User:MDELLAIRA/sandbox

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Michael Dellaira is a composer of classical music, primarily for the voice. He is a citizen of the United States and Italy. He resides in New York City with his wife, the writer Brenda Wineapple.

Background

 * Born Michael Dellario on August 5, 1949 in Schenectady, New York, Dellaira attended Linton High School, where he sang in community choirs, played violin and clarinet in city orchestras, and was a drummer and lead singer in several rock bands. (One of them, The Heathens, still pops up now and then on compilations of 60's garage bands.) Dellaira graduated from Georgetown University with a degree in Philosophy, and was active in the Washington, D.C. area folk music scene as an acoustic guitar soloist. In the early 70's he enrolled in the graduate music program at The George Washington University, studying composition with Robert Parris and conducting with George Steiner. After getting his Master of Music degree he served briefly as Assistant Conductor of the Alexandria Symphony, but his growing interest in music theory and especially twelve-tone music led him to Princeton University, where he studied primarily with Milton Babbitt, Edward T. Cone and Paul Lansky, receiving both an M.F.A and Ph.D. in Composition. He spent two summers in residence at The Composers Conference working with Roger Sessions and Mario Davidovsky. Dellaira was awarded a Fulbright in 1977, and went to Italy to study with Goffredo Petrassi at the Academy of Santa Cecilia, Franco Donatoni at the Chigiana Academy, and privately with Walter Branchi.  Dellaira has taught Electronic and Computer Music in the summer programs at Princeton University, and was on the faculties of The George Washington University and Union College.  In 1989 he was elected Vice President of American Composers Alliance, the oldest composer's service organization in the U.S, a position he held until 2000.

Works

 * A recipient of an ASCAP Morton Gould award, and awards from the American Composers Forum, American Music Center, Cary Trust, the Ford and Mellon Foundations, the Jerome Foundation, and New Jersey Arts Council, Dellaira's first work to get public attention was the monodrama Maud, for mezzo-soprano accompanied by computer-generated sounds (created using the MUSIC4BF language running on an IBM mainframe.) Featured at the First International Computer Music Conference at M.I.T., Maud premiered in New York at a concert of the I.S.C.M and was awarded First Prize by the American Society of University Composers (now the Society of Composers).
 * Beginning to think his music had become unusually and unnecessarily complex, Dellaira sought a return to basics, and for three years became the principal songwriter, keyboardist and producer for the new-wave rock group Annette. The group dissolved in 1983, shortly after completing an EP (Annette) which was named a Top Album Pick by Billboard Magazine.
 * Dellaira's 1995 orchestral tone-poem Three Rivers was a turning point in his compositional style and voice; his music now would be characterized by pitch centers and rhythmic simplicity, a return, he has said, to "the sense of improvisation which occurred when music flowed freely from heart to fingers, unimpeded by matters of style, theory, or criticism."
 * From the year 2000 on, Dellaira has devoted himself almost exclusively to opera and choral music.
 * His choral triptych USA Stories -- especially its last movement The Campers at Kitty Hawk is popular with choruses and has been performed by professional, amateur and college groups internationally.
 * Dellaira wrote his first opera, Chéri in 2003 based on the novel by Colette. The libretto was written by Susan Yankowitz.  Following early workshops hosted by American Opera Projects and Center for Contemporary Opera, Dellaira and Yankowitz were invited to bring Chéri to The Actors Studio by then Artistic Director Estelle Parsons, where it spent the next three years in development under the direction of Tony-award winning actress Carlin Glynn. There Chéri went through an intense series of readings and workshops, culminating in a production in 2005.  The following year it was a finalist for the Richard Rodgers Award in Musical Theater.
 * From 2006 - 2012 Dellaira was Composer-in-Residence at the Center for Contemporary Opera (CCO) in New York. CCO, with Long Leaf Opera and San Antonio Opera, co-commissioned him and librettist J. D. McClatchy to write an opera based on Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent.  The Secret Agent premiered on March 18, 2011 at Hunter College's Kaye Playhouse with Amy Burton and Scott Bearden in the lead roles of Winnie and Adolf Verloc.  The opera was directed by Sam Helfrich. Sara Jobin conducted.  In October of that year The Secret Agent was invited to the Armel International Opera Festival in Szeged, Hungary where it was named the festival's "Laureat", and went on for an additional performance the following April at the Opéra-Théâtre d'Avignon in France.
 * Dellaira's 2006 The Masters on the Movies, a dramatic fantasy for chorus based on Richard Howard's poem of the same name, was commissioned and premiered by Hobart and William Smith Colleges Cantori singers. It had its New York city premiere a year later by the New Amsterdam Singers.
 * In 2013 Dellaira and McClatchy's The Death of Webern will be premiered by The Pocket Opera Players at New York's Symphony Space.
 * In September, 2013 American Opera Projects announced it had commissioned Dellaira and McClatchy for a new opera based on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's great 20th century novel, The Leopard.

Writing
Dellaira is acting editor-in-chief of New Music Connoisseur, a New York based magazine dedicated to contemporary music. He has been an occasional writer for 20th Century Music, Opera Today, and Open Space. His theoretical article Some Recorded Thoughts on Recorded Objects (Perspectives of New Music, 1995), a study of how recording technology has effected music composition, is often quoted by scholars, in particular Dellaira's unique classification of recordings into documents, pseudo-documents, and abstractions.

Discography

 * Selections from Chéri - (Albany Troy 1129)[2009]
 * The Masters on the Movies - the best of such songeries (Hobart & William Smith Colleges) [2009]
 * Five - (Albany Troy 487) [2001]
 * Three Rivers - The Orchestra According to the Seven (Opus One 170) [1996]
 * Art and Isadora - To Orpheus (CRI 615) [1992]
 * Maud - Compilation CD (Opus One 146) [1987]
 * Annette - EP (Primadonna P-5101)[1982]
 * Problems / The Other Way Around - The Heathens, 45-RPM (Vibra L-104)[1967]