Anita Feldman

Anita Feldman, one of a new breed of tap dancers in the early 1980s who expanded the parameters of the art, and one of the earliest to articulate her tap aesthetic, was raised in the suburbs of Chicago. Her mother was an accountant and her father an engineer; both encouraged her to become a mathematician. She began her tap training at age five in Chicago with tap master Jimmy Payne and continued classes with him until she graduated from high school. She also studied ballet and jazz dance, and piano, and learned the rudiments of music theory, becoming attracted to the rhythm section's instruments (bass, drum, and piano) of a jazz combo. When she entered the University of Illinois she studied percussion and African drumming while settling on a major in dance. Modern dance's value as an art form and as a physical outlet was appealing to her, and after graduation she moved to New York where her aesthetic of percussive performance began to evolve. She enrolled in the Dance Education Program of Teacher's College at Columbia University, studying musical composition with Robert Dunn, a John Cage associate who fostered the Judson Dance Theater in the early 1960s. Dunn exposed her to new methods and tools of choreographic experimentation. Still working in the modern dance mode, her choreography was rhythm-oriented and extremely complex, requiring accurate and technically proficient performers. Feldman's early partner was Carol Hess.

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Lois V Vierk

Lois V Vierk (www.loisvvierk.com) from Lansing, Illinois, in suburban Chicago, was born in 1951. She has spent most of her career in New York City. Vierk's music has also received an impressive international reputation. She has been active in Europe and Asia, and her music has been presented in Portrait Concerts at German Radio Cologne and in Switzerland. 

Among the many performers and presenters who have commissioned her music are pianists Ursula Oppens, Frederic Rzewski, Claudia Rüegg, Margaret Leng Tan, Aki Takahashi, accordionist/composer Guy Klucevsek, the Kronos Quartet, Lincoln Center Festival, Bang on a Can Festival, Ensemble Modern, Music from Japan, the Relâche Ensemble of Philadelphia. 

Co-creations with tap-dance choreographer Anita Feldman have been performed at major dance venues in the US and Europe and also at music venues. Modern dance choreographers Elise Monte and Karole Armitage have choreographed new dances to Vierk's music and have presented them in concerts in New York City, Chicago and elsewhere. Filmmaker Holly Fisher has featured her compositions in films Out of the Blue; Ruffled Feathers; Goldfish Variations; and others). 

Vierk has composed for many types of performing forces, from solo piano and also inside-the-piano (Yeah Yeah Yeah; To Stare Astonished at the Sea) to string quartet (River Beneath the River; Into the Brightening Air) to chamber ensemble (Timberline; Red Shift; Io; etc.) to ensembles of the same instrument (Simoom for 8 cellos; Go Guitars for 5 electric guitars; Cirrus for 6 trumpets; Manhattan Cascade for 4 accordions; Tusk for 18 trombones; etc.) to orchestra (Devil's Punchbowl).

Vierk's music has been recorded by various labels including XI Records, Tzadik, New World Music, Starkland, and Vexer Verlag. Her scores are available from Frog Peak Music.

"I think of myself as a composer from the generation after the minimalists, both chronologically and artistically. The concentration on sheer sensuous beauty of sound in the "long tone" works of minimalist composers in the 70's and 80's, especially the work of Phill Niblock, has always been arresting for me. In my own music, striving for this kind of pure sensuous beauty has often been a starting point. I work with emotional expressiveness and with many kinds of sound relationships as well, to build form and structure. 

"My works are developmental, often slowly unfolding, sometimes reaching high energy climaxes. In the 1980s I started developing principles of what I call Exponential Structure, in which elements such as time, harmonic motion, rhythmic and timbral development, sound density, etc. are controlled by mathematical exponential factors. These are not abstract constructs to me, but formal ideas based on the emotional thrust of the sounds and of the piece as a whole.

"I'm influenced by a rigorous analytical study of Western music with my composition teachers Mel Powell, Leonard Stein, and Morton Subotnick, at California Institute of the Arts, and also by 12 years of study of Gagaku, Japanese court music. For ten years I studied Gagaku (Japanese Court Music) with Suenobu Togi in Los Angeles, and for two years I studied in Tokyo with Sukeyasu Shiba of the emperor's Gagaku Orchestra."

Click here to visit Lois V Vierk's website.