photo credit: Peggy Friedland
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Please direct all inquiries to: mail@michaelgandolfi.com
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photo credit: Peggy Friedland |
Mr. Gandolfi recently completed a Meet the Composer/Music Alive residency with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. In the spring of 2007 the ASO commissioned and premiered his new work The Garden of Cosmic Speculation, inspired by Charles Jencks’ spectacular private garden in Dumfries, Scotland. Following the premiere performance, The Garden of Cosmic Speculation was recorded and released on the Telarc label. A new recording of other orchestral and large ensemble works, Y2K Compliant, was also released in early 2008 by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.
In 1986 Mr. Gandolfi was a Composition Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center, where he won the first of the prestigious Paul Jacobs commissions to write an orchestral work, Transfigurations, for performance by the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra. That summer, he met composer/conductor and Festival of Contemporary Music director Oliver Knussen, who championed Gandolfi’s works, taking Transfigurations to England, leading it with the radio orchestra of the BBC, and also conducting others of the composer’s works in Britain and the United States. In addition, Gandolfi returned often to Tanglewood for performances of his works and for hire as a guitarist to perform in new works, including Stockhausen’s Gruppen, Foss’ Baroque Variations, Del Tredici’s An Alice Symphony, Andriessen’s Hadewijch and Knussen’s Symphony no. 3.
By the late 1980's Gandolfi had already made contact with many new-music performers and with such groups as Speculum Musicae and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Orpheus led a consortium, also including the Saint Paul and Los Angeles chamber orchestras, to commission Gandolfi’s Points of Departure, a piece that has since been performed quite frequently. He has also received commissions from the Atlanta Symphony, the Fromm Foundation, Boston Musica Viva, Speculum Musicae, and the Koussevitzky Foundation, among many others. While fulfilling commissions, Mr. Gandolfi was also teaching: he taught at Harvard University, Phillips Andover Academy, the New England Conservatory of Music (where he serves as chairman of the composition department), and is presently on faculty at the Tanglewood Music Center. This fall, Mr. Gandolfi will be on faculty at Indiana University and he will return to the Harvard faculty for the spring term.
The breadth of Gandolfi’s musical interests encompasses not only contemporary concert music, but also the jazz, blues, and rock, by which route he first became a musician. The span of his musical investigation is paralleled by his cultural curiosity, resulting in many points of contact between the world of music and other disciplines, including science, film, and theater. A collaboration with The Shakespeare & Company, resulted in his incidental music for their production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream directed by Tina Packer; recently he worked with computer animator, Jonathan Bachrach, video artist Ean White and filmmaker Pamela Larsen. As an educator, he has expanded on these interests by organizing innovative, cross-discipline activities involving collaborations between Tanglewood Music Center Fellows and Shakespeare & Company and a project involving composers and experimental filmmakers that was presented at the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music in August 2004. Mr. Gandolfi also maintains a strong interest in writing music for children’s audiences and has contributed a substantial body of work for that purpose.
Mr. Gandolfi's music has been recorded on the Telarc, BMOP Sound, Deutsche Grammophon, CRI, Innova and Klavier labels. Additional recordings are available from CSU Wind Esemble Recording: Visions, USMB Recordings. He is listed in the New Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians.