Composers and musicians are set to convene and showcase their immense talents at the University of New Mexico.
The 51st Annual John Donald Robb Composers’ Symposium will take place at UNM’s Keller Hall on March 22-24 and March 27. The event, promoted by the UNM Robb Trust, consists of a series of free public concerts and masterclasses and a chance for students to learn from and mingle with experts.
Peter Gilbert, immediate past chair and board member of the Robb Trust, said about the students’ opportunity, “They get to have this kind of elite level experience with people who are specialists in interpreting contemporary music and bringing it to life.”
Guest composer and UNM alumnus Levi Raleigh Brown will be one of many musicians featured at the symposium. He is a multi-instrumental, genre-crossing artist who aims to examine the human experience through his music.
Brown said about his writing, “I like to play a lot with things that are partially improvised or the result isn’t fully controlled,” he said.
Brown began playing piano around the age of five, he said, and eventually added brass, percussion and guitar to his repertoire. He has built an expert’s understanding of theory through his knowledge of different instruments.
This year’s symposium will be Brown’s first as a nonstudent.
Brown said, “It definitely feels like I’m getting somewhere with my career developing, and glad to hear that the university and my professors are still interested in what I’m doing and what I’ve been working on enough to let me present there.”
Headlining the composers’ symposium is the innovative quintet Splinter Reeds. The ensemble is made up of oboist Kyle Bruckmann, Bill Kalinkos and Jeff Anderle on the clarinet and bass clarinet, respectively, and saxophonist Nicki Roman, and Dana Jessen on the bassoon. Through commissions and industry collaborations, the group produces avant-garde composition that strays from the traditional path of woodwinds.
Splinter Reeds even blends punk and metal into its scores.
“Our training is in classical music, but our hearts are in a variety of different places, and we just really enjoy bringing those different energies to the instrumentation where it’s not immediately obvious that’s what we ought to do,” explained Bruckmann.
He added, “We definitely are all of the philosophy that you get the chops, you get the understanding, and the joy is seeing where you can deploy them.”
Each member of Splinter Reeds will host a masterclass in their respective instruments on Thursday.
Thursday night, Splinter Reeds will perform five commissioned works, and then the group will perform six more pieces composed by UNM students on Friday.
Both Bruckmann and Jessen have done residency work at UNM before, but this will be Splinter Reeds’ first Robb symposium. The ensemble is excited about the opportunity to work with the university and continue Robb’s legacy.
“We do a lot of work with electronic music and various intersections of acoustic and electronic, improvised and composed, so any place that we can land where that openness and that energy is the foreground, that’s our happy place,” Bruckmann said.
