Discipline: Music Composition

Christopher Yavelow

Discipline: Music Composition
MacDowell Fellowships: 1976
More: chrisyavelow.com
Christopher Yavelow is a composer and proponent of computer assisted composition. He studied composition and theory at Boston University, Harvard University, the Franz Liszt Academy in Hungary, the Darmstadt Ferienkurse in Germany, the Conservatoire Darius Milhaud in Aix-en-Provence, and L'ecole Normale de Musique in Paris where he also studied with Nadia Boulanger. Yavelow has taught music composition and theory at Harvard (teaching fellow, 1975–77), the Paris-American Academy (1978–79), the University of Texas (at Dallas, 1983–84), and Claremont Graduate University (1988-93). He was Chairman of the Department of Music at Schiller International University from 1979 to 1980. Currently, he teaches at the University of Maryland University College (from 2008). Major works include his grand opera, The Passion of Vincent van Gogh commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1981 and performed by the University of Texas in 1984. The National Institute of Music Theater sponsored his chamber opera, Countdown (1987), as part of their “Opera in the Eighties and Beyond” program on behalf of the Boston Lyric Opera. Countdown is the first computer-assisted opera, the first opera performance accompanied by a virtual orchestra, and the first opera to exist in cyberspace.

Studios

Monday Music

Christopher Yavelow worked in the Monday Music studio.

Given to the residency by the Monday Music Club of Orange, NJ, Monday Music Studio is sited next to an enormous boulder deposited by glaciers thousands of years ago. A small dormer once pierced the east slope of the roof, but after damage suffered in the 1938 hurricane, the roof was rebuilt without the dormer. The interior…

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