Estevan Olmos
Estevan Olmos graduated with a B.A. in music composition from California State University, Fresno and is now continuing his graduate studies at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music. His wide ranging experience as a composer, percussionist and first generation Mexican-American results in music that seeks to surprise and delight the listener, while subverting their expectations. Estevan was a finalist in the Second Annual Fresno State Art Song Competition in 2019, won the National Association for Music Educators (NAFME) national electronic composition competition in 2020, and was awarded the 2022 One Found Sound Emerging Composer Award. He now resides en El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula (founded 1781), now known as the city of Los Angeles.
Nick Bentz
Nick Bentz (b. 1994) is a composer, violinist, and multimedia artist whose work is drawn to remote fringes and recesses of experience. In his work he seeks to render intimately personal spaces imbued with an individual sense of storytelling and narrative. His art centers around the blurring, juxtaposition, and amalgamation of stylistic idioms into singular sonic statements. Nick’s music has been performed by leading artists including the Philadelphia Orchestra, International Contemporary Ensemble, Sandbox Percussion, HOCKET, yMusic, and Ensemble Dal Niente, and featured at Lincoln Center, Kimmel Center, and the Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai. His first opera, Having Guests for Dinner, was commissioned by /kor/ productions, and premiered by Hillman Opera. Current projects include co-commissions from Ensemble Intercontemporain and Wigmore Hall, a piece for percussionist David Moliner to be premiered at the Musikverein, and multimedia collaborations with visual artist Allyson Packer and vocalist Anika Kildegaard.
Nick is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Brown University, pursuing a doctorate in Music and Multimedia Composition. He holds BMs in composition and violin and an MM in violin from the Peabody Institute, and an MM in composition from the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music. His mentors include Anthony Cheung, Wang Lu, Eric Nathan, Nina Young, Donald Crockett, Ted Hearne, Andrew Norman, Felipe Lara, Kevin Puts, and Yiorgos Vassilandonakis.
Donald Crockett
Los Angeles-based composer and conductor Donald Crockett has received commissions from a wide spectrum of organizations including the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (Composer-in-Residence, 1991 – 97), Kronos Quartet, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Hilliard Ensemble and the Guitar Foundation of America, among many others. Commissions in recent seasons include those from New Music USA, Aspen Music Festival, the Harvard Musical Association, and commissions for new string quartets from the Dilijan Chamber Music Series in Los Angeles and the Caramoor Festival in New York. The recipient of an Arts and Letters Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship, Donald Crockett has also received grants and prizes from the Barlow Endowment, Copland Fund, Kennedy Center Friedheim Awards, the National Endowment for the Arts, New Music USA and many others. His music is published by Keiser Classical and Doberman/Yppan and recorded on the Albany, BMOP Sound, ECM, Innova, Laurel and New World labels among others. A frequent guest conductor with new music ensembles nationally, Donald Crockett has been very active over the years as a composer and conductor with the venerable and famed Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles, the Jacaranda concert series in Santa Monica and most recently the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Composer Fellowship Program. In 2023, he returned for his seventh season leading the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble (ACE) for the opening weeks at the Aspen Music Festival. As conductor of the USC Thornton Symphony’s annual New Music for Orchestra series, he has premiered over 150 new orchestral works by outstanding Thornton student composers. His recordings as a conductor can be found on the Albany, Centaur, Doberman/Yppan, ECM and New World labels. Deeply committed to education, Donald Crockett is Professor and Chair of the Composition Program and Director of Thornton Edge new music ensemble at the USC Thornton School of Music.
Djentata No. 1
Estevan Olmos
Djentata No. 1 is heavily influenced by djent. Djent is a subgenre of progressive metal that can be characterized by its incredibly complex rhythms, metric modulations and low syncopated riffs which is where the onomatopoeia, “djent,” comes from. Djentata No. 1 captures the essence of djent with percussion instruments rather than guitar and drums (the usual instrumentation for djent). The integration of metric modulation, polyrhythm and hemiola really showcase the expressive capabilities of rhythm and percussion to create a groovy, djent-inspired sound world.
the shifting earth
Nick Bentz
the shifting earth takes its inspiration from René Daumal’s surrealist novel, Mount Analogue. It tells the story of a climbing expedition ascending the titular mountain, an invisible peak so large that its presence bends light around it. The allegory of the novel frames the climbing of Mount Analogue as a reaching for immortality, or a yearning for the absolute. Daumal passed before he finished the novel, so his mountaineers are frozen in time, mid-sentence, stuck with their heads forever looking upwards into the cloud-covered crags. The piece takes its title from the last three words of Daumal’s manuscript. the shifting earth was written for Donald Crockett and Thornton Edge and is dedicated to the memory of composer and friend Kris McCormick.
