American Composers Festival

The Pacific Symphony's annual American Composers Festival explores a different facet of music in America. This year's festival -- the 10th -- focuses on "The Greatest Generation," examining themes from the Depression of the 1930s through World War II. Programs at the Orange County Performing Arts Center will feature composers Aaron Copland and Kurt Weill as well as a world premiere of Michael Daugherty's "Mount Rushmore." In addition, the festival includes performances by two student arts groups to explore the festival's themes.

It's no big thing to play the music of Duke Ellington. That's done all the time: in cabarets, concert halls, movies, Broadway theaters and anywhere jazz musicians assemble. Ellingtonia, a word coined by admirers who realized that no existing musical category could contain him, is virtually inexhaustible: some 2,000 pieces, many in multiple versions and settings, often to the point of recomposed variations. Overall, he offers the modern musician those qualities that never wilt, from lavishly distinctive melodies to the richest harmonic palette in jazz or popular music to a rhythmic variety, reminding us that swing is infinitely supple and can be as uplifting, witty, fierce or romantic as a good tune.

Carl St.Clair, the music director and principal conductor of Orange Country's Pacific Symphony, was a bit taken aback at one of the programming choices for the 2012 edition of the organization's American Composers Festival. This year's theme is "Nowruz — Celebrating Spring," marking the Persian New Year and celebrating the prominent Iranian American community and its vast cultural legacy. There's a world premiere of an oratorio by Iranian American composer Richard Danielpour and collaborations between the symphony and Persian music troupe the Shams Ensemble.

Carl St.Clair, the music director and principal conductor of Orange Country's Pacific Symphony, was a bit taken aback at one of the programming choices for the 2012 edition of the organization's American Composers Festival. This year's theme is "Nowruz — Celebrating Spring," marking the Persian New Year and celebrating the prominent Iranian American community and its vast cultural legacy. There's a world premiere of an oratorio by Iranian American composer Richard Danielpour and collaborations between the symphony and Persian music troupe the Shams Ensemble.

The subject of this year's American Composers Festival, the Pacific Symphony's annual poking into the corners of American music, is William Bolcom. As stylistically diverse a musician and composer as they come, Bolcom will be featured as composer, pianist, accompanist, teacher and raconteur in a variety of musical settings and venues, ranging from supper club to concert hall.

Carl St.Clair can clearly recall being in the third grade in his hometown of Yoakum, Texas, and being "marched down to the Grand Theater where we all got to see 'Ben-Hur.' I was totally captivated," he says. "The score was overwhelming to me." Fifty years later, St.

The Pacific Symphony concert Wednesday in Segerstrom Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center peaked sooner than it should have. The program opened with two fascinating rarities, continued with an interesting if flawed curiosity and closed with a masterpiece. The rarities were orchestrations of piano pieces by Debussy and Ravel by Australian American composer Percy Grainger.

Imagine a postmodern Aaron Copland or Charles Ives with a pop cultural twist, and you're primed for the music of Michael Daugherty. A composer of his time and birthright, Daugherty is a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, native and the musical embodiment of Americana. His canvas reflects a 20th century cultural mosaic dotted by the likes of Elvis and Superman and Jackie Onassis. At age 55, Daugherty is also the exuberant master of his craft, an artist whose sophistication and compelling appeal can seem utterly at odds with the often kitschy titles of his works.

Pacific Symphony: An article in the Sept. 25 Arts & Books section about the Segerstrom Center for the Arts' 25th anniversary said that the Pacific Symphony launched its annual American Composers Festival in 2003. It began in 2000.

Four American composers have been commissioned to write new pieces for the next two seasons of the Pacific Symphony, the orchestra announced Wednesday. A choral composition by Michael Daugherty, to Carl Sandburg texts, will be a highlight of the orchestra's American Composers Festival, titled "The Greatest Generation," in early February 2010. Two weeks later, a piano concerto by Richard Danielpour will have its premiere with Jeffrey Biegel as soloist. Works by William Bolcom and Zhou Long, both highlighted in earlier American Composers Festival programs, will premiere in the 2010-11 season.

