FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Tamar Fortgang
213-237-2873 (do not publish)
REDCATpr@calarts.edu

California EAR Unit Performs Tribute to Mel Powell at REDCAT

February 19
REDCAT
8:30 p.m.
$24

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Los Angeles, CA, February 5 -REDCAT, The Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater, and the California EAR Unit celebrate the extraordinary chamber music of Mel Powell, the founder and longtime dean of CalArts' School of Music in special performance on February 19. The performance will take place at REDCAT's performance space, located in Walt Disney Concert Hall, on Sunday, February 19 at 8:30 pm. Tickets are $24 for general admission seating. Tickets may be purchased at the REDCAT box office located at the corner of 2nd and Hope streets, calling 213-237-2800 or by clicking here.

Mel Powell's work has been widely recognized for its meticulous craftsmanship, rich expressiveness and intricate musical structures. Powell won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in music as one of the many honors throughout his career. This concert features Sextet, an important chamber work originally commissioned by the EAR Unit, and solo works written for several member of the ensemble. These works also appear on a California Ear Unit CD titled "Settings" recently issued by New World Records.

The California Ear Unit consists of Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick, cello; Amy Knoles, percussion; Marty Walker, clarinet; Dorothy Stone, flute; Vicki Ray, piano and Robin Lorentz, violin. Guest conductor for the concert will be Stephen L. Mosko.

The concert's program includes:

Immobiles Re-Mix (1967, 2003 version by Amy Knoles)
Invocation (1988)
Sonatine (1996)
I.
II.
III.
AmyAbilities (1988)

---Intermission---

Etude (1957)
Prelude (1988)
Setting (1972)
Sextet (1996)

Special thanks to: Jon Lovelace, Nicholas England, Steven Lavine, Stan Levine, and the California Institute of the Arts Alumni Association.

Mel Powell was born Melvin Epstein on February 12, 1923 in the Bronx. His father, a diamond merchant, was rarely home; a Talmudic grandfather was an imposing presence. Mel started taking piano lessons when he was six years old. In his early teens, his younger brother took him to a Benny Goodman concert at the Paramount Theater. Biographer Joan Peyser writes: "Powell was so taken with the improvisations of Teddy Wilson that, at his next lesson, he embroidered Beethoven in the same ways." At age fifteen, Mel was playing regularly at Nick's, a jazz club in lower Manhattan. Too young to be in the musicians' union, he was spirited into the men's room between sets. As his career advanced, he changed his name to Powell, borrowed from a Polish uncle who had changed his name from Poljanowski. At eighteen, he dropped out of school to join the Benny Goodman orchestra. He performed with Goodman for barely a year. Nevertheless, he established himself as one of the big band era's most electrifying pianists.

During World War II, Powell was recruited into the Glenn Miller Air Force band, appearing in hundreds of performances. In 1945, he was selected as Downbeat magazine's jazz pianist of the year. But he was already turning away from being a jazz star: During the war, he wrote concert works, which the Miller musicians tried out for him. Powell would later say that he was able to endure the solitary life of a modern composer without bitterness or regret because of his youthful years in the limelight.

After the war, Powell spent another year with Goodman, followed by an unfulfilling stint as a studio musician in Hollywood. Finally, he moved back East and auditioned for Paul Hindemith at Yale. As Powell recounted it, he had carefully prepared Scarlatti and Mozart sonatas to play for the maestro. Somewhat apprehensively, he entered the classroom, walked over to the piano and sat down. No sooner had he lifted his hands to play than Hindemith said, "Fine-that's enough." Crestfallen, Powell asked what he had done wrong. "Nothing," replied Hindemith. "I could tell by the way that you adjusted the piano bench that you are a musician." Powell graduated with a bachelor's degree from Yale in 1952.

At first, Powell was drawn to Hindemith's neo-classic style, but he eventually turned towards a more modernist approach, inspired by Schoenberg, Webern and American serial composers. Upon hearing Powell's first twelve-tone work, Hindemith said laconically, "So, you've gone over to the other side." Powell's first teaching position was at Queens College. At Hindemith's invitation, he taught at Yale in the late fifties, eventually succeeding his teacher as chair of the composition department. He was a founding editor of Perspectives in New Music, and a pioneering figure at the Columbia/Princeton electronic music studios.

By then, Powell had essentially retired from public jazz performances, though he made an occasional studio recording. His legendary sessions for John Hammond have just been re-released on the Vanguard label.

In 1968, Powell was invited to serve as the inaugural dean of the Music School at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. He later served as provost for six years. At the time of his death, he held the Roy E. Disney Chair in Music Composition.

Powell was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for Duplicates: A Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra. Numerous other honors included the Brandeis Creative Arts Medal, a Guggenheim fellowship, and commissions from the Koussevitzky and Fromm Foundations. In his last years, he revived his jazz playing, performing in the SS Norway's Floating Jazz Festival several times. He was inducted into the Jazz and Big Band Hall of Fame in 1997, and posthumously inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1998.

