Centennial Composers

Dorothy Hindman’s music, fusing punk/grunge with spectralist sensibility and classical refinement, has been called “bright with energy and a lilting lyricism” (New York Classical Review), “dramatic, highly strung” (Fanfare), “varied, utterly rich and sung with purpose and heart” (Huffington Post), and “powerful and skillfully conceived” (The Miami Herald).  ICON magazine raves, “Hindman’s music weds technique and syntax of classical music with the directness and impudence of rock. Highly recommended for rockers wishing to get their proverbial feet wet in post-20th century classical music.”

Hindman’s catalog of 100+ works received over 400 performances spanning 150 cities and 22 countries, by the world’s top new music performers including CAMP, Ex-Sentia, Bent Frequency, Empire City Men’s Chorus, Fresh Squeezed Opera, Quince, Splinter Reeds, the [Switch~ Ensemble], Gregg Smith Singers, Caravel String Quartet, New York Saxophone Quartet, Corona Guitar Kvartet, Duo 46, bassist Robert Black, cellist Craig Hultgren, percussionists Stuart Gerber and David Moliner, and more. Festival appearances include Havana Contemporary Music Festival, Australian Flute Festival, and Rome’s Nuovi Spazi Musicali. Artistic collaborations include scoring Carrie Mae Weem’s film Italian Dreams, and The Wall Calls to Me with visual artist Sally Wood Johnson.

Hindman’s awards and other recognition include Finalist in Resonate 2024 and the 2023 14^th Edition of the "Città di Udine" International Compositioviiin, Winner of the NODUS 2022 Fundacio Caixa Castello, a 2019 Mellon Foundation CREATE grant, ISCM/New Music Miami, Iron Composer, NACUSA and others.  Her music is published by Universal Edition and Subito, and her recordings appear on innova, Albany, and Capstone. Hindman is Associate Professor of Music Composition at the University of Miami.

A centennial is an auspicious occasion, a celebration of a century of people working together with common goals to build a legacy of something lasting and impactful. To be asked to celebrate it by creating a new piece of music is a high honor. Knowing that I cannot express 100 years of history in a six minute piece, nor can I predict its future, I tried instead to capture as many of my own undergraduate and graduate memories and emotions as possible. Foremost among these are the gifted mentors who deeply expanded my universe with new knowledge and possibilities, and the rapid ways that my dreams grew and changed as I discovered my ultimate desire and purpose. 

This fanfare is a whirlwind of overlapping themes, emotions, and moods, much like the college experience itself. These fragments might conjure the thunderous excitement of undefeated football seasons, the solemn joy of graduation and the Alma Mater, or just the tranquility of sitting quietly in thought by the lake. I hope that somewhere in the exuberant swirl of this piece you will recall some of your own experiences of the special mentors, discoveries, and friendships that continue to shape you, the legacy that we gather to celebrate.

The music of Peter Van Zandt Lane reflects an organic coalescence of his eclectic musical life. Formative experiences include: learning piano by ear at the age of four by snooping on his older sister’s lessons (he began studying properly at five, but turned out to be a terribly distractible student); taking up electric guitar at nine (fed by a steady diet of classic rock by his father); joining middle-school band at eleven (he asked for a sax, but they gave him a bassoon); making bad techno music on a Korg synthesizer as a teenager; and spending his high school and undergrad years juggling a life of playing bassoon in orchestras and guitar/vocals in rock bands around South Florida. After growing a deep affinity for the music of the Renaissance in college, his work would increasingly explore new perspectives on old techniques like canon, isorhythm, and prolation. Since the mid-2000s, he’s composed dozens of concert works for chamber ensembles, wind ensemble, and orchestras (often incorporating electronics in performance), which have accumulated hundreds of performances across five continents. Upon receiving the Charles Ives Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters remarked “At every turn, his propulsive, incisive work is beautifully and confidently made. . . Lane's music is as inviting as it is sophisticated.”

Recent major works include Radix Tyrannis, a trombone concerto for NY Phil legend Joseph Alessi commissioned by American Chamber Winds (available on Mark Records); Piano Quartet: The Longitude Problem commissioned by Atlanta Chamber Players (available on Innova Recordings); Chamber Symphony, commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for EQ Ensemble (Boston). Several of his works for wind ensemble –particularly Hivemind and Astrarium– have become mainstays of wind ensemble programming across the country and beyond. Lane’s music often tackles questions of how we engage the world and each other through technology, directing his unique blend of contemporary classical with touches of minimalism, modernism, rock and electronica towards a uniquely 21st-century brand of humanism. 