Pacific Symphony: An article in the Sept. 25 Arts & Books section about the Segerstrom Center for the Arts' 25th anniversary said that the Pacific Symphony launched its annual American Composers Festival in 2003. It began in 2000.

Where does one begin with the most prolific of major modern composers? Philip Glass has written more than two dozen operas along with a considerable amount of incidental music for plays. By next season, his symphonies will number nine. There are concertos galore, film scores galore, solo pieces galore, and an impossible-to-categorize repertory for his Philip Glass Ensemble (now complemented by the Glass Chamber Players). Glass' list of collaborators is also profligate. Along with film and theater directors ?

The Pacific Symphony will try to relight a torch for opera in Orange County starting next year ? not with full productions like those that vanished when Opera Pacific went under late in 2008, but with "semi-staged" concert versions of Puccini's "La Boheme" and Engelbert Humperdinck's "Hansel and Gretel. " The two operas ? casts will be announced later ? will be part of a three-year sung-music initiative called "Symphonic Voices," described by Pacific Symphony as "an effort to restore [opera]

One of the strengths of the Pacific Symphony's annual American Composers Festival has been its inclusion of a wide range of arts groups and voices. This year, in exploring the themes of "The Greatest Generation," the challenges and hardships faced during the turbulent 1930s and '40s will be seen through the eyes of the newest generation. The symphony has partnered with the Orange County High School of the Arts, tapping students from the film and TV conservatory to produce documentary shorts that bring the experiences of this older generation to a younger audience.

The Pacific Symphony's annual American Composers Festival explores a different facet of music in America. This year's festival -- the 10th -- focuses on "The Greatest Generation," examining themes from the Depression of the 1930s through World War II. Programs at the Orange County Performing Arts Center will feature composers Aaron Copland and Kurt Weill as well as a world premiere of Michael Daugherty's "Mount Rushmore." In addition, the festival includes performances by two student arts groups to explore the festival's themes.

Imagine a postmodern Aaron Copland or Charles Ives with a pop cultural twist, and you're primed for the music of Michael Daugherty. A composer of his time and birthright, Daugherty is a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, native and the musical embodiment of Americana. His canvas reflects a 20th century cultural mosaic dotted by the likes of Elvis and Superman and Jackie Onassis. At age 55, Daugherty is also the exuberant master of his craft, an artist whose sophistication and compelling appeal can seem utterly at odds with the often kitschy titles of his works.

The Pacific Symphony will highlight its 2003-04 season, and its 25th anniversary year, with five commissioned world premieres. It will also devote its second annual American Composers Festival to the works of Chinese American composers. The season opens Oct. 8 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

It's no big thing to play the music of Duke Ellington. That's done all the time: in cabarets, concert halls, movies, Broadway theaters and anywhere jazz musicians assemble. Ellingtonia, a word coined by admirers who realized that no existing musical category could contain him, is virtually inexhaustible: some 2,000 pieces, many in multiple versions and settings, often to the point of recomposed variations. Overall, he offers the modern musician those qualities that never wilt, from lavishly distinctive melodies to the richest harmonic palette in jazz or popular music to a rhythmic variety, reminding us that swing is infinitely supple and can be as uplifting, witty, fierce or romantic as a good tune.

Hollywood's "Golden Age" was, of course, black and white. What gave the pre-World War II talkies their "color" was their ornate, even gaudy, music. Many of those scores were the product of emigre composers and their American followers, who wrote in a reactionary tuneful, tonal, lush Wagnerian style. Although the language of a Europe that was no more, it became the sound of American cinema. That, to some extent, is the theme of the Pacific Symphony's American Composers Festival this year, taken from a chapter in "Artists in Exile," the latest intriguing book by the orchestra's artistic advisor, Joseph Horowitz.

Four American composers have been commissioned to write new pieces for the next two seasons of the Pacific Symphony, the orchestra announced Wednesday. A choral composition by Michael Daugherty, to Carl Sandburg texts, will be a highlight of the orchestra's American Composers Festival, titled "The Greatest Generation," in early February 2010. Two weeks later, a piano concerto by Richard Danielpour will have its premiere with Jeffrey Biegel as soloist. Works by William Bolcom and Zhou Long, both highlighted in earlier American Composers Festival programs, will premiere in the 2010-11 season.