Brandon died February 21, 2024, nearly 3 years after this interview. He was a composer of experimental music, and a very good friend of mine.

This interview touches on topics like: attention (inside & outside of concert settings), processing trauma through music, mental illness, drug usage, the psychology of repetition, the harmonic properties of multiphonics, spectralism, whole number ratios, being in the same room (both acoustically and socially), zoom meetings, music being the artwork of present moments, and many other things.

Pieces, in order heard:
the awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships (for six bowed music stands)
Repetition Study II (Music as a Means of Processing Trauma)
the awakened, lips parted.... (reprise)
Proportions/Frame (Brandon's final published recording)

https://soundcloud.com/brandonbecker-2
https://www.instagram.com/brandontravisbeckwr/
https://www.facebook.com/brandon.becker.1612

Interview originally recorded March, 2021.

Eleven trips to the Mayan region and an investigation of some 35 years into Precolumbian thought have indelibly marked and changed the work of this U.S.-born composer. Haladyna’s Mayan Cycle now stretches to thirty-five highly distinctive pieces, including such titles as Zaquico’xol, El Llanto de Izamal, The Maya Curse Pedro de Alvarado, Pok-ta-Pok, 2012, The Oracle of 13 Sky, Copal, and the Jaguar Poems. Among the most novel features of the Cycle is its frequent use of Jeremy's original scales (three in total) derived from the ingenious math of the Mayan calendar.

Jeremy, an accomplished keyboardist and conductor, served as director of UC Santa Barbara’s Ensemble for Contemporary Music for sixteen years (2003-2019) and created much of the Mayan Cycle during that time. He holds prizes and academic qualifications from three countries. A laureate of the Lili Boulanger Prize and diplômé of the history-rich Schola Cantorum on Paris' Left Bank, he also holds an advanced degrees from the University of Surrey (U.K.) and the University of California. He taught undergraduate composition to scores of young composers at UCSB from 1990-2019 (29 years) after being named to its permanent faculty in March, 2000. He is now Emeritus Faculty. His own past teachers include William Kraft, Karl Korte, Eugene Kurtz, Jacques Charpentier, Peter Racine Fricker, John McCabe, Sebastian Forbes, and Joseph Schwantner.

Pieces, in order heard:
Pok-ta-Pok
Maya Zodiac

https://www.mayancycle.com/
https://music.ucsb.edu/people/emeriti/jeremy-haladyna

Interview originally aired July 5, 2021.

Joel Feigin is an internationally performed composer, whose operas, chamber, orchestra, and piano works have been widely praised for their “very strong impact, as logical in musical design as they are charged with emotion and drama.” (Opera Magazine).

Feigin’s opera, Twelfth Night, based on Shakespeare’s comedy, was produced in North Carolina, Chicago, and southern California, where it was hailed as a “glittering masterpiece” by critic Dan Kepl. Excerpts had also been featured at New York City Opera’s VOX Showcase series and Opera America’s New Works Sampler. Mysteries of Eleusis, Feigin’s first opera, written on a Guggenheim Fellowship, was commissioned and premiered by Theatre Cornell; on the international stage it was featured at the Moscow Conservatory (Russia) and repeated at the Russian-American Operatic Festival.

Instrumental commissions include a Fromm Commission for Aviv: Concerto for Piano and Chamber Orchestra, written for Yael Weiss, as well as piano commissions from Leonard Stein and Margaret Mills. Ms. Mills included two of Joel’s works on her album Meditations and Overtones (Cambria Recordings). Feigin’s most recent CD (released on MSR Classics) presents the large-scale chamber work Lament Amid Silence, featuring violist Helen Callus. Concerts devoted solely to Feigin’s music have been given in Russia and Armenia, and in New York at Merkin Hall and Lincoln Center’s Bruno Walter Auditorium. Honors include a Mellon Fellowship, a Senior Fulbright Fellowship, and the Dimitri Mitropoulos Prize in Composition at the Tanglewood Music Center.

Dr. Feigin studied with Nadia Boulanger at Fontainebleau and with Roger Sessions at The Juilliard School. An accomplished pianist and accompanist, Feigin studied with Rosina Lhevine, and worked at the Metropolitan Opera in New York with Nico Castel.

The Joel Feigin Collection at the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center opened in 2011. A student of Zen Buddhism, Feigin is Professor Emeritus of Composition at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Pieces, in order heard:
Surging Seas, for string orchestra: 1. Allegro maestoso (excerpt)
Two Songs from Twelfth Night: No. 1 O Mistress Mine (Allegretto grazioso)
Surging Seas, for string orchestra: 1. Allegro maestoso (full movement)

http://joelfeigin.com/