©2007 Nicholas Schutzenhofer
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Amy Beth Kirsten (b. 8/21/1972 in Belleville, Illinois) is honored to have received a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship and Levy Supplemental Stipend for music composition. The Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard awarded her a 2011 commission to compose a song cycle for the duo TwoSense, featuring Lisa Moore, piano and Ashley Bathgate, cello. In recent years, she was a finalist for the Rome Prize in music composition and received a Rockefeller Foundation Artist Fellowship. In 2009-2010, Ms. Kirsten was named Missouri's First Composer Laureate due to her close association with the state. The residency featured the premier of a new work, Hall of Waters, set to the poetry of Missouri's first Poet Laureate, Walter Bargen.
Ms. Kirsten composes chamber music, orchestral music, solo music, and opera. She has had recent performances by Sequitur, Dark in the Song, Cadillac Moon Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, Tim Munro (of eighth blackbird), American Composers Orchestra, l'Orchestre de la francophonie canadienne, San Francisco Cabaret Opera, Missouri Verses and Voices, and the award-winning choir, Volti. Ms. Kirsten's music has been heard at festivals at home and abroad: Norfolk New Music Workshop, Bang on a Can, Mizzou New Music Festival, MusicX, and at École Normale de Musique in Paris.
This season Ms. Kirsten will have a U.S. premier by Sequitur at Merkin Hall in New York City and three world premiers: a theatrical work for solo flute commissioned by Tim Munro; a theatrical work for solo piano commissioned by Vicki Ray; and a new work for orchestra performed by the Bowling Green Philharmonia / Conrad Lawrence Chu. The 2012-13 season features the premier of a music theatre piece for eighth blackbird which will be choreographed and directed by Martha Clarke (MacArthur Award, 1990) and which was generously sponsored by the MAP Fund. Other patrons of Ms. Kirsten's works include ASCAP, the Presser Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the American Music Center.
Raised in the suburbs of Kansas City and Chicago, Ms. Kirsten received degrees from Benedictine University (BA Jazz Studies, 1998), the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University (MM Composition 2004), and from Peabody Conservatory (DMA Composition, May 2010). Currently a freelance composer, she has previously served on the music faculties of University of Connecticut, Wesleyan University, Towson University, and Peabody Conservatory. She was recently appointed to the composition faculty of the HighSCORE Festival in Pavia, Italy.
Before moving to Baltimore to attend Peabody, Ms. Kirsten was a regular fixture in the Chicago singer-songwriter scene performing at such venues as Fitzgerald's Nightclub, Quenchers Saloon, The Subterranean, Katerina's, and Uncommon Ground.
Ms. Kirsten is also a published poet. Her poem, "November Prayer," is a featured text in the choral work by Christopher Theofanidis entitled Messages to Myself (2007) and several of her poems have appeared in Sol Magazine: Spring 2010; The Avatar Review: Summer 2009; and Red Wheelbarrow: National 2008. All of her music is self-published by Tweet Street Publishing, ASCAP. She currently lives and works in New Haven, CT.
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evokes the pale angel at the center of the text – Ms. Kirsten's own poem – by creating a chromatic, fragmented dream world. Shards of vocalise, tactile percussion (pitched and otherwise), rhythmic whispering and gracefully angular flute lines are intertwined, with the vocal line often seeming part of the instrumental texture. Yet the poetry is not lost here: Elizabeth Farnum, the soprano, sang it with a haunting litheness, with the flutist Tara Helen O'Connor and the percussionists Matthew Gold and Matt Ward winding their light-hued lines around her." (The New York Times, Sept. 21, 2011) |
(KCMETROPOLIS.org, August 25, 2010) |
(Berkeley Daily Planet, Nov. 13, 2008) |
formed the most singularly original event of the evening." (San Francisco Classical Voice, March 2, 2007) |
© 2007-2010 Amy Beth Kirsten - All Rights Reserved.
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