News

New Music for South Dakota

Teenagers on the Pine Ridge and Sisseton-Wahpeton Reservations, in South Dakota, have composed exquisite, highly personal pieces through the Composition Academies I had the opportunity to lead.  As Music Alive Composer-In-Residence with the South Dakota Symphony, I worked with them, alongside other gifted composer-mentors, for a week each in the summer, then returned in September to help rehearse their pieces for the remarkable Dakota String Quartet and Dakota Wind Quintet (SDSO principals) and present them in public venues and at their high schools on the reservations.  See a Facebook Live broadcast here. And now I’m deep into composing my own work, inspired by all my time in South Dakota.  In a lovely luxury, the SDSO will hold workshop reading of my work in progress with

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Into the West

Fully inhabiting my role now as Music Alive Composer-in-Residence with the South Dakota Symphony, I am composing and prepping for a remarkable year.  First off, in July and August, I’ll spend two weeks working with teen composers, mostly Native Americans, from the Pine Ridge and Lake Traverse Indian Reservations.  The students’ pieces will be played, by musicians of the SDSO, on tour to all their schools in September.  I’m also helping program community events, and (let’s not forget!) working intensively now on a new piece.  Remarkably, the orchestra has scheduled an entire service to workshop my new piece five months before the premiere – allowing me to be much more experimental in my writing.  In and around my ten or so weeks in South Dakota,

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Composer-in-Residence at South Dakota Symphony

I am thrilled to join the South Dakota Symphony, Music Director Delta David Gier, and Executive Director Jennifer Boomgaarden, as Music Alive Composer-in-Residence until June 2019, through the national residency program of the League of American Orchestras and New Music USA.  I’ll compose a new work for next season, lead cross-cultural composing projects with kids and adults, create community events, and more. Read the press release and stay tuned for news from South Dakota!

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Sinfonietta’s warm welcome in West Virginia

My Sinfonietta (2016) captures moments of spiritual experience, 21st century music inspired by the 14th century Sufi mystic Hafez – vignettes of hilarity, wonder, confusion,  clamor.  In West Virginia 2018 it connected with musicians and audiences in the most gratifying ways.  The West Virginia Symphony and Music Director Lawrence Loh recently gave the first performances of the revised version (the South Dakota Symphony and Delta David Gier premiered the original version in 2017), first in the beautiful Clay Center in Charleston, then in a middle school auditorium in Parkersburg. (WVSO somehow fit The Planets onto that stage!) In both places, audience members had so much to say to me.  Modesty prevents my quoting directly; suffice it to say, musicians enjoyed it more, the more they

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A season for song

This spring seems to be all about song.  At long last, my song cycle For Allegra premieres on April 10, with soprano Nina Berman and pianist Steve Beck.  Composed during my daughter’s high school and college years to suit her growing voice and her poetic interests (Millay, Whitman, Dickinson, Chiasson, Erickson, Berry), it hasn’t been performed complete until now.  Meanwhile, poet/soprano Emma Stace Darling is back in town, from her home in Bologna, to work with me on the growing cycle Girl on Fire.  She writes the poetry.  I write the music.  She sings.  I play.  We performed it as an eight-song set one year ago in Hastings, England.  Now it’s thirteen songs and growing toward a one-woman opera. We’re rehearsing almost daily toward recording

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Upcoming Events

Recordings

American Violin Concertos

american violin concertos theodore wiprud ittai shapira katrina

Violin Concerto (Katrina) performed by Ittai Shapira and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.

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NONG


gamin nong theodore wiprud

The first recording of Wiprud's Mudang for p'iri and strings, by dedicatee gamin and string quartet ETHEL.

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Fire In Heaven And Earth

fire in heaven and earth theodore wiprud

The first recording devoted to the composer's work, featuring four works of vocal, chamber, and orchestral music.

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