Musiqa to Present FROZEN TIME at Asia Society Texas Center, 1/11

Musiqa, winner of the 2013 Chamber Music America/American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers Award for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music, presents its winter concert, Frozen Time, at the Asia Society Texas Center on Saturday, January 11, at 7:30 p.m.

The eclectic concert explores the interconnection between music, literature and photography, with a program that highlights new works by Musiqa composers and new work by the noted writer and poet Nick Flynn. For Musiqa's first collaboration with the Asia Society Texas Center, the concert also showcases a pair of works by composers from Eurasia.

Works by members of Musiqa's artistic board are featured, including a FotoFest-inspired world premiere by Marcus Maroney as well as Karim Al-Zand's lyrical Orange Torches Against the Rain, a song cycle set to poems by American poet Amy Lowell. Poignant works by Eurasian composers include Elena Firsova's Frozen Time and Lei Liang's Trio for Piano, Cello & Percussion. Expressing the literary side of the arts, writer Nick Flynn will read works specifically written for this program.

The concert's performers include Paul Cannon, double bass; Julia Cleworth, cello; Suzanne LeFevre, violin; Grant Loehnig, piano; Tali Morgulis, piano, Aidan Soder, mezzo-soprano, Nathaneal Udell, horn; Yung-Hsiang Wang, violin; Michael Webster, clarinet and Blake Wilkins, percussion.

Frozen Time is a collaboration presented by Musiqa, the Asia Society Texas Center and FotoFest.

Firsova was born in Leningrad into the family of physicists Oleg Firsov and Viktoria Lichko. She studied music in Moscow with Alexander Pirumov, Yuri Kholopov, Edison Denisov and Philip Herschkowitz. In 1979 she was blacklisted as one of the "Khrennikov's Seven" at the Sixth Congress of the Union of Soviet Composers for unapproved participation in some festivals of Soviet music in the West.

She has composed more than a hundred compositions in many different genres including chamber opera The Nightingale and the Rose after Oscar Wilde and Christina Rossetti (premiered in London in 1994), an orchestra work Augury, (premiered in 1992) that includes a choral setting of William Blake's famous lines 'To see the world in a grain of sand...' and Requiem to Anna Akhmatova's poem for soprano, chorus and orchestra (premiered in Berlin in September 2003).

Her favorite genre is a chamber cantata for solo voice and ensemble (or orchestra). Some of them are written to the poems by Alexander Pushkin, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak and Oleg Prokofiev. However, the most of them are setting the poems by her favorite poet Osip Mandelstam.

She has received commissions from many music festivals, orchestras and ensembles including the Concertgebouw Orchestra, Brodsky Quartet, Manchester Wind Orchestra, Schubert Ensemble, Freden Festival, BBC Proms and Expo 2000 (Hanover).

Chinese-born American composer Lei Liang (??, b. Nov. 28, 1972, Tianjin) is Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego. He received his first piano lessons at the age of four, and began composing at age six. His piano teacher Zhou Guang-ren encouraged him to compose without formal training. He received several awards in China for composition and piano performance during childhood, including three honors in the Xinghai National Piano Music Competition, where his early piano music has been in the mandatory repertoire since 1984, and Second Prize for piano performance in the Jing-Jin-Sui competition (1988). In 1989, Beijing Qingnianbao-Beijing Youth Daily-named him one of its ten "Persons of the Year."

In 1990, Liang left his family for the USA as a high school student. He studied piano with William Race in Austin, Texas before shifting his focus to composition. He received degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music (BM & MM, both with academic honors and distinction in performance) and Harvard University (PhD).

Lei Liang received the George Whitefield Chadwick Medal-the honor the New England Conservatory bestows upon its most outstanding graduates-as well as the Tourjée Alumni Scholarship Award (both in 1996). He is the recipient of numerous prizes, fellowships and grants including an Aaron Copland Award (2008), ASCAPLUS Award (2008) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2009). He is the recipient of the Elliott Carter Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (2011), and the Alpert/Ragdale Prize in Music Composition (2012).

Nick Flynn (b. Jan. 26, 1960) is an American writer, playwright, and poet. His most recent publication is "The Reenactments," which chronicles Flynn's experience during the making of "Being Flynn," a film based on his acclaimed 2004 memoir, "Another Bullshit Night in Suck City." Flynn is also the author of three collections of poetry, including "Some Ether," which won the inaugural PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry in 1999, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Raised by his mother outside of Boston, Nick Flynn was estranged from his father. He examined his relationship with his father, as well as the suicide of his mother, in "Another Bullshit Night in Suck City." Flynn explored his decision to have a child in his second memoir, "The Ticking Is The Bomb." Following its publication, he wrote a book of poetry, "The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands," which continued on similar themes. "The Reenactments" is the final book in Flynn's trilogy of memoirs.

Flynn's initial focus was on poetry, and he held a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, before moving to New York to pursue his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at New York University. He was a member of Columbia University's Writing Project, in which he served as an educator and consultant in New York public schools. He currently teaches Creative Writing at the University of Houston.

The music of composer Karim Al-Zand (b.1970) is wide-ranging, from settings of classical Arabic poetry to scores for dance and pieces for young audiences. His works explore connections between music and other arts, and draw inspiration from diverse sources such as 19th century graphic art, fables of the world, folksong and jazz. The subjects of some of his pieces speak to his middle-eastern heritage as well. Al-Zand's music has enjoyed success in the US, Canada and abroad and he is the recipient of several national awards, including the Sackler Composition Prize, the ArtSong Prize, the Louisville Orchestra Competition Prize and the "Arts and Letters Award in Music" from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His music is recorded on the Albany, Capstone and MSR labels. He holds degrees from Harvard and McGill Universities and is currently on the faculty of the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University and is a member of Musiqa's Artistic Board.

Marcus Karl Maroney studied composition and horn at The University of Texas at Austin (B.M.) and Yale School of Music (M.M., D.M.A.). His principle composition teachers were Joseph Schwantner, Ned Rorem, Joan Tower and Dan Welcher. In 1999, he received a fellowship to the Tanglewood Music Center, the First Hearing award from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (for Those Teares are Pearle) and an ASCAP/Morton Gould Young Composer's award. Other awards and fellowships followed, including: a Charles Ives Scholarship from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Music 2000 Prize from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, further awards from ASCAP, a residency at the Copland House and consecutive Woods Chandler Memorial awards from Yale University. Commissions have come from such organizations and individuals as eighth blackbird (Rhythms), the Orchestra of St. Luke's (Hudson), The Norfolk Chamber Music Festival (Introduction and Barrage for the Gryphon Trio), Timothy McAllister (Denk Dir:), the Moores School Percussion Ensemble (Pantheon), the Texas Music Festival (Märchenbilder), the Deer Valley Music Festival (Three Pieces for String Quartet) and the Juventas! New Music Ensemble (Dust of the Road). Three Pieces for String Orchestra was recently premiered by the Utah Symphony, and The Ever-fixed Mark was recently named the winner of the inaugural College Orchestra Directors Association Composition Contest. Dr. Maroney served on the faculty of the Yale School of Music from 2002-2004. He is currently Associate Professor of Music at the University of Houston's Moores School of Music and is a member of Musiqa's Artistic Board.