Composer Connections: Trevor Weston
We’re excited to launch Composer Connections this season, a new series that connects audiences with the composers behind the music we perform. Enjoy intimate conversations with our director and composers near and far to explore their creative inspirations, processes, and lives as composers in the strange new landscape outside the concert hall. This series provides a unique look past the score to connect through our shared language of music—to illuminate the people and stories in between the notes on the page that give the choral music deeper meaning.
We’re delighted to feature the talented New York-based composer Trevor Weston in our Composer Connections series to introduce this award-winning composer, accomplished author, and educator to our audiences and highlight his uniquely creative voice.
Join us for an intimate conversation with Rebecca and Trevor, delving into his compositional inspiration, his time as a graduate student in Berkeley (working with past Sacred and Profane director Marika Kuzma), and how he integrates a wide variety of traditions and textures into his choral works. We’ll hear from Trevor about his approach to composing with timely topics of social and racial justice, and his inspiration behind Martyrs, a new work for remote choir we co-commissioned with C4 Ensemble that sets texts from Psalm 39, a Renaissance isorhythmic motet by Guillaume Dufay, and newly-composed texts about breath and its relevance to the present moment. The piece is both a plea for protection and a warning about the senseless and unnecessary deaths caused by COVID-19 and by excessive police force against African Americans, which we’re excited to perform in our upcoming concert Make Our World Anew: Black Voices Matter.
Alongside the interview, we’ll also be sharing performances of his impactful work to provide a context to his compositional style and celebrate his repertoire, from local groups to professional ensembles. We know you’ll love his music as much as we do!
Watch the broadcast on our Youtube channel and chat with our director live in the comments. This free broadcast will be available to watch on-demand after the premiere, no tickets necessary.
Composer Connections: TREVOR WESTON
Saturday, FEBRUARy 27 at 6pm
TREVOR WESTON (b. 1967)
I have always gravitated to music that mesmerizes and entrances its listeners by creating a sense of suspended reality. Music can be a portal to a parallel existence where our experiences, thoughts, and ideas are communicated through the more impactful abstract nature of aural stimuli. Music allows us to retreat from the mundane to reflect more profoundly on our existence. My intention is to create music that is transformative regardless of instrumentation or style.
Trevor Weston’s music has been called a “gently syncopated marriage of intellect and feeling.” (Detroit Free Press) Weston’s honors include the George Ladd Prix de Paris from the University of California, Berkeley, a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and residencies from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the MacDowell Colony. Weston co-authored with Olly Wilson, chapter 5 in the Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington, “Duke Ellington as a Cultural Icon” published by Cambridge University Press. Weston’s work, Juba for Strings won the 2019 Sonori/New Orleans Chamber Orchestra Composition Competition.
Weston’s Flying Fish, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall for its 125 Commission Project and the American Composers Orchestra, was described as having, “…episodes of hurtling energy, the music certainly suggested wondrous aquatic feats. I was especially affected, though, by an extended slower, quizzical episode with pensive strings and plaintive chords.” (New York Times). The Boston Landmarks Orchestra commissioned Griot Legacies for choir and orchestra, a work created with four innovative arrangements of African American Spirituals. Griot Legacies demonstrates Weston’s “knack for piquant harmonies, evocative textures, and effective vocal writing.” (Boston Globe) The Grammy-nominated Choir of Trinity Church Wall Street, under the direction of Julian Wachner, recorded Trevor Weston’s choral works. The Bang on a Can All-Stars premiered Weston’s composition Dig It, commissioned by the group for the Ecstatic Music Festival in NYC.
A list of ensembles performing Trevor Weston’s compositions include Roomful of Teeth, The Boston Children’s Chorus, St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue Choir, The Starling Chamber Orchestra, Mallarme Chamber Players, The Providence Singers, Chicago Sinfonietta, Seraphic Fire, The Tufts Chamber Chorus, Ensemble Pi, The Amernet String Quartet, The UC Berkeley Chamber Chorus, The Washington Chorus, Trilogy: An Opera Company, and The Manhattan Choral Ensemble. In addition to his creative work, Weston completed the re-orchestration of Florence Price’s Piano Concerto for the Center for Black Music Research in 2010.
Dr. Weston’s musical education began at the prestigious St. Thomas Choir school in NYC at the age of ten. He received his B.A. from Tufts University and continued his studies at the University of California, Berkeley where he earned his M. A. and Ph. D. in Music Composition. His primary composition teachers were T. J. Anderson, Olly Wilson, Andrew Imbrie and Richard Felciano. Dr. Weston is currently Professor of Music at Drew University in Madison, NJ.