Strange Attractors

Martin Herman composed his Arena in 1990-91. Herman has worked at IRCAM with Pierre Boulez and in Iannis Xenakis' studio. He is currently on the faculty of California State University, Long Beach, where he teaches music composition and theory and directs the Computer and Electronic Music Studio. Augusta Read Thomas' coolly austere Whites resulted from the composer's desire to make a sonic equivalent of a visual exploration of white. Stephen Jaffe composed his Impromptu in 1987. It is a short set of variations based on a bluesy pavanne and was composed for a 70th birthday concert in honor of George Rochberg. Jaffe is currently on the faculty of Duke University where he directs the concert series "encounters with the Music of Our Time." According to the composer Randall Woolf, the hard-driving Nobody Move "tries to find the common ground between the menace of the hard-core Hollywood villain and the fearless bravado of the virtuoso pianist, with the audience as helpless victim, too frightened to bat an eye." John Harbison won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1987. His Four Occasional Pieces were written over a ten year period between larger, more serious works. Today he holds an endowed professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Robert Kyr's White Tigers is based on a legend found in Maxine Hong Kingston's novel "The Woman Warrior" in which a young girl learns the ways of a woman warrior in part by emulating a white tiger - the wildest, most mysterious beast in the jungle - and goes on to liberate her people from oppression.