UMaine’s Wiemann Wins Aaron Copland House Music Residency
Contact: George Manlove at (207) 581-3756
ORONO — UMaine music professor, composer and performer Beth Wiemann has been selected for a 2004 Aaron Copland Awards residency at the former home of composer Aaron Copland near Peekskill, N.Y., an historic rural hide-away for emerging and talented musicians to work uninterrupted.
The expenses-paid residencies offer gifted composers the opportunity to live for three to eight weeks at Copland’s restored, landmark home one hour north of New York City, to focus undisturbed on their creative work, according to the Copland House.
Typically, six to eight gifted, emerging or mid-career American composers each year are invited to reside, one at a time, at Copland House, Aaron Copland’s restored, longtime New York home. There they can focus on their creative work, free from the distractions of daily life and other professional responsibilities. As guests of Copland House for three weeks to two months, their meals, housekeeping, local transportation and other needs are provided.
Copland House jurors reviewed 90 applications from composers in 28 states to select eight winners this year. Jurors considered composers breaking new ground in musical genres that include “uptown and downtown, electronic and acoustic, progressive and traditional and emerging and mid-career,” Copland House says.
Wiemann’s compositions include synthesized classical music, often featuring clarinet, saxophone, voice or piano, sometimes involving video.
A clarinetist and composer who joined the UMaine faculty in 1997, she has performed on several compilation CDs, Wiemann recently released her first full length compact disk, “Why Performers Wear Black,” released by Albany Records and featuring soprano Susan Narucki and pianist Christopher Oldfather. The music incorporates Wiemann’s interest in setting words with electronic and digital technology.
The Copland residency will be the fifth for Wiemann this year. Currently on sabbatical, she also has received expenses-paid fellowships at Yaddo in upstate New York and at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, N.H.
Wiemann earned a bachelor’s degree at Oberlin College and a master’s and Ph. D. at Princeton. She maintains homes in Bangor and in Maynard, Mass.