Arthur Levering

Composer Arthur Levering, who was born in Baltimore in 1953, has received many awards for his work including the Rome Prize, the Heckscher Foundation Composition Prize, the Lee Ettelson Composer’s Award, a Barlow Endowment Commission, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. His compositions have been performed by various ensembles including the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the New Juilliard Ensemble, the Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Boston Musica Viva, Sequitur, the League of Composers/ISCM, Musica d’Oggi (Italy), and the Rascher Saxophone Quartet (Germany), and they have been played at, among other venues, New York’s Merkin Hall, Weill Hall, and Alice Tully Hall, at the Aspen Music Festival, the Japan America Theatre in the Los Angeles Philharmonic Green Umbrella Series, as well as at concerts and festivals in Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. Compact disks of his work include School of Velocity, CRI CD 812, 1999/NWCR812, 2007 ("the best debut album by an American composer I’ve heard this year"—Robert Carl, Fanfare, July/August 1999), and Still Raining, Still Dreaming, New World CD NW 80662-2, 2008. A 2002 work for viola and piano, Tesserae, is included in Americans in Rome, Music by Fellows of the American Academy in Rome, Bridge CD 9271 A/D, 2008.

For his Guggenheim project he composed Furies (11 players), commissioned by Sequitur and premiered in 2008 at Merkin Hall in New York, and Parallel Universe (string orchestra), composed for the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Other important compositions include the virtuosic three-movement piano work School of Velocity, commissioned and performed by Donald Berman in a League of Composers/ISCM concert at Merkin Hall, New York, in 1999. Echoi (violin and piano) was premiered by Nicholas Kitchen and Donald Berman in Boston in 2003. Clarion/Shadowing (clarinet, violin, piano) was performed by the 21st Century Consort at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., in 2004. The revised version of Still Raining, Still Dreaming (6 players) was premiered by the Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble in Boston in 2005. Twenty Ways Upon the Bells (7 players) was commissioned and premiered by Dinosaur Annex in Boston in 1994. Cloches II (8 players) was performed by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in 2001. Catena (piano and 16 players) was premiered by Donald Berman and the Dinosaur Annex Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Scott Wheeler at Jordan Hall, Boston in 2000. Il Mare Dentro (orchestra) was premiered by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project at the Ditson Festival of Contemporary Music in Boston in 2008.