with bass-baritone Dashon Burton), the Canadian Chamber Choir, percussionist Ian David Rosenbaum, the Chronos Vocal Ensemble, bassoonist Rachael Elliott, soprano Magali Simard-Galdès, oboist Catherine Lee, and Shawn Mativetsky, McGill University professor of tabla and percussion. Her scores are available from the Canadian Music Centre, Galaxy Music, Hal Leonard's BandQuest and Mark Foster series, and E.C. Schirmer. Olson holds a doctorate in music composition from the University of Toronto, a Master of Music degree from the Yale School of Music, an Artist Diploma from the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, and a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Calgary. She is an adjunct professor of composition at the Hartt School of Music.
Pop!
Year: 2018
Duration (in minutes): 4:00
Difficulty: Low (student/pedagogical)
Publisher: BandQuest
Description: “Pop! is a delightful musical journey for the players and the audience. This artistically constructed exercise in acceleration, tension, crescendo and their oppositional counterparts begins with melodic fragments that gradually combine to reveal the full “tune.” Every player has chance to shape his/her own part in the “popping away” sectional climax, which allows for individual creativity through mild aleatory. Students will be excited by the easily distinguishable parallels between the exergy of corn popping and the progression of this music.” -Thomas C. Duffy BandQuest Series Editor
Magnificat
Year: 2017
Duration (in minutes): 8:00
Difficulty: Medium (college/community)
Instruments: organ
Description: This setting of the Magnificat and Ave Maria for Bulgarian Girls Choir and SATB chorus was commissioned by Karen Clute in honor of strong teenage girls everywhere. The work was premiered by the Elm City Girls Choir and Yale Schola Cantorum, conducted by David Hill.
Meadowlark
Year: 2016
Duration (in minutes): 14:00
Difficulty: High (professional)
Description: Although I grew up in Western Canada, where the Western Meadowlark makes its summer home, this piece was not inspired by the experience of hearing a meadowlark in the wild. In January, 2013 I heard a recording of a meadowlark during a lecture given by Allan Gordon
Bell, my undergraduate composition teacher. The beautiful recorded song moved me in a manner difficult to describe, and many months later I found myself thinking of it. Fortunately, Allan was kind enough to share his recording with me when I asked, and the first movement of this piece was the result.
The structure of the piece is rooted in the meadowlark's song; the fixed media in the first movement is derived from the two-second birdsong recording, which I stretched out to last over four and a half minutes and processed slightly. The marimba music is also drawn from
that slowed-down song. It calls for very virtuosic playing; the percussionist must perform diminuendi with one hand and crescendi with the other in a kind of transcription of the slowly shifting, overlapping pitches of the original birdsong. The second and third
movements of the piece use transcriptions and transformations of a meadowlark recording made by Geoffrey A. Keller, which the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology kindly provided to me. The second movement also uses a recording of peepers and
bullfrogs made by Chad Stayrook at i-Park.
Meadowlark is dedicated to Ian Rosenbaum, who - against all odds - made me fall in love with the marimba, and to my mother, a lifelong birder who instilled in me a love of nature and of birdsong.
No Capacity to Consent
Year: 2016
Duration (in minutes): 35:00:00
Difficulty: High (professional)
Description: Chamber oratorio for SSATBarB, percussion, cello, and continuo organ. Sets to music the legal complaint filed by a pregnant woman which recounts how, after being stopped for a minor traffic violation in an American town infamous for police abuse, she was raped by a corrections officer. (Neither the woman nor the officer is named.)
This work was commissioned by Third Practice and New Music USA.
Scel lem duib
Year: 2012
Duration (in minutes): 6:30
Difficulty: High (professional)
Publisher: E.C. Schirmer Music Co., Inc.
Description: A medieval Irish monk once wrote: “It is senseless for anyone to cease in the praise of God. The birds, they never cease, and their souls are only air.” As I wrote this piece, I felt overwhelmed by the beauty of creation, the way plants and animals are always growing and changing, driven to take root, to migrate, to bear fruit by a force much deeper than consciousness. I love the poem “Scel lem duib” because its elegant spareness celebrates winter as a thing-in-itself, as yet another instance of nature's awful beauty. Unlike many other poems, it does not use the turning seasons as a metaphor for aging and death. As I set the text that is translated “the bracken reddens/its shape becomes hidden,” however, I found myself thinking that all of the beauty of this world is an echo of another country, one where some whom I love are hidden, and where I hope by God’s grace one day to dwell. But before I could become too lost in this thought, a flock of geese intruded, raucously calling out God's praises in the here and now.
