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The Recording You Will Now Hear (excerpt) —
Chatter, David Felberg, cond. The Recording You Will Now Hear
won the 2011 UNM John Donald Robb National Biennial Composer's Competition. I started with "Cuatro Flores," a song by Josefina Flores which you can hear Robb's field recording of here.
I Believe I Believe I Believe (excerpt) —
Scotty Horey, perc. I Believe I Believe I Believe
was premiered at the Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Arts in September 2010. It's based on an old song by the Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose. You can see a video of Scotty's dynamic performance here.
Lust (excerpt) —
Shanti Nolan, cond., Whitney Noble, cl., Anna DeGraff, mezzo, Jessica
Narum, piano, Vivian Sun, vc. Lust
is a setting of a poem of the same name by Robert E. Howard (with a
short epigram from Ovid). You can see a video of the whole piece here.
*Netwrought
(excerpt) — Frederick Regional Youth Orchestra, Elijah Wirth, cond.
This piece deals with the use of old musical materials to describe
contemporary categories of experience.
Trying to get the
feeling back that I had in 1972 (excerpt) — Irvine Arditti, vln.
This piece was originally composed for viola; this is a transcription
for violin. The title is taken from "Until I Believe In My Soul," a
Dexys Midnight Runners tune; it has to do with the sensation of
nostalgia for something one hasn't actually experienced. A video of the
entire performance can be seen here.
The Opposite of the
World (excerpt) — London Contemporary Orchestra, Peter Wiegold,
cond. In this piece I wanted to drill down on the distinction between
two
definitions of the word "music": The first is something we do, and the second is something we have. The following excerpt is from
the "something we have" part of the
piece.
There Is No Going Back
(player piano) (excerpt) — Solange Guillaume, piano. There's a
long and personal story behind this piece that I won't
bore
you with. The upshot is that it's a piece for piano about a pianola whose subject
matter is the irreversible accretion of emotional associations that
comes to cover our material possessions. You can see a video of the
premiere here.
Sequins
(excerpt) — fixed media. I have a little bit of a philosophical
objection to presenting
fixed-media pieces in the concert hall. This one was performed to a
crowd at the 2007 Midwest Composers' Symposium in Bloomington, IN who
(judging by their response) must have shared my reservations.
Did you ever have a
sister? (excerpt) — Lisa Cella, fl., Frank Cox, vc. The title of
this piece is taken from The Sound
and the Fury;
like a lot of the pieces I wrote around this time, it's an attempt to
analogize an extramusical process, transformation, or (in this case)
relationship in musical terms.
There Is No Going Back
(false grails)
(excerpt) — Kyra Saltman, vc. Like player
piano, this
piece requires the performer to wear a click track in performance; the
click track constantly changes tempo and meter, which makes it quite
difficult to follow. The challenge electrifies the performance, but it
also cultivates a performer-composer relationship that I no longer
really desire—so I don't write pieces like this anymore.
Facilities: The Black
Maria, the Eight Ball, Building 470 (excerpt) — me. This is a
favorite "party piece" of mine. I don't remember
which show this excerpt is taken from; I've
performed the piece a few times in a few different places.
Feux d'artifice
(excerpt) — Poppy Crum, vln. Feux d'artifice grew out of a
meditation, prompted by
geopolitical events
of the day, on how fortunate it is to live in a place where most
explosions are purely recreational.
You can also download the scores of That 20kHz Smile
and All
This
Could Be Yours, two very
short pieces I wrote in response to open calls from the New York
Miniaturist
Ensemble.
I'm finishing up my doctorate in composition at the University of Minnesota. Pieces I've written have been performed in the United States and in Europe by some pretty incredible musicians. I write a weekly post on contemporary music for NewMusicBox.org, the web magazine of New Music USA; I've also written some articles on music for academic journals. I live in Minneapolis, but I'm originally from Frederick, Maryland.
Currently a doctoral student at the University of Minnesota, Colin Holter (b. 1983) holds a BA summa cum laude from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, an MMus from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and an MPhil from Brunel University. His teachers have included Richard Barrett, Franklin Cox, James Dillon, Linda Dusman, Christopher Fox, Erik Lund, Keeril Makan, and Stuart Saunders Smith; his studies have been supported by a Linehan Artist Scholarship (UMBC), a UIUC University Fellowship, a UMN Graduate School Fellowship, and an Overseas Research Student Awards Scheme grant, among other awards. In addition to his activities as a composer, Holter writes a weekly column for NewMusicBox, the web magazine of the American Music Center. Holter is a native of Frederick, Maryland.