This is an historical archive for streaming the original MN Composers Gallery Radio Programs so you may listen to the guest composers and their music. This website also includes the Radio broadcast shows of the first West Banks School of Music Jazz Composers Series 1985 which I also engineered and produced for KFAI FM Community Radio.
Eventually more details on music, performers, air dates etc.. will be added over time. I've also or soon will include some tapes that are in a raw unedited form; such as prerecorded interviews and other such source materials. Sometimes that is all I have left of the program that might not of been recorded when aired. The composer's consistent astute discourse, as well as their excellent music is why these programs are archived here for your listening pleasure.
MN Composers Gallery Intro-Outro theme:
(Music composed by Richard Byron Strunk with sound effects by Eric 'Barney' Peterson)
Janika Vandervelde
MCG 1985-09-12 Jan Vandervelde
- 32min
MCG 1987-03-25 Janika Vandervelde
- 51min
Works:
Genesis II
Genesis III
Janika Vandervelde was born in Ripon, Wisconsin, and grew up in nearby Green Lake, playing horn and piano. She began composing in her teens. After undergraduate studies in music education at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, she relocated to the Twin Cities of Minnesota, earning a doctorate in composition from the University of Minnesota, where her teachers included Dominick Argento and Eric Stokes. She has taught intermittently at the University of Minnesota School of Music, and teaches regularly at the Perpich Center for Arts Education, a residential high school for the arts in Golden Valley, Minnesota. Additionally, Vandervelde served as music director at Wesley United Methodist Church in Minneapolis.
The music of Janika Vandervelde grows out of a vigorous dialogue between instinct and form. Her subtle, assymetrical weave of pitches and rhythms has been described by musicologist Susan McClary (MacArthur Foundation fellow and author of Feminine Endings) as "endlessly fascinating — almost like facets of a crystal that seem to change with each turn . . . ordered, yet timeless." Her 'Genesis' series of compositions — seven works written between 1982 and 1989 for a range of small ensembles — is an extended exploration of life cycles and cycles of change, rooted in the contrapuntal flow of expanding palindromes and clockworks. The architecture of these acclaimed pieces derives from an early interest in the T’ai-chi diagram, which provided the composer with an alternative to western, linear compositional models. In the past decade, Ms. Vandervelde’s music has become more eclectic and elastic, integrating a more open, spontaneous, multi-dimensional sound-world into her earlier preoccupation with process, architecture, and purity of language.
A native of Wisconsin, Ms. Vandervelde has written more than 90 works for orchestras, choirs, chamber ensembles, soloists, and the stage, including the operas Hildegard (1989) and Seven Sevens (1993). She has twice been a Bush Artist Fellow and a McKnight Foundation Composer Fellow, has been honored with the Boulanger Award of the Women’s Philharmonic in San Francisco, and has received grants and fellowships from the Minnesota State Arts Board, ASCAP, and the American Composers Forum. She has been commissioned by such organizations as The Minnesota Orchestra, The Guthrie Theater, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Women’s Philharmonic, the Minnesota Chorale, the Dale Warland Singers, Chanticleer, the Oregon Repertory Singers, and Zeitgeist. She has been profiled in the New Grove Dictionary of Music (2nd ed.) and the International Who's Who of Classical Musicians.
During the period 1999-2002, Ms. Vandervelde served as Composer-in-Residence for three Twin Cities organizations — the Minnesota Chorale, the Minnesota Center for Arts Education, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom — under a New Residencies grant from New York City-based Meet the Composer, Inc. In this capacity, she acted as a musical ambassador to the wider community, offering presentations in neighborhood venues, pre-concert talks, and school residencies, organizing reading sessions, coaching local performers, and teaching classes for student composers and other young artists.
Since completing her three-year New Residencies grant, Ms. Vandervelde has worked on a steady stream of choral commissions for groups at all levels, from professionals to children. In 2006, she designed a composition curriculum using music technology—Music By Kids For Kids—available from the American Composers Forum. She currently serves on the faculty of the Perpich Center for Arts Education—a state-wide, innovative arts high school with a cutting-edge, composition-based music program.
Like Us & Then Add your Comment
on the Composer and their Music!
The 1st year of the MN composers Gallery was produced and hosted by Eric 'Barney' Peterson & Richard Byron Strunk; later, only by Richard Byron Strunk. 1985 - 1989 On KFAI "Fresh Air" FM Radio
Quick thank you to Composer Randall Davidson who originally encouraged this idea and Jody Williams who was instrumental in its progressive improvement as well as thanks to The American Composers forum staff, Warren Park and the West Bank School of Music plus countless other composers, musicians and music lovers that made this show possible.
All music is owned and belongs sololy to this music's composer; all rights belong to the composers and the music that is provided here as an historical archeive; and visitors to this archeive may only stream and listen to this music.
Janika Vandervelde was born in Ripon, Wisconsin, and grew up in nearby Green Lake, playing horn and piano. She began composing in her teens. After undergraduate studies in music education at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, she relocated to the Twin Cities of Minnesota, earning a doctorate in composition from the University of Minnesota, where her teachers included Dominick Argento and Eric Stokes. She has taught intermittently at the University of Minnesota School of Music, and teaches regularly at the Perpich Center for Arts Education, a residential high school for the arts in Golden Valley, Minnesota. Additionally, Vandervelde served as music director at Wesley United Methodist Church in Minneapolis.