CHRIS LASTOVICKA, composer, winner of Melodia's Women Composer Commissioning Competition, writes music dealing primarily with psychological and metaphysical subjects. Her opera Crossing the Horizon was a finalist in Houston’s 2008 Opera Vista Competition, held in June 2008. Excerpts from Crossing the Horizon were performed by New York City Opera at their 2007 VOX: Showcasing American Composers festival. Lastovicka’s music has been performed at the Boston Early Music Festival, Merce Cunningham Studio, and in Spoleto, Italy. Her electronic work Spring was commissioned by Robin Becker Dance for the company’s 15-year anniversary. She received a Dale Warland Singers New Music Reading Session award. Her song Thursday received cum laude recognition from the Diana Barnhart American Song Competition.

Lastovicka is the recipient of a Presser Award, a Hatz Award, and a NYSCA Decentralization grant. At age 14, she became the youngest winner in the history of Chicago’s Gruenstein Memorial National Organ Competition. At 15, she won Oberlin’s Otto B. Schoepfle National Organ Competition and was a finalist in the Fort Wayne National Organ Competition.

She studied composition with Samuel Adler, Frederick Bianchi, Joel Hoffman, and Allen Sapp; orchestration with Dominick Argento; and organ with Roberta Gary.

She attended the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music on full scholarship and graduated summa cum laude in 1995. She was born in Houston, TX and raised in Hartsville, SC.

Recordings:
Fortune Has Turned (Ahari Press, 2005)
Láska for oboe d’amore and harpsichord (Classic Concert Records – Austria)

 

BECCA SCHACK is a New York-based composer, performer and lyricist. Becca’s music spans a large spectrum. She has written classically-driven pieces for full orchestra and chamber groups. She also composes, arranges and produces music that she performs, moving from acoustic piano to electro-dance pop and often incorporating a rhythmic base, rooted in jazz, Brazilian and Middle Eastern sounds. A 2002 graduate of The Julliard School with a BM in Music and a major in composition, Becca studied with Samuel Adler, Christopher Rouse and Elliott Sharp. She attended the prestigious Dartington International Summer Festival in Devon, England on full scholarship. In 2004, Becca was a finalist in the John Lennon Songwriting Contest for her song “Metal Factory,” and she received Honorable Mention in two ASCAP Young Composers competitions, the first at age eleven.

In 2003, Becca wrote a commissioned piece for electric cello as part of a music technology concert series, Beyond the Machine 2003, incorporating vocals from children in Kenya and video images by Ellen Sigunick on screen. In 2005, Becca was commissioned by the Austin Ballet to write a te- minute piece for six dancers, and, working in collaboration with choreographer Tawn Dao and percussionist Alex Fortuit, wrote “Stepping Stone,” which premiered in February 2006.

In 2005, Becca received a Gold Record for her involvement playing keyboards with the Trans Siberian Orchestra on “The Lost Christmas Eve.” She was a featured extra in the 2005 Moby video “Lift Me Up” and the 2007 Chris Cornell video “Arms Around Your Love,” both of which aired on MTV. She has worked with other well-known musicians, including Mark Wood, Alex Skolnick, Teddy Thompson, Eric Mingus and members of the New York Philharmonic, and performed as a keyboard player and backup singer with Cantinero in the U.S. and abroad.

As a solo performer, Becca has appeared at several New York clubs, including Spirit, Splash, Show, Don Hill’s and Frying Pan. Her music shows “intricate layers of ambient textures and trip-hop beats,” combining to create “a heady artistic endeavor and a guilty pleasure all at once,” wrote the editor of Download.com.

Becca’s association with Melodia Women’s Choir dates to its early seasons when she was a singer and, on occasion, played keyboards. In 2005, Becca and Alex Fortuit wrote “Fire and Ice,” a widely-praised soundscape for Melodia’s fall concert, Twilight in the Garden of Dreams.

In 2006, Melodia Women’s Choir commissioned Becca to write its second commissioned choral work. Her composition, In My End Is My Beginning, is a work in four movements based on Four Quartets by the acclaimed poet, T.S. Eliot. Like the poetry, the score savors nature’s elements -- air, water, earth and fire. As reflected in the score’s title, each musical movement ends as it begins, attesting beautifully to the cyclical rhythm of life, death and rebirth. One movement, the third, was sung as a work-in-progress in Melodia’s Spring 2007 Concert. The world premiere of the full composition in Sweet Interlude, in Fall 2007, coincides with and celebrates Melodia’s Fifth Anniversary season.

 

ALLISON SNIFFIN is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist. As a composer, she has received grants from Meet the Composer and first prizes from Conductors' Club of America and Sadie M. Rafferty Choral Composition Contest. Her numerous compositions, many of them commissions, include original works and arrangements for voice, chamber ensemble, orchestra, and choir. She has completed commissions for Concert Artists' Guild, Northern Arizona University Chorale, Union Theological Seminary, Stonewall Chorale, Temple Sinai of Bergen County NJ, and Terre Haute Symphony, and arranged several compositions for Melodia's previous concerts. Allison is also music director, arranger, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist with the Meredith Monk Ensemble , working with her since 1996. She has performed with Meredith Monk at the Lincoln Center Festival, Next Wave Festival (BAM), Zankel Hall, Queensland Biennial Festival of Music in Australia, Performing Arts, Chicago, throughout Europe and elsewhere.

Some of her previous works include: An Advent Ceremony of Carols, Even Unto the End of the Earth, Prelude for Horn and String Orchestra, Punch!, Psalm 131, A Poem for the Blue Heron, Madrigal Mortalis, Grant Me A Well of Tears, and Heart, do not Bruise the Breast.

A graduate of Virginia Commonwelath University and Florida
State University, Allison completed post-graduate work at CUNY Graduate Center. She holds B.Mus and M.Mus degrees in music composition, and was a 1987 Fellow, Center for Compositional Studies at Aspen Music Festival, and 1989 Fellow, Atlantic Center for the Arts. She has studied composition with Allan Blank, Harold Schiffman, Andrew Imbrie, Joan Tower, Tania Leon and Thea Musgrave. She lives in New York.

In program notes for the Melodia Women's Choir premiere of her new composition, Allison wrote: "The title of my composition, Óyeme con los ojos (Hear Me with Your Eyes) is taken from a poem by Sor Juana, and also is the heading of a chapter in Octavio Paz’s biography of her. Paz, reflecting on Al amor, cualquier curioso (As to love, anyone curious), a poem inspired by Cartesian logic, imagines “the beautiful nun standing beside a blackboard" arguing in legalistic fashion for the case of Love Freely Chosen vs. Forced (unsolicited) Love.

"I used several texts by Sor Juana to consider the nature of love. Like Paz’s instructor, my narrator analyzes love, to the Renaissance-style accompaniment of Juan Vásquez's love madrigals. But the choir interjects with musically varied responses from Sor Juana's writings, each a window into a different type of love -- a slippery Tango, a jubilant Corrido templado and a tender Cantilena. Danza a Tonantzin presents the interplay between the Divine Mary and ancestral voices, who speak in the native Nahuatl language and recall the goddess Tonantzin. In Bolero Matiz, Sor Juana defends her love of knowledge to the Church, insisting that human intelligence is not at odds with the divine, but confirms it. In the end, a series of dissonances are reconciled by sudden harmonic shift, a musical configuration as unusual as Sor Juana herself. True love, she seems to say, involves searching, risk, growth and a willingness to shift perspective."