Peter’s music for contemporary dance created in collaboration with acclaimed choreographer Kate Ladenheim has also garnered international attention, with their 2013 exploration of cyber-activism in the form of an evening-length ballet, HackPolitik, being praised by the New York Times for “explor[ing] identity and anarchy in a refreshingly relevant way” and their second collaboration, GLASS, being dubbed a top-10 work of 2018 by Dance Magazine. He continues to be active as a bassoonist specializing in contemporary chamber and electroacoustic music, premiering dozens of works by living composers. Recordings of his compositions can be found on New Focus Recordings, PARMA, Mark Records, New Dynamic Records, and Innova Recordings. 

Peter Van Zandt Lane is an Associate Professor of Composition and Director of the Roger and Phyllis Dancz Center for New Music at the University of Georgia Hugh Hodgson School of Music. He holds degrees from the University of Miami Frost School of Music and Brandeis University, where he studied composition with Lansing McLoskey, David Rakowski, Eric Chasalow, and Melinda Wagner. He lives in Athens, Georgia with his wife, two kids, and two cats.

Dr. Kevin Day (b. 1996) is an award-winning, multi-disciplinary composer, jazz pianist and conductor. Internationally acclaimed as one of the world’s leading musical voices, Dr. Day’s work is known as a vibrant exploration of diverse musical traditions from contemporary classical, jazz, R&B, Soul and more. Across all areas, his work explores the complex interplay of rhythm, texture and melody across genres. His music has been performed and commissioned by the Cincinnati Opera, Houston Symphony Orchestra, Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, Dallas Winds, Nu Deco Ensemble, Boston Brass, Capitol Quartet, Puerto Rican Trombone Ensemble, Syrinx Quintet, Sheffield Chamber Players and many others throughout the United States, Canada, Austria, Taiwan, South Africa, Australia and Japan. Dr. Day is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Copland House Residency Award, the MacDowell Fellowship for Music Composition, the BMI Composer Award, the TCU Alumni Outstanding Young Professional Award, and many more. Dr. Day holds a BM in Performance from TCU, a MM in Composition from the University of Georgia, and a DMA in Composition from the University of Miami Frost School of Music. His composition teachers and mentors include Dorothy Hindman, Charles Norman Mason, Peter Van Zandt Lane, Emily Koh, Gabriela Lena Frank, and Neil Anderson-Himmelspach. 

Charles Norman Mason has been recognized repeatedly for his originality and attention to color.  Peter Burwasser of Fanfare writes that Mason’s music speaks in a “boldly, original voice”. High Performance Reviewstates that the music is “full of invention… funky and colorful… consistently ingenious.”  Katherine Porlington writes in Upstate Music (NY) “...Mason's Senderos Que se Bifurcan... is, without doubt, one of the finest new clarinet chamber works of the past twenty years.”  Nancy Raabe writes in The Birmingham News “Mason's brilliant From Shook Foil occupies a class of its own... it is charged with creativity.”

Mason has received many awards for his compositions including the Rome Prize, the American Composer Orchestra “Playing it Unsafe” prize, the MTNA 2022 Distinguished Composer Award, the International Society of Bassists  prize,  the Ernst Bacon Memorial Award American Prize, Fresh Minds selection prize, First Prize in the Yoon Jin Kim Contemporary Music Composers Around the World Competition, the Premi Internacional de Composició Musical Ciutat de Tarragona Orchestra Music prize, a  National Endowment of the Arts Individual Artist Award, First Prize in the Atlanta Clarinet Association Composition Competition, a  Plymouth Music Orchestra Reading fellow, a Delius Prize, the  Dale Warland Singers Commission Prize. In 2009 he received the Outstanding Alumni award from the University of Miami Frost School of Music.

His music has been performed throughout the world and broadcast on a number of radio stations including “Performance Today” (featuring his string quartet) on NPR and RIAA in Italy and his compositions were the subject of two radio programs on Mexico’s Opus 94 on 94.5 FM.

For a number of years, Mason has explored isolation and connectedness as well as spatial location (music written for specific locations). He has also worked in collaboration with artists such as New York video artist Sheri Wills, New York photographer Richard Barnes, and Video artist Alex Schweder.  Mason’s collaborative works with video have appeared in Yerba Buena (San Francisco), Howard House (Seattle), American Academy in Rome, and the ISPIN Gallery (New York).  His work, Murmurs was featured in the New York Times magazine and the on-line magazine FLYP media.

In addition to his year in Rome, Mason has had residencies at I-Park, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, composer in residence at the International Centre for Composers in Visby, Sweden, invited guest composer for the Visiones Sonoras 2015 festival, a resident composer at the Hambidge Center, the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, the ppianissimo New Music Festival in Bulgaria, and has had two residencies with "Escape To Create” in Seaside, Florida. 

His music is available on sixteen different compact disc recordings on Albany Records, Beauport Classical, Innova Recordings, Quindecim Recordings, North/South Consonance Recordings, Capstone Recordings, Seamus recordings, and Living Artist Recordings labels.

