National Conference Update

IU has a faculty of 140 teachers many of whom are performers recognized around the world. We also have over 1400 students, certainly one of the greatest talent pools in the world. Every year over a thousand recitals and ensemble concerts are presented; I consider many of these performances to be among the most thrilling I have experienced anywhere and hardly any fall below a very high professional standard. Outstanding faculty and student performers are available for virtually every instrument (including early music instruments) and voice type.

IU's New Music Ensemble has a core instrumentation of string quintet, woodwind quartet, brass quartet, percussion, piano and harp; occasionally strings or winds may be doubled to a group of around 20 players. The IU Percussion Ensemble and the IU Brass Ensemble will also be performing during the conference. Of course, there is a wide variety of student chamber ensembles available, from string quartets and saxophone quartets to any number of heterogeneous groupings. We plan to include at least two concerts of faculty chamber performances; one faculty ensemble, The Indiana Trio, composed of IU's clarinet faculty is particularly interested in reviewing works for three or four clarinets. At least one recital of vocal chamber music is planned.

As conference host, I will be responsible for the final programming decisions; I do have an agenda of which composers submitting scores should be aware. I want this conference to give us the chance to hear music by many SCI composers whose music is not programmed often enough. I want the music we hear to be intriguing, surprising, compelling, and rewarding to the players and the listenersÑboth the audience of composers and the musical community. And I want to give the faculty and student performers here at IU opportunities to commit themselves to performances of the music of their time that will change the way their audiences think about music. Two considerations arise from this agenda: (1) I tend to favor shorter piecesÑin general, a concert of 8 pieces averaging 7 minutes will offer the listener more perspectives of composers' ideas than a concert of 4 15-minute works (I know, I've had a few 15-minute+ pieces done at conferencesÑI'm just lucky I wasn't the host!); (2) I want to utilize as many of the performing resources of the IU School of Music as possible, both for the purpose of giving these very influential performers as much experience as possible playing "our" music, and to showcase the tremendous array of performing talent here. In most other situations I would probably be thankful for as many guest performers as possible; here, it's the opposite situationÑduring the course of a 4-day conference it won't be possible to do more than to scratch the surface of what's possible here.

Don Freund