American Music for Flute, Voice & Strings

Ronald Perera is the Elsie Irwin Sweeney Professor of Music at Smith College. His compositions include operas, song cycles, chamber, choral and orchestral music and several works that combine instruments or voices with electronic sounds. Donald Wheelock is Irwin and Pauline Alper Glass Professor of Music at Smith College, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1974. His teachers include Edgar Curtis, Kenneth Leighton, Quincy Porter and Yehudi Wyner. His works include four string quartets, two symphonies, many works for solo instruments, eleven song cycles and many larger ensemble and orchestral works. Ed London is known primarily as a composer and conductor. His teachers included Gunther Schuller, Luigi Dallapiccola and Darius Milhaud. Like two other composers and one of the performers on this recording, he has a connection with Smith College, having taught there for most of the 60s. Since then he has taught at the University of Illinois and at Cleveland State University, where he founded the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, the award-winning ensemble renowned for its enthusiastic performances of the works of living composers. The name Otto Luening appears most frequently in conjunction with his pioneering efforts with Vladimir Ussachevsky in the early days of electronic music. His talents, however, ranged far wider than experimentation in this area. He was trained extensively, both in Europe and America, as a flautist, conductor and composer, and his career, both as flautist and conductor, was considerable.