Dr. Mason is chair of the composition department at the Frost School of Music, University of Miami and is professor of composition.

Steve Danyew’s music has been hailed as “startlingly beautiful” and “undeniably well crafted and communicative” by the Miami Herald, and has been praised as possessing “sensitivity, skill and tremendous sophistication” by the Kansas City Independent.

Danyew (b. 1983) is the recipient of numerous national and international awards for his work (see full list below), and his compositions have been performed throughout the world in venues such as the Sydney Opera House, the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, and the steps of the US Capitol.

Danyew’s recent work Into the Silent Land was named the winner of the 2019 Walter Beeler Memorial Composition Prize.

An early work for orchestra, The Night Eagle was awarded a prestigious BMI Composer Award. Five of his compositions for wind band are featured between Volumes 11 and 12 of Teaching Music Through Performance in Band (GIA).

In addition to composing, Danyew is a passionate educator who teaches composition lessons through his own private studio. He also teaches courses focused on helping young musicians craft their own creative careers at the Eastman School of Music’s Institute for Music Leadership. 

He is the contributing author for the 2nd edition of Ramon Ricker’s book Lessons from a Street-Wise Professor: What You Won’t Learn at Most Music Schools (Soundown, 2018). He is also a frequent guest composer and lecturer at schools throughout the United States.

Danyew grew up in New England, playing the saxophone and improvising music on the piano. After a performance of his own work, the South Florida Sun Sentinel proclaimed him a “saxophone virtuoso par excellence, making the instrument sing as well as shout.” Danyew performed as a saxophonist in the University of Miami Wind Ensemble under the direction of Gary Green, and this formative experience led him to begin composing works for wind band.

Danyew received a B.M. in Composition from the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami where his primary composition teachers were Scott Stinson and Dennis Kam. He also holds an M.M. in Composition from the Eastman School of Music. Additionally, Danyew has served as a Composer Fellow at the Yale Summer Music School with Martin Bresnick, and as a Composer Fellow at the Composers Conference with Mario Davidovsky.

Kenneth Fuchs is the first living American composer recorded by the virtuoso Sinfonia of London and its brilliant conductor, John Wilson.

In June 2024, Chandos Records released Light Year, Orchestral Works, Volume 2, which includes a large suite for orchestra, a concerto for alto saxophone (with the superstar Timothy McAllister), a concerto for bass trombone (with the gifted James Buckle), and an idyll for winds, brass, strings, and percussion.

In July 2023, Chandos Records released Cloud Slant, Orchestral Works, Volume 1, which includes two works for full orchestra, an exuberant composition for strings, and a concerto for C and alto flute, performed by the extraordinary Adam Walker.

Fuchs recorded for Naxos five albums with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by JoAnn Falletta, the last of which won the 2018 GRAMMY^® Award for “Best Classical Compendium.” In August 2020, Naxos released Point of Tranquility (Seven Works for Symphonic Winds), recorded by the United States Coast Guard Band. Naxos also published an album of chamber music including Falling Canons, Falling Trio and String Quartet No. 5 “American.” Albany Records published String Quartets 2, 3, 4 in definitive performances by the American String Quartet.

Fuchs has composed music for orchestra, band, voice, chorus, soloists, and various chamber ensembles. With Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lanford Wilson, Fuchs created three chamber musicals. The National September 11 Memorial & Museum presented Fuchs’s operatic monodrama Falling Man (text by Don DeLillo, adapted by J. D. McClatchy) in commemoration of the 15th anniversary of 9/11. His music has achieved significant global recognition through performances, media exposure, and digital streaming and downloading.

Fuchs serves as Professor of Music Composition at the University of Connecticut. He is a graduate of the University of Miami and received master of music and doctor of musical arts degrees from The Juilliard School. His composition teachers include Milton Babbitt, David Diamond, and Vincent Persichetti. His music is published by Bill Holab Music, Hal Leonard LLC, Edward B. Marks Music Company, and Theodore Presser Company, and it has been recorded by Albany, Chandos, and Naxos. His webpage is: kennethfuchs.com

