Pamela Marshall

Description

Composer Pamela J. Marshall (b.1954) writes music for chamber ensembles, orchestra, solo voices & chorus, mandolin, and computer audio. Her music is published by Subito Music (formerly Seesaw), Plucked String, and her own company, Spindrift Music (on the Web at www.spindrift.com - sign up for her email list).

Some performances  In December 2011, premiere performances of “Shepherds and Angels”, American Christmas songs for chorus, violin, harp and tamborine take place in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. In September, her 1-minute composition "Double" for soprano Beth Griffith was performed in New York, and the duo “2” performed "Zoa" for flute and harp in Boston. She produced several concerts between 2007 and 2010, including performances of her Quinteto for strings and piano, songs from the Art-Poem-Music project, and a Women Composers Spotlight concert in association with Art Without Borders. From 1998 to 2005, she was a member of Just In Time Composers and Players, a Boston-area collaborative of composers and performers that presented several concert seasons of accessible new music. She was the group’s director for the 1999-2001 seasons. Her Art-Poem-Music project, a collaboration with visual artist Sirarpi Heghinian-Walzer and poet Elizabeth Kirschner begun in 2007, resulted in several concerts and two collections of songs inspired by Walzer’s art with texts by Kirschner.

Her improvisation classes and workshops have introduced many local performing musicians and students to the joys of spontaneous music creation. She has led improv workshops for the Northeast Horn Workshop and Lexington Music Club and the Vortex Other Dimension festival. With Carroll Ann Bottino, a piano teacher in Lexington, MA, she developed a workshop curriculum that introduces composition and improvisation to music students. She has taught improvisation at Lexington Music School and performs on the Vortex Series for New and Improvised Music.

Recordings  Her music is on several CDs from Living Artists, Beauport Classical, Plucked String, and Clique Track. She produces nature soundscapes on the Nachursona label. As a recording engineer, she mastered composer Hayg Boyadjian’s recent CD for Albany records and the first Vortex Series CD.

Commissions  Pamela has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, and has received commissions or grants from South Beach Chamber Ensemble, Green Mountain Youth Symphony, Rivers School, Master Singers of Lexington, organist Carson Cooman, Assabet Valley Mastersingers and Unitarian choirs in Massachusetts and Minnesota, the Renee Fisher Foundation, Mass. Council for the Arts, the New Works/New Composers series at the Composer's Forum, NEWCOMP, DanceArt, mandolinist Neil Gladd, American Women Composers, the Axiom Duo, Trio Arundel, and Local Cultural Council grants from Lexington and Concord. She has written music for Esprit de Cor, Enigmatica, the Arden Quartet, and cellist Luis Leguia.

She founded the Spindrift Commissioning Guild in 2005 and friends and patrons have pooled contributions to support several recent projects of new chamber music, with fiscal sponsorship from Fractured Atlas. Some of the projects are concerts of the song cycle "Body and Soul" and "Quinteto sobre los poemas de Carlos Pintado" for piano and strings, and commissions for Meditations for organ, Enchanted for oboe and chamber orchestra, Black Bear Dance for horns and drums, and Triptoe Suite for youth orchestra.

In addition to composing, she records local concerts and teaches improvisation and horn. She has written music software and developed sounds for Kurzweil synthesizers and written technical documentation for software for computer programmers. She lives in Lexington, Massachusetts and plays French horn in local orchestras and chamber ensembles. With her husband David Emerson, they have displayed their photography in local galleries and on the web at honeycreeper.com.

Memberships  She is a member of BMI, American Composers Forum, and Chamber Music America, a teacher at the Lexington Music School, a board member of the Concord Orchestra, International Alliance of Women in Music, and Lexington Music Club, and part of the planning team for the Vortex Series.

Education  She received degrees in composition from the Eastman School of Music (B.M. 1976) and Yale School of Music (M.M. 1980), where she also studied horn, conducting, and electronic music. Her teachers have included Jacob Druckman, Joseph Schwantner, Betsy Jolas, Warren Benson, and Samuel Adler in composition; horn studies with Verne Reynolds, Paul Ingraham, Charles Kavalovski, and Jean Rife; and conducting with Arthur Weisberg.