About Elizabeth Brown
Elizabeth Brown, a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, combines a succesful composing career with an extremely diverse performing life, playing flute, shakuhachi, theremin, and dan bau (Vietnamese monochord) in a wide variety of musical circles. Her chamber music, shaped by this unique group of instruments and experiences, has been called luminous, dreamlike and hallucinatory.
Brown's music has been heard in Japan, the Soviet Union, Colombia, Australia and Vietnam as well as across the US and Europe. She has received grants, awards and commissions from Orpheus, St. Luke's Chamber Ensemble, Newband, the Asian Cultural Council, the Japan/US Friendship Commission, the Cary Trust, and NYFA. She is the only musician to have both played with Orpheus and also written for them; Orpheus commissioned Lost Waltz in 1997 and premiered it in Carnegie Hall. Other notable pieces include her chamber opera Rural Electrification (2006), for theremin, voice, and recorded sound, funded by a Barlow commission; Collected Visions, an installation done in collaboration with photographer Lorie Novak, which has been presented by the International Center of Photography in NYC, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Center for Creative Photography in Tuscon; Delirium, featuring the original microtonal instruments of American composer/inventor Harry Partch, performed by Newband to open the 2001 Bang On a Can Marathon at BAM's Opera House; and Migration, for shakuhachi and strings, which was included on CRI's Emergency Music: Bang On A Can Live Volume 2, and has been widely performed. Brown was Artist-in-Residence at the Hanoi National Conservatory of Music in 2002, through a grant from the Asian Cultural Council. A solo CD, "Blue Minor: Chamber Music by Elizabeth Brown" was released in 2003 by Albany Records.
After hearing the instrument on a concert tour of Japan, Brown began studying shakuhachi (traditional Japanese bamboo flute) in 1984 and its music has been a major influence on her musical language. Featured as composer and soloist at the 2004 Big Apple Shakuhachi Conference in New York, she has given solo moonlight shakuhachi performances as Artist-in-Residence in Maine's Acadia National Park, in the sculpture quarry of the Lacoste School for the Arts in Provence, and in Isle Royale National Park, a U.S. Biosphere Reserve in the middle of Lake Superior. In july 2008. she will premiere Mirage for shakuhachi and string quartet with the Grainger Quartet at the World Shakuhachi Festival 2008 in Sydney, Australia. In December 2008, she will begin a five-month residency in Japan, supported by the US/Japan Friendship Commission. Brown has been a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center in Italy and at the MacDowell Colony, and has been composer-in-residence at the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival, the Cape and Islands Chamber Music Festival, and the Bennington Chamber Music Conference and Composers' Forum of the East.
Flute Force will premiered Brown's The Baths of Caracalla, for four alto flutes and recorded sound, in their 25th anniversary concert in January at Weill Hall. In March 28th and 29th, Brown premiered Piranesi for theremin and string quartet, with video by Lothar Osterburg, in a program of her music at the Issue Project Room. Performers included the Momenta Quartet, Flute Force, and guitarist Benjamin Verdery. Brown is currently collaborating with animator Steven Subotnick on a new project, Lullabye. In 2007, she was guest composer and thereminist at both Monadnock Music and the Yale Summer School of Music in Norfolk, and her music for maverick game designer Eddo Stern's Darkgame was part of the inaugural show at Laboral, a new-media museum in Gijon, Asturias, Spain. Current projects include a concerto for theremin and Partch instruments for Montclair University's Partch Ensemble (December 2008) and a new work for Tom Buckner's Interpretations series (October 2008). Brown played the solo theremin part in Gavriil Popov's First Symphonic Suite with the American Symphony at Lincoln Center in January 2008, and was in residence at the MacDowell Colony in February 2008. She performs as flutist with a number of New York-based ensembles, including Orpheus, American Symphony, American Composers Orchestra, Brooklyn Philharmonic, New York City Ballet Orchestra, and Flute Force.
Brown was born in 1953 in Camden, Alabama, where she grew up on an agricultural research station. After receiving a Master's degree in flute performance from The Juilliard School in 1977, she started composing in the late 70's. She now lives in Brooklyn with visual artist Lothar Osterburg, and enjoys reading, gardening, quilting, and birdwatching.