Gramophone Magazine calls Shawn Crouch a "gifted composer" and the New York Times describes Shawn Crouch's work as music of "gnarling atonal energy". The Miami Herald called his Road from Hiroshima; A Requiem a "staggering achievement, an imaginative, powerful and deeply moving work." Recently Crouch’s Visions and Ecstasies, A Mass was named “Best New Work” by the South Florida Classical Review. Shawn has received grants and awards from such institutions as the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The American Prize, ASCAP, BMI, Yale University, Society of Composers Inc., Meet the Composer, NewMusicUSA, and the Percussive Arts Society. He is the inaugural recipient of the Dale Warland Singers Commissioning Award given by Chorus America and the American Composers Forum. Shawn has had his works performed and commissioned by ensembles in the United States, Canada and Europe including the Cleveland Orchestra, American Modern Ensemble, The American Guild of Organists, Blow, Cantori New York, California E.A.R. Unit, Chanticleer, Del Sol String Quartet, Eighth Blackbird the Esoterics, Essential Voices USA, the Lunar Ensemble, Lost Dog New Music Ensemble, Non Sequitur, newEar Contemporary Ensemble, Plexure Trio, Phoenix Chorale, Prism Quartet, Quince Ensemble, San Francisco Choral Artists, Santa Fe Chorale, Seraphic Fire, Splinter Reeds, [Switch~ Ensemble],the Yesaroun' Duo, Variant 6, and Volti. Shawn received his B.Mus. in composition from the New England Conservatory with honors and distinction in performance, his M.Mus. in composition from the Yale School of Music, and his D.M.A. in composition from the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami. Shawn Crouch is a BMI composer. Crouch is currently Associate Professor of Professional Practice in Composition and Theory at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music where he is artistic director of the Ensemble Ibis.

I first encountered Marc Kaminsky’s powerful poems about life before and after the Hiroshima bombing over coffee in New Haven, Connecticut, while Patrick Dupré Quigley and I were both studying at the Yale School of Music. Patrick recited one of Kaminsky’s poems to me—a haunting piece describing the moment after the bomb detonated, leaving only the shoes of those who had stood moments earlier on a train station platform. These vivid and emotional portrayals of nuclear devastation deeply moved us, and we felt compelled to collaborate on a project incorporating Kaminsky’s words.

The resulting work titled The Road from Hiroshima, A Requiem, is scored for choir, children’s choir, soprano and baritone soloists, and chamber orchestra. It begins with a brief “awakening” of bells set days after the bombing, then moves backward through scenes of devastation, the bombing itself, and ultimately returns to Hiroshima as an industrial city before August 6, 1945. Inspired by the structure of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, The Road from Hiroshima unfolds on three levels. The soprano and baritone soloists, along with the children’s choir, give voice to the stories told through Kaminsky’s poetry. The chamber choir, singing the Latin Requiem text, represents the human condition. The interweaving of Latin and English texts creates not only a lamentation of suffering and loss but also a visceral reflection on life amid tragedy.

Through more than 200 works for a wide range of performance genres, including works with and without electronics for orchestra, choir, soloists, and chamber ensembles, Orlando Jacinto Garcia has established himself as an important figure in the contemporary classical/new music world. The distinctive character of his music has often been described as "time suspended sonic explorations," qualities he developed from his studies with Morton Feldman, among others.

Born in Havana, Cuba and residing in the US, he is the recipient of numerous honors and awards including Rockefeller, Fulbright, Knight, Dutka, Civitella Ranieri, Bogliasco, and Cintas Foundations, State of Florida, MacDowell and Millay Colony, and Ariel, Noise International, Matiz Rangel, Nuevas Resonancias, Salvatore Martirano, American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Bloch International Competitions. Garcia is the recipient of 5 Latin Grammy nominations in the Best Contemporary Classical Composition Category with recordings on New Albion, O.O. Discs, CRI /New World, Albany, North/South, CRS, Rugginenti, VDM, Capstone, Innova, CNMAS, Opus One, Telos, Toccata Classics, Metier/Divine Art, and New Focus.

He is the founder and director of the NODUS Ensemble, the Miami Chapter of the ISCM, and the New Music Miami Festival. A dedicated educator, Garcia is Composer in Residence and Distinguished University Professor at Florida International University.

Hailed as “whirlwind” (Gramophone), “ingeniously derived” (Sequenza21), and “dramatic…and powerfully funny” (Observer), the works of composer-librettist Dana Kaufman have been heard in North America, Europe, and Asia. Her compositions have been featured at venues and festivals such as Carnegie Hall, New York Opera Fest, Contemporary Music Center of Milan, the National Gugak Center (South Korea), Seattle Opera’s Tagney Jones Hall, The Tank, Jordan Hall, Hartford Opera Theater, Vatroslav Lisinski Concert Hall (Croatia), Ravinia Festival, and Opera on Tap Chicago; they have been commissioned by GRAMMY-winning pianist Nadia Shpachenko, the Louisville Ballet, Carlow Arts Festival (Ireland), Synchromy, the Lowell Chamber Orchestra, Paradox Opera, and many others.

A Fulbright Research Fellow in Estonia, National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, winner of an OPERA America’s Opera Grants for Women Composers: Discovery Grant (supported by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation), University of Miami Frost School of Music Centennial Medalist, and four-time American Prize honoree, Kaufman has given lectures at the LA Opera, Women Composers Festival of Hartford, Leuphana Universität Lüneberg, and the Music by Women Festival as a frequent speaker on gender diversity in composition and queer opera. She is Associate Professor in Music Composition at University of California, Riverside. danakaufmanmusic.com