User:Jeff Weston/sandbox

The MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music is a US national center devoted to the study, performance, creative work and promotion of contemporary music within the College of Musical Arts at Bowling Green State University. The mission of the center is to bring the local, state, national, and international musical communities together through research, performances, compositions, lectures and outreach programs.

Founded in 1987 with funding from an Ohio Board of Regents Academic Challenge Grant, the Center is housed in the College of Musical Arts at Bowling Green State University. The Center received the 1992 and 1998 Chamber Music America/ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming.

A director, an operations coordinator and an electronic technician/recording engineer are the Center’s permanent staff. Music faculty at BGSU complement the efforts of the staff with performance and scholarship. A national advisory board assists with policy and artistic direction; the current board includes Ara Guzelimian (Dean and Provost, Juilliard School), Ralph Jackson (President, BMI Foundation), Marilyn Nonken (pianist; Director of Piano Studies, NYU-Steinhardt Department of Music and co-founder of Ensemble 21), Claire Chase (flutist; Executive Director, International Contemporary Ensemble), Dan Lippel (guitarist; member of Flexible Music) and George Steel (Artistic Director and General Manager, New York City Opera).

At the heart of the Center’s activities is the New Music Festival. This annual event explores the contemporary arts through concerts, panels, art exhibitions, seminars, master classes and papers. Begun in 1980, the festival has hosted John Adams, Milton Babbitt, William Bolcom, Anthony Braxton, John Cage, Chen Yi, John Corigliano, George Crumb, Mario Davidovsky, Anthony Davis, Philip Glass, John Harbison, Lou Harrison, Karel Husa, Paul Lansky, Pauline Oliveros, Bernard Rands, Terry Riley, Christopher Rouse, Frederic Rzewski, Gunther Schuller, Bright Sheng, Steven Stucky, Morton Subotnick, Joan Tower and more than 350 other guests and artists.

The MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music also sponsors a variety of ongoing services and events including the yearly Music at the Forefront concert series. Grants for research and development activities in music written since 1945 are available to BGSU students, faculty and staff members. Guest musicians and scholars may apply for residencies and research consultation; limited in-kind services are frequently granted. The Archives of the MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music contain more than 9,000 scores and provide invaluable resources for research and study. As outreach to the northwest Ohio community, the Center sponsors summer workshops, cooperative projects with public schools and presentations for service organizations.

The Archives of the MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music, originally supported in part by funds awarded from an Ohio Board of Regents Academic Challenge Grant, were established in 1987. This collection, housed in the Music Library and Sound Recordings Archives of William T. Jerome Library, contains the documents, scores and recordings submitted for the Annual New Music & Art Festivals and year-round performance consideration, as well as tapes of live performances and the New Music Festival Radio Series, videotaped interviews with guest composers, programs, posters, paper abstracts and other documentation. The Center for Archival Collections at BGSU has developed a finding aid to guide users in locating print documentation from this section of the archives.