About the Festival

Showcase your talent!
Starting out as a collaboration in 2003 between Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble and the Community Music Center of Boston, The Young Composers Festival is an annual educational initiative of workshops, readings, coaching sessions, panel discussions, and multi-media concerts featuring both professional and student musicians. The Festival serves student musicians from elementary school-age through graduate school. The mission of this multi-day festival is to encourage, inspire and commission the creation of new chamber music. The multi-faceted festival events are enriched by the intergenerational and interdisciplinary music and arts communities of greater Boston.

This year’s program will include:

• Featured Concerts
• Reading Session
• Written and Performed By…
• Electronic Exchange
• Panel Discussions
• Choreography & Live Music
• Public School Outreach

Want to learn more about the Young Composers Festival?

About Us

Dinosaur Annex

Founded in 1975, Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble is a leading presenter of new music. The group has established an international reputation from its brilliant performances of newly commissioned pieces, established twentieth-century masters, and a large repertory of contemporary compositions. Dinosaur Annex presents world premieres from around the world as well as works by emerging composers of the Boston area.
www.dinosaurannex.org

Community Music Center of Boston (CMCB), Inc

Now in our 99th year, Community Music Center of Boston (CMCB) provides excellent music education to individuals and groups fo diverse backgrounds, ages, and abilities, transforming lives citywide.

We serve more than 5,000 students each week, both on-site in the Boston Center for the Arts and in nearly 50 community sites each year, including more than 20 Boston Public Schools. In keeping with our settlement school roots, we serve a multicultural student body — particularly those from traditionally underserved urban neighborhoods, in financial need, and individuals with physical, cognitive, emotional or social challenges.
www.cmcb.org

New Gallery Concert Series

New Music. New Art. Come Celebrate the Now!
The New Gallery Concert Series (NGCS) presents new pieces of music and visual art, along with the composers and artists who create them. NGCS’s commitment to building a unique community that encourages highly interactive collaborations between musicians, visual artists, and members of the audience makes the New Gallery Concert Series one of the most refreshing organizations of its kind.
www.newgalleryconcertseries.org

Workshop Leaders, Panelists, and Composers

Betsi Graves Akerstein, Choreography Workshop

Betsi Graves Akerstein, founder and director of Urbanity Dance, is originally from Orlando, Florida and holds a BA from Boston College. Her dance training includes studies in ballet, jazz and modern dance at Orlando Ballet and Studio 5d under the direction of Gaymarie Tomlinson. At the age of 17, she was selected by Mia Michaels to tour across the U.S. on full scholarship with LA Undergound. She has taught ballet and jazz at Harvard University, Boston College, and is currently on faculty at Boston Ballet School. As a choreographer, Ms. Graves has won national choreography awards and judged for dance competitions throughout New England. She is an alumna of Jacob’s Pillow Choreographer’s Lab (2006) and Green Street Studios Emerging Artists Program (2008). She currently performs as a modern dancer for Karen Murphy-Fitch’s Falling Flight Project and in fall 2008 danced as a street performer for Theatre Mama and Cirque du Soleil’s Kooza. Her choreography has been reviewed as “soulful and inspiring,” “unique and full of energy” and “gutsy and culturally poignant.” Akerstein was recently awarded Boston Dance Alliance’s prestigious Rehearsal and Retreat Fellowship, a grant given annually to a dance maker who shows promise at improving the quality of work created in Greater Boston. Upcoming projects include Urbanity Dance’s Big Red Door & Other Stories (February, 2010), Boston Contemporary Theater’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (June, 2010) and Urbanity Dance’s The Story of Stuff (November, 2010).

Andy Cavatorta, MIT Media Lab Field Trip

Andy Cavatorta is a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab, where he makes big musical machines and occasional small fires.

Prior to joining the Media Lab, Andy built musical robots for Amorphic Robot Works and was the Director of Engineering for Ensemble Robot. His work centers around creating music by harnessing natural phenomena with the power and precision of computer-guided machinery.

Eva Kendrick, Panel Moderator

Eva Kendrick is a composer and vocalist. She writes in many genres including opera, chamber music, song cycles, and film music. She is very active in the Boston and Providence music communities, serving as Music Director at First Parish Medfield and on the music theory and voice faculty at the Community Music Center of Boston, where she is a composer-in-residence. She maintains a private voice studio and is in high demand as a freelance composer. Kendrick has been commissioned by ensembles and organizations including Dinosaur Annex, Rialto Arts, the New Gallery Concert Series, the Community Music Center of Boston Chamber Orchestra, and the American Shakespeare Company. She has written scores for filmmakers in New York, Boston, and Providence. Kendrick enjoys collaborating with poets, producing large-scale song cycles and choral works. For more information, please visit her website at www.evakendrick.com.

Shaw Pong Liu, New Sounds Workshop

Shaw Pong Liu is an improvising violinist and creator of shows that interplay live music, narration, and spoken word. Her recent productions include “Soldiers’ Tales Untold”, with music of Stravinsky, veterans’ stories, and improvised music (www.soldierstalesuntold.org); “Jelly and Jelly Jam”, an imagined musical encounter of jazz composer “Jelly Roll” Morton and legendary Hungarian violinist Jelly d’Aranyi; and “Stone Soup” a musical re-telling of the classic fable. She plays amplified and looped violin with Boston’s spoken word production “ARTiculation” and regularly performs as guest soloist with MIT’s innovative Gamelan Galak Tika. A dedicated performer-educator, Shaw Pong seeks to engage diverse communities with creative music and social dialogue. Visit her at www.shawpong.com.

In the classical music world, recent performances include Bang-on-a-Can All-Stars, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and performances with performances with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, in the world premieres of several new works. A graduate of U.C. Berkeley with a Masters in Violin Performance from the New England Conservatory of Music, Shaw Pong is the recipient of the Eisner Prize, the Hertz Travelling Fellowship, and was 2009 Artist-in-Residence at the Blue Sky Project in McHenry County, IL.

Will MacFarlane, Electronic Exchange Workshop

Will Macfarlane founded the Parts and Crafts Collective in 2008 – a group of thinkers, teachers, artists, and tinkerers in the Boston and New York areas who are interested in fostering creative and socially mindful uses of technology and helping people build, think, create, succeed, fail, and learn (www.partsandcrafts.org).

He’s taught and worked with graduate students and elementary school-age children in schools and out of them. His current research interests are in how tools and environments help and hinder educational and creative efforts. When he’s not thinking about self-directed teaching and learning, he writes software for mos, a small multidisciplinary architecture/design office based in New Haven, CT.

Eric Rosenbaum, Electronic Exchange

Eric Rosenbaum is a PhD student at MIT Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten research group, where he works on empowering people to tinker with electronics, improvise music, and paint with light. He holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s in technology in education from Harvard University. In his spare time he enjoys sledding, painting, and playing the funky trombone.