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SAN FRANCISCO COMPOSERS CHAMBER ORCHESTRA
Mark Alburger, Music Director
Sunday, October 19, 2003, at 8:30pm
Performing Arts Center, Golf Club Road
Pleasant Hill, CA

PROGRAM
Mark Alburger and Jan Pusina, conducting

 
 

Jan Pusina's compositional career started in the 1960's while he was studying at U.C. Berkeley, with Four Songs on Zen Texts and Tape Composition #1. It continues today in the instrumental and electro-acoustic genres. His recent performances include Pink Wind, by the San Francisco Community Music Center Orchestra, and Furtive Assymptotes by the SFCCO. He has also recently produced a set of computer music pieces, available on request.

Jan Pusina

Wind Quartet

Anne Baldwin Veterans' Day

Stan McDaniel studied composition with an inspiring teacher and consummate musician named H. Klyne Headley, who (although now forgotten) at that time was quite well known as a composer, conductor and concert pianist. Mr. Headley taught him skills for serious musical composition. Although he pursued a career in philosophy, Stan continued to compose music, bits here and there, and even one or two major pieces over the years, based on further reading and experience as time permitted. Stan made efforts at self-publishing, and in 1965-66 two of his pieces, "The White Tree" and "Estel" (Hope) for solo alto recorder, were received favorably, the first by a laudatory review in The American Recorder magazine (1965) and the second in a letter from the outstanding professional recorder artist Franz Bruggen, who called "Estel" "a real contribution to the modern recorder repertoire."

Stan McDaniel

Quick Rain

Lisa Scola Prosek is a graduate of Princeton University in Music Composition. Her teachers include Edward Cone, Milton Babbitt, Lukas Foss, and Gaetano Giani Luporini. Scola Prosek is the recipient of numerous grants, commissions and awards, including The NY Center for Contemporary Opera "Atelier" Award for The Lariat. Scola Prosek has composed and produced eight operas with librettos in Italian and English. In 2012, Daughter of the Red Tzar, written for acclaimed tenor John Duykers, premiered in San Francisco to capacity audiences, and is currently on the outreach season with Long Beach Opera. Lisa serves as General Manager and Director of the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra, since 2001. Other awards have been from Theatre Bay Area, the LEF Foundation, The Argosy Contemporary Music Fund, Meet the Composer, the Hewlett Foundation, the American Composers Forum, The San Francisco Arts Commission, The Center for Cultural Innovation, The California Arts Council, the NEA and the Zellerbach Foundation.

Lisa Scola Prosek

Chilkat

Dr. Mark Alburger (1957-2023, Upper Darby, PA) was an award-winning, eclectic ASCAP composer with postminimal, postpopular, and postcomedic sensibilities. He was the Music Director of SF Composers Chamber Orchestra, SF Cabaret Opera / Goat Hall Productions, and The Opus Project; Editor-Publisher of 21st-Century Music and New Music; Adjunct Professor Emeritus of Music Theory and Literature at Diablo Valley College; and a Musicologist for Grove Online and Grove Dictionary of American Music. His principal teachers were Gerald Levinson and Joan Panetti (Swarthmore College, B.A.); Jules Langert (Dominican University, M.A.); Christopher Yavelow (Claremont University, Ph.D.); and Terry Riley. Dr. Alburger had composed 399 major works, including chamber music, concertos, oratorios, operas, song cycles, and symphonies. His complete catalogue was available from New Music. (markalburgerworks.blogspot.com)

Mark Alburger

Don Quixote Prologue from "Camino Real"

PERFORMERS

 

Flute
Cheryl Lundstrom
Sarah Hughes

Oboe
Suzanne Christensen
Sheila Weston
Mark Alburger

Clarinet
Rachel Condry
Peter Brown
Marion Fay

Bassoon
Michael Cooke
Michael Garvey
Lori Garvey

Alto Sax
Michael Cooke

Trumpet
Rachel Steele
Daphne Owens

French Horn
Brian Holmes
Jan Pusina

Trombone
Sandra Schlink

Piano
Paul Blackwell 

Percussion
Ken Crawford
Phillip Almquist

Vocalist
Michelle Castillo
Amanda Hopper
Desirae Steele

Violin I
Joanna Pinckney
Kristina Anderson
Phyllis Chang 

Violin II
Ayrin Santoso
Laura Lengowski

Viola
Katrina Wreede
Laura Lengowski

Cello
Esther Jo
Joan Hadashi

Bass
John Beeman
Travis Kindred

 

Mark Alburger Dr. Mark Alburger was the Music Director, Conductor, and founder of the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra. Mark was an eclectic American composer known for his postminimal, postpopular, and postcomedic sensibilities. He served as the Music Director of Goat Hall Productions / San Francisco Cabaret Opera, Editor-Publisher of 21st-Century Music Journal, an award-winning ASCAP composer of concert music published by New Music, an Instructor in Music Theory and Literature at Diablo Valley College, a Music Critic for Commuter Times, an author, musicologist, oboist, pianist, and recording artist.

Dr. Alburger studied oboe with Dorothy Freeman and played in student orchestras that were in association with George Crumb and Richard Wernick. He studied composition and musicology with Gerald Levinson, Joan Panetti, and James Freeman at Swarthmore College (B.A.), Karl Kohn at Pomona College, Jules Langert at Dominican College (M.A.), Tom Flaherty and Roland Jackson at Claremont Graduate School (Ph.D.), and Terry Riley.
       Since 1987, he had lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he initially produced a significant amount of vocal music with assembled texts. His works from this period included the opera "Mice and Men" (1992), the crisis-madrigal collection L.A. Stories (1993), the rap sheet For My Brother For My Brother (1997), and the hieratic Passion According to Saint Matthew (1997).

Since 1997, Dr. Alburger had gridded and troped compositions upon pre-existent compositions ranging from world music and medieval sources to contemporaries such as George Crumb and Philip Glass. To that date, he had written 16 concerti, 7 masses and oratorios, 12 preludes and fugues, 20 operas, 6 song cycles, and 9 symphonies -- a total of 500 opus numbers amounting to more than 800 individual pieces.