Scel lem duib was commissioned by the Yale Institute of Sacred Music's Robert Baker Commissioning Fund for New Music. It is dedicated to Marguerite Brooks and the chamber choir of the Yale Camerata, with special thanks to harpist Kristan Toczko.
As Rain Hollows Stone
Year: 2011
Duration (in minutes): 15:00
Difficulty: High (professional)
Description: The title of this work comes from the ancient proverb "Gutta cavat lapidem non vi, sed saepe cadendo," which roughly translates as "raindrops hollow stone not through force, but by often falling." This proverb plays out in the piece on several levels, perhaps most audibly in the idea of persistence, which is important to each of the three movements in a different way.
“As Rain Hollows Stone” was written for the Wanmu Percussion Trio at the request of Ian Rosenbaum, and is dedicated to Ian, Candy Chiu and John Corkill.
Muses
Clara Schumann, Drei Lieder Op. 12
Cécile Chaminade, Viens, mon bien-aimé
Cécile Chaminade, La lune paresseuse
Cécile Chaminade, Si j'étais jardinier
Tawnie Olson, Three Songs on Poems by Lorri Neilsen Glenn
Rebecca Clarke, A Dream
Rebecca Clarke, Shy One
Rebecca Clarke, June Twilight
Composers: Tawnie Olson, Clara Schumann, Cécile Chaminade, Rebecca Clarke
Memory Palace
Crashing Through Fences, by Timo Andres
G-Force, by Paola Prestini
Celestial Sphere, by David Crowell
Meadowlark, by Tawnie Olson
Memory Palace, by Chris Cerrone
Composers: Tawnie Olson, Paola Prestini, Timo Andres, Chris Cerrone, David Crowell
Label: Naxos
Product ID: VIA-10
Buy URL: http://naxosdirect.com/items/memory-palace-383016
Buy URL 2: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N9F837R/ref=dm_ws_sp_ps_dp
Recent projects include Reformation, for SATB, mezzo-soprano and tenor soloists, brass quartet, and organ, commissioned by the University Church in Yale for the UCY Chapel Choir, Pop!, for concert band, commissioned by the American Composers Forum for the E.C. Adams 8th grade band, Susan Oakley, director, an arrangement/recomposition of "Know the Way" (by electronica artist Grimes), commissioned by Geof Holbrook and the Cluster Festival for the Plumes Ensemble, Incantation, for eight voices, violoncello, and continuo organ, commissioned by Third Practice, Meadowlark, for marimba and fixed media, composed for Ian David Rosenbaum, Three Songs on Poems by Lorri Neilsen Glenn, for soprano and piano, commissioned by the Canadian Art Song Project for Magali Simard-Galdès, and Magnificat, commissioned by Karen Clute for the Elm City Girls Choir and Yale Schola Cantorum.
Olson's music is performed on five continents; it can also be heard on recordings by Parthenia (with bass-baritone Dashon Burton), the Canadian Chamber Choir, percussionist Ian David Rosenbaum, the Chronos Vocal Ensemble, bassoonist Rachael Elliott, soprano Magali Simard-Galdès, oboist Catherine Lee, and Shawn Mativetsky, McGill University professor of tabla and percussion. Her scores are available from the Canadian Music Centre, Galaxy Music, Hal Leonard's BandQuest and Mark Foster series, and E.C. Schirmer. Olson holds a doctorate in music composition from the University of Toronto, a Master of Music degree from the Yale School of Music, an Artist Diploma from the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, and a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Calgary. She is an adjunct professor of composition at the Hartt School of Music.
Pop!
Year: 2018
Duration (in minutes): 4:00
Difficulty: Low (student/pedagogical)
Publisher: BandQuest
Description: “Pop! is a delightful musical journey for the players and the audience. This artistically constructed exercise in acceleration, tension, crescendo and their oppositional counterparts begins with melodic fragments that gradually combine to reveal the full “tune.” Every player has chance to shape his/her own part in the “popping away” sectional climax, which allows for individual creativity through mild aleatory. Students will be excited by the easily distinguishable parallels between the exergy of corn popping and the progression of this music.” -Thomas C. Duffy BandQuest Series Editor
Magnificat
Year: 2017
Duration (in minutes): 8:00
Difficulty: Medium (college/community)
Instruments: organ
Description: This setting of the Magnificat and Ave Maria for Bulgarian Girls Choir and SATB chorus was commissioned by Karen Clute in honor of strong teenage girls everywhere. The work was premiered by the Elm City Girls Choir and Yale Schola Cantorum, conducted by David Hill.
