The 2011 OSU Contemporary Music Festival marks a departure from what has taken place in previous years. There has been a "change in management," so to speak. Composer Donald Harris, who founded the festival in 2000, retired from OSU last July. His successor is Dr. Russel C. Mikkelson, Director of University Bands and Professor of Music. Dr. Mikkelson has conducted frequently at these concerts and last year, he conducted a work by guest composer Augusta Read Thomas. At previous festivals, he conducted works by Krzysztof Penderecki, John Corigliano, Gunther Schuller, Olly Wilson, and Jennifer Higdon. He has developed a national reputation through his advocacy of young and emerging composers. At OSU, he elevated the wind program to new heights through recordings, Midwest tours, and clinics/workshops throughout Ohio.

The guest composer for this year's Festival will be Donald Harris. The School of Music dedicates the 2011 festival to him in honor of his eightieth birthday and his retirement from full-time faculty status.

The festival's opening concert on Thursday, April 28, at 8:00 p.m. at Weigel Auditorium will relate in different, meaningful ways to Harris' life and work. Three world premieres are on the docket, two of which are for wind symphony (Souvenir from Poland by Harris' OSU faculty colleague Jan Radzynski; and Moriarty's Necktie by Harris' former student Matthew Saunders, a recent DMA graduate). The Johnstone Fund for New Music, our community's most generous supporter of new music, commissioned both of these works especially for this year's Festival. The third premiere is a work entitled souvenirs/résolutions for the OSU Trumpet Ensemble by OSU faculty member Thomas Wells. Ross Lee Finney, Harris' mentor during his six-year stay at the University of Michigan, will be represented by Fantasy in Two Movements for solo violin, written for and premiered by Yehudi Menuhin at the Brussels Worlds Fair in 1958. Harris remembers sitting with Finney at the premiere. Following intermission, Dr. Mikkelson will lead an OSU student ensemble in a rare performance of La Création du Monde, Darius Milhaud's well-known jazz-inspired ballet. Harris cultivated a friendship with Milhaud while living abroad. This performance, a first in Columbus, will be produced in partnership with BalletMet Columbus. Production costs, as well as original choreography by Jimmy Orrante, were made possible through a generous grant from the Johnstone Fund for New Music.

Keeping with festival tradition, there will be a retrospective concert of Harris' music on Friday, April 29 at 8:00 p.m. in Weigel Auditorium. This concert will include the world premiere of A Letter from Home (text by Mary Oliver) for two soprano voices, flute, viola, and harp. It will be performed by Lucy Shelton, Christine Shumway Mortine, and the trio Cosmos. Other works on the program include the two vocal pieces Of Hartford in a Purple Light and Pierrot Lieder, Lyric Fanfare for Orchestra, First String Quartet, and Five Tempi, LUDUS III.

At 7:00 p.m. on April 28 and 29, the festival will screen the world premiere of a documentary film entitled Sonata 1957. It traces the origins of Harris' 1956-57 piano sonata, composed at the beginning of his 13-year stay in Paris. Produced by pianist Daniel Beliavsky, it includes interviews with two former colleagues: Gunther Schuller, with whom Harris has enjoyed a long association, and pianist Veronica Jochum, who made the first commercial recording of the sonata. It also features a discussion with Daniel Beliavsky about musical life in Paris in the 1950's, and a performance of the sonata by Beliavsky.

Since 2002, the festival has been produced in conjunction with the Columbus Symphony Orchestra. This year, that collaboration will be postponed until April of 2012, when the CSO will premiere Harris' Second Symphony. Commissioned by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress, this performance will be led by newly appointed CSO Music Director, Jean-Marie Zeitouni. We'll post more information about this performance as it becomes available.