SCHOLA CANTORUM SAN FRANCISCO

Dr. Mark Alburger

Dr. Mark Alburger is the Music Director, Conductor and founder of the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra. He is an eclectic American composer of postminimal, postpopular,and postcomedic sensibilities. He is also Music Director of Goat Hall Productions, Editor-Publisher of 21st-Century Music Journal, Music Critic for Commuter Times and San Francisco Classical Voice, an award-winning ASCAP composer of concert music published by New Music, oboist, pianist, vocalist, recording artist, musicologist, and author. Alburger began playing the oboe and composing with Dorothy and James Freeman, George Crumb, and Richard Wernick. He studied with Karl Kohn at Pomona College, Joan Panetti and Gerald Levinson at Swarthmore College (B.A.), Jules Langert at Dominican College (M.A.), Roland Jackson at Claremont Graduate School (Ph.D.), and Terry Riley. Two of his operas, The Pied Piper of Hamelin and Cats, Dogs, and Divas were premiered in May at the Fresh Voices VI Festival at Thick House, on programs which also included his Ecclesiastes, San Rafael News, and Waiting for Waiting for Godot.

Alexis Alrich has been a member of the SFCCO since its first concert. She has recently been chosen to attend an artists’ colony in August of 2006, I-Park in Connecticut, where she will write an orchestral piece about endangered forests. As one of the winners of a Continental Harmony grant from the American Composers Forum she has written a piece for chorus, orchestra and soloists for the state of Maine. Avenues, her first orchestra piece, was premiered by the Women's Philharmonic and has been played around the country. Her chamber compositions have been performed by members of the San Francisco ballet, opera and symphony orchestras and ensembles including Bay Brass, City Winds, the Ariel Ensemble, New Release Alliance and Earplay in San Francisco. Ms. Alrich is one of four hosts of a weekly radio show on KUSF in San Francisco, “Classical Salon” with little-heard music from 1800 to the present.

John Beeman studied with Peter Fricker and William Bergsma at the University of Washington where he received his Master’s degree. His first opera, The Great American Dinner Table was produced on National Public Radio. Orchestral works have been performed by the Fremont-Newark Philharmonic, Santa Rosa Symphony, and the Peninsula Symphony. Mr. Beeman received ASCAP special awards from 1998 -2005, and also has attended the Ernest Bloch Composers’ Symposium, the Bard Composer-Conductor program, the Oregon Bach Festival, and the Oxford Summer Institutes. His “Concerto for Electric Guitar and Orchestra” was performed in January 2001 by Paul Dresher, electric guitar. In 2002 "Angel of Peace" (SATB chorus) premiered at the Oregon Bach Festival. 2003 had two major performances: The Answering Machine (opera) received its second production on July 25-27 as part of Fresh Voices IV ; and Four Retablos was performed by Ensemble Sorelle at the Seattle Art Museum. In 2004 Smoke and Mirrors was premiered by the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra funded by a Subito grant from the American Composers Forum. On April 23, 2005 Beeline: A Concert Overture was performed by the Mission Chamber Orchestra.

Michael Cooke is a composer and performer who plays flute, bass clarinet, soprano sax, alto sax, tenor sax, and bassoon. This Louis Armstrong Jazz award winner graduated from the University of North Texas, which he attended while on a competitive bassoon performance scholarship. Michael graduated cum laude with many different areas of study; jazz, ethnomusicology, music history, theory and of course composition. In 1991 Michael began his professional orchestral career performing in many north Texas area symphonies. He also has performed in jazz and free improvising ensembles. Michael has toured Europe, Mexico, and across the United States with various groups. Cimarron Music and Productions began published many of Michael’s compositions in 1994. In 1999, Michael started a jazz label called Black Hat Records and is currently on the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra. Michael has recorded several CDs, which receive international airplay, and has won two Sports Emmy for his work on “NASCAR on Fox”.

Lisa Scola Prosek recently premiered her new opera and libretto in Italian Leonardo’s Notebooks, which was featured on KQED’s West Coast Live. Lisa grew up in Rome and studied composition at Princeton University with Milton Babitt and Ed Cone, and voice with Margherita Kalil of the Met. Lisa’s graduate studies in music composition were at the Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini in Florence, and in New York she studied with Lukas Foss. Lisa also holds a Masters in Architecture from the University of Washington. She is currently working with film artist Jakub Kalousek on a new opera, Belfagor, based on the tale by Macchiavelli which will feature “soft set’ videography. The American Composers Forum’s generous support of Lisa’s Libera Me for the Schola Cantorum and the SFCCO was made possible through a grant of the Community Engagement Program.

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.

Dr. Erling Wold is a composer, aesthete and a bon vivant. He is currently working on a solo opera for tenor John Duykers to be premiered in early 2007, and a personal autobiographical theater piece detailing his corruption and death with the help of James Bisso. His dance opera Blinde Liebe, on a true crime story, was recently performed in Europe and the US with Palindrome Dance of Nürnberg Germany. He recently premiered his opera Sub Pontio Pilato, an historical fantasy on the death and remembrance of Pontius Pilate in San Francisco and Austria.He completed a residency at ODC Theater with a presentation of a chamber opera based on William Burroughs' early autobiographical novel “Queer”, with the support of the Burroughs estate. His critically acclaimed work A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, based on the Max Ernst collage novel, was presented by the Paul Dresher Ensemble and ODC in 2000. It was given its European premiere in a German version by the Klagenfurter Ensemble in July of 2001 and toured to Max Ernst's hometown of Brühl. He is an eclectic composer whose teachers include Gerard Grisey, Robert Gross, Andrew Imbrie and John Chowning, but who has also been called "the Eric Satie of Berkeley surrealist/minimalist electro-artrock" by the Village Voice. He composed the soundtracks for four Jon Jost films. He holds a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley and was a researcher in signal processing and music synthesis at Yamaha Music Technologies before co-founding Muscle Fish LLC, an audio and music software company.