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The Portfolio Composer

May 28, 2015

Rusty Banks is a composer/guitarist born in Jasper, Alabama and living in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. His compositions have been performed in China, Taiwan, France, Italy, Belgium, Canada, Mexico, and throughout the United States. Besides writing concert music for ballet, orchestra, wind ensemble, and other acoustic...


May 21, 2015

The music of Michael Torke has been called "some of the most optimistic, joyful and thoroughly uplifting music to appear in recent years" (Gramophone). Hailed as a "vitally inventive composer" (Financial Times) and "a master orchestrator whose shimmering timbral palette makes him the Ravel of his generation" (New York...


May 18, 2015

Two questions are answered today, and this time by the composers who have shared their insights on Composer on Fire episodes before. The questions:

  • What do I do if the people who commissioned the music don't like it?
  • I haven't commissioned commissioned anything because it will cost a lot of money and I'm not sure I'm...


May 14, 2015

Gregory Spears writes music for modern and period instruments that blends aspects of romanticism, minimalism, and early music.  His work has been called “astonishingly beautiful” (New York Times), “coolly entrancing” (The New Yorker), and “some of the most beautifully unsettling music to appear in...


May 7, 2015

Jason Eckardt played guitar in jazz and metal bands until, upon first hearing the music of Webern, he immediately devoted himself to composition. Since then, his music has been influenced by his interests in perceptual complexity, the physicality of performance, political activism, and self-organizing processes in the...