His wife of fifty years was actress Martha Scott. They raised three children: Mary, Kati, and Powell's stepson, Scotty. When Powell was in his mid-fifties, he fell inexplicably while playing tennis. He was diagnosed with a degenerative muscle disease, which eventually left him confined to a wheelchair. He endured his disability with characteristic dignity and optimism. He fought courageously against numerous health problems, eventually succumbing to liver cancer on April 24, 1998. He was seventy-five years old.

A peerless teacher, the power of Powell's instruction lay in his articulation of style-transcendent principles. Studying with him was an apprenticeship: A lesson would often start with Powell saying, "OK-now it's my piece." He would carefully revise the score while the student sat in silence. He would then explain his corrections in such a way that the student was aware of the principles that guided his judgment.

In the classroom, Powell was famous for his slogans-aphorisms that crystallized a musical concept into concise and memorable form. "Repetition ensures closure" was a particular favorite. Form was "perceived differentiation." Orchestration was "animating the inert." To demonstrate this last concept, he put a piano reduction of Debussy's Ronde de Printemps on the board: five bars of just a single pitch, b-natural. Then he showed how Debussy brought this single note to life by using repeated notes in the upper strings, harmonics in the basses, a distinctive figure in the harp, and more. Out of the inanimate note, Debussy had created a multiplicity of motions. Unceasingly generous with his time, he made his students feel as if teaching was not an intrusion but rather a natural extension of his creative life.

Until his illness, Powell was a gifted athlete: he played semi-pro baseball in his youth and was later an avid tennis player. He painted watercolors as a hobby, and was enormously well read: Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus, in which a composer trades his soul to "discover" the twelve-tone method, was a particular passion. Somehow, in one person, both the worldly and the spiritual, the sensual and the cerebral, the spontaneous and the disciplined, were combined in an almost magical balance. -

"Wizards of new music the L.A. Daily News; "The EAR Unit performs with exuberance and razor sharp precision," the New York Times; "The California EAR Unit, d'excellents musiciens...un ensemble de tres grand qualityé," La Province; "The exhilaration in their playing, as they plunge with glorious high spirits and dazzling skill into the world,s most daunting repertoire...should be reward enough for anybody," LA Style

These are just a few of the national and international press accolades garnered by the California EAR Unit in its twenty-two year history. The Los Angeles-based new music ensemble is dedicated to the performance, promotion and creation of the exciting music of our time. Founded in March 1981, the EAR Unit has brought unparalleled versatility, virtuosity and dedication to its performances and is recognized today as one of America's finest contemporary chamber ensembles. For its contributions to the field of contemporary American music, the ensemble has recently garnered awards from the L.A. Weekly (Best Classical Series) and the 1999 "Letter of Distinction" from the American Music Center.

Kaleidoscopic. Eclectic. Violins and pianos one minute, harmonicas and amplified plants the next-the audience never knows what to expect. Attending an EAR Unit concert means experiencing a fresh, exuberant approach to music making. Since 1987 the EAR Unit has been Ensemble-in-Residence at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where they present their own four concert critically acclaimed series. The EAR Unit's repertoire of over 400 compositions ranges from the most demanding works for the concert hall to collaborations with major artists in other fields to create original multi-media works. The EAR Unit combines a "classic" instrumentation of flute, clarinet, keyboards, percussion, violin and cello to an "anything goes" including voices, panpipes, handcuffs, playing Bach on the cello with a carrot (Cage's Theater Piece), theatrics and the latest interactive electronic media.

The Unit has performed at major venues all over the world including Tanglewood, Brussels, Aspen, Kiev, Paris, the Kennedy Center, Cologne, New York, Boston, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Amsterdam, Reykjavik, and many places in between. The ensemble has been featured in documentaries for the BBC and Japanese television and many of their concerts have been broadcast by American and National Public Radio, WGBH's "Art of the States" Program, WDR(Germany), BRT (Belgium) and DR (Danish Radio) and the International Rostrum of Composers.

The EAR Unit has recorded for Nonesuch, Crystal, New Albion, New World, Tzadik, O.O. Discs, CRI/Emergency Music, and Cambria labels and has the distinction of being one of the first contemporary music groups to be featured on a CD-ROM, Morton Subotnick's All My Hummingbirds have Alibis on the Voyager label. New Albion has released a collection of pre-eminent Dutch composer Louis Andriessen's works, featuring Zilver, which was also written and commissioned by the Unit in conjunction with the EAR Unit's tour of England for the Contemporary Music Network. Bridge Records has issued Morton Feldman's four-hour-long trio For Philip Guston (named "Best Classical CD" of 1997 by CDNow). Recent recordings include "Go" on the Echograph label and "Settings," music by Mel Powell on New World.

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