Meadowlark
Year: 2016
Duration (in minutes): 14:00
Difficulty: High (professional)
Description: Although I grew up in Western Canada, where the Western Meadowlark makes its summer home, this piece was not inspired by the experience of hearing a meadowlark in the wild. In January, 2013 I heard a recording of a meadowlark during a lecture given by Allan Gordon
Bell, my undergraduate composition teacher. The beautiful recorded song moved me in a manner difficult to describe, and many months later I found myself thinking of it. Fortunately, Allan was kind enough to share his recording with me when I asked, and the first movement of this piece was the result.
The structure of the piece is rooted in the meadowlark's song; the fixed media in the first movement is derived from the two-second birdsong recording, which I stretched out to last over four and a half minutes and processed slightly. The marimba music is also drawn from
that slowed-down song. It calls for very virtuosic playing; the percussionist must perform diminuendi with one hand and crescendi with the other in a kind of transcription of the slowly shifting, overlapping pitches of the original birdsong. The second and third
movements of the piece use transcriptions and transformations of a meadowlark recording made by Geoffrey A. Keller, which the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology kindly provided to me. The second movement also uses a recording of peepers and
bullfrogs made by Chad Stayrook at i-Park.
Meadowlark is dedicated to Ian Rosenbaum, who - against all odds - made me fall in love with the marimba, and to my mother, a lifelong birder who instilled in me a love of nature and of birdsong.
No Capacity to Consent
Year: 2016
Duration (in minutes): 35:00:00
Difficulty: High (professional)
Description: Chamber oratorio for SSATBarB, percussion, cello, and continuo organ. Sets to music the legal complaint filed by a pregnant woman which recounts how, after being stopped for a minor traffic violation in an American town infamous for police abuse, she was raped by a corrections officer. (Neither the woman nor the officer is named.)
This work was commissioned by Third Practice and New Music USA.
Scel lem duib
Year: 2012
Duration (in minutes): 6:30
Difficulty: High (professional)
Publisher: E.C. Schirmer Music Co., Inc.
Description: A medieval Irish monk once wrote: “It is senseless for anyone to cease in the praise of God. The birds, they never cease, and their souls are only air.” As I wrote this piece, I felt overwhelmed by the beauty of creation, the way plants and animals are always growing and changing, driven to take root, to migrate, to bear fruit by a force much deeper than consciousness. I love the poem “Scel lem duib” because its elegant spareness celebrates winter as a thing-in-itself, as yet another instance of nature's awful beauty. Unlike many other poems, it does not use the turning seasons as a metaphor for aging and death. As I set the text that is translated “the bracken reddens/its shape becomes hidden,” however, I found myself thinking that all of the beauty of this world is an echo of another country, one where some whom I love are hidden, and where I hope by God’s grace one day to dwell. But before I could become too lost in this thought, a flock of geese intruded, raucously calling out God's praises in the here and now.
Scel lem duib was commissioned by the Yale Institute of Sacred Music's Robert Baker Commissioning Fund for New Music. It is dedicated to Marguerite Brooks and the chamber choir of the Yale Camerata, with special thanks to harpist Kristan Toczko.
As Rain Hollows Stone
Year: 2011
Duration (in minutes): 15:00
Difficulty: High (professional)
Description: The title of this work comes from the ancient proverb "Gutta cavat lapidem non vi, sed saepe cadendo," which roughly translates as "raindrops hollow stone not through force, but by often falling." This proverb plays out in the piece on several levels, perhaps most audibly in the idea of persistence, which is important to each of the three movements in a different way.
“As Rain Hollows Stone” was written for the Wanmu Percussion Trio at the request of Ian Rosenbaum, and is dedicated to Ian, Candy Chiu and John Corkill.
Muses
Clara Schumann, Drei Lieder Op. 12
Cécile Chaminade, Viens, mon bien-aimé
Cécile Chaminade, La lune paresseuse
Cécile Chaminade, Si j'étais jardinier
Tawnie Olson, Three Songs on Poems by Lorri Neilsen Glenn
Rebecca Clarke, A Dream
Rebecca Clarke, Shy One
Rebecca Clarke, June Twilight
Composers: Tawnie Olson, Clara Schumann, Cécile Chaminade, Rebecca Clarke
Memory Palace
Crashing Through Fences, by Timo Andres
G-Force, by Paola Prestini
Celestial Sphere, by David Crowell
Meadowlark, by Tawnie Olson
Memory Palace, by Chris Cerrone
Composers: Tawnie Olson, Paola Prestini, Timo Andres, Chris Cerrone, David Crowell
Label: Naxos
Product ID: VIA-10
Buy URL 2: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N9F837R/ref=dm_ws_sp_ps_dp