-Nick Bentz
Violin Concerto (2021)
Donald Crockett
This Violin Concerto, a co-commission from the Aspen Music Festival and Oberlin Conservatory, was completed in September 2021 and given its premiere performances at Oberlin and Aspen in spring-summer 2022. My thoughts about this concerto began with violinists whose artistry I admire, who are very engaged in new music, can play anything, and have an unforced, singing lyricism which I like very much. The lyrical portions of the piece sing with these artists very much in my ear. Also important are an incisive rhythmic sense and a natural feel for “American syncopated rhythms.” The concerto is rather expansive, in four movements lasting around 23 minutes, and written for soloist and “sinfonietta,” which in this case is a small chamber orchestra of eighteen musicians featuring woodwinds, brass, harp, piano, two percussionists and solo strings. An important color in this piece involves a dialogue between the soloist and the principal violin in the ensemble (the concertmaster). This is featured most prominently in the second movement “Elegy” and the fourth movement “Chaconne.” Throughout most of the piece, the solo violinist plays around (over and under and through) the layered sounds of the ensemble, as if riffing on the music. The full range and color spectrum of the violin are used, including very high lyrical lines (inspired by my inspirational violinists) and slashing chords. At a climactic point near the end of the fourth movement, the soloist and the solo string quartet converge in the “slashing chords” music as a kind of super-violin. The four movements are formally pretty clear: the second movement “Elegy” is basically a song without words, ending in a duet between soloist and concertmaster. The third movement, “Whistling (in the dark)” focuses on a very syncopated rhythmic idea from an earlier piece of mine written at the end of the previous millennium (1999) for new music ensemble, Whistling in the Dark, about Y2K anxiety. The fourth movement, “Chaconne,” is the longest movement of the piece, an expansive, generally lyrical and at times folk-like take on a repeated chord progression (in the time-honored tradition), with a central fast section with the ensemble racing around. And finally the first movement “Cadenza” – written last – features the soloist conjuring and trying on various bits of the piece to follow. The soloist disappears at the end of the Cadenza after the second movement has already started in the ensemble. This Concerto is dedicated to violinists David Bowlin and Peter Herresthal.
-Donald Crockett
David Bowlin
Recognized for his “rich, alluring tone” and praised as “brilliant” (the New York Times), violinist David Bowlin has led a wide-ranging career as a soloist and chamber musician performing an expansive repertoire. First prize winner of the Washington International Competition, he has performed across the Americas, Europe, and Asia. He has performed widely as a soloist, with premieres of violin concertos written for him by Marcos Balter at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, by Alexandra Hermentin at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital, and most recently by Donald Crockett at the Aspen Music Festival. A prolific recording artist, Bowlin has released recordings on the Naxos, Bridge, New Focus, Nonesuch, Arsis, Mode, Tundra, and Austrian National Radio labels, including concerto recordings of works by Luciano Berio and Huang Ruo.
As a chamber musician, Bowlin has made many tours with Musicians from Marlboro, and performs regularly with the Oberlin Trio and the Bowlin-Cho Duo with pianist Tony Cho. Bowlin is an emeritus founding member of the acclaimed International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) and a former member of the Naumburg Award-winning Da Capo Chamber Players.
Bowlin has performed as guest concertmaster with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Marlboro Festival Orchestra, and the IRIS Orchestra. Festivals include the Aspen, Banff, Bridgehampton, Bowdoin, Chesapeake, Ojai, and Olympic festivals; as well as the Boston Chamber Music Society, ChamberFest Cleveland, Chamber Music Chicago, Chamber Music Quad Cities, and the Kneisel Hall Chamber Music Festival, where he has been faculty artist since 2013.
Bowlin is also a dedicated teacher and for seventeen years served as Professor of Violin at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Starting this fall he will join the faculty of the Eastman School of Music as Professor of Violin. He has given many masterclasses throughout the US and abroad including the Korea National University of the Arts, Seoul National University, Yonsei University, Central Conservatory Beijing, the Australian National Academy of Music, the Royal Danish Academy of Music, the Norwegian Academy, Malmö Academy of Music in Sweden, and the Kunstuniversität Graz.
USC Thornton Edge
USC Thornton Edge, founded in 1976 by Robert Wojciak, has been under the direction of Donald Crockett since 1984. Comprised of some of the finest student musicians in the Thornton School, the ensemble presents a series of four concerts annually on the USC campus. Edge has also been part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella Series and Noon to Midnight, the New Music LA festival, and is a recipient of the Outstanding Ensemble Award given by LA Weekly in 2006. On tour, Edge has presented concerts at the Paris and Lyon Conservatories, the Berlin 750 Jahre Festival, as well as the 2014 Carlsbad Music Festival, and has appeared as soloist with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in Stephen Scott’s Concerto for Bowed Piano and Orchestra. Thornton Edge has two commercial recordings: a set of new guitar concertos by Dusan Bogdanovich, Brian Head, Simone Iannarelli, Steven Gates, and Donald Crockett, performed by Thornton faculty artists and released on the Doberman/Yppan label in 2015; and a collection of ensemble works by Frederick Lesemann, Songs and Concertinos, released on the Centaur label in 2021.
