Discipline: Music Composition

Douglas Boyce

Discipline: Music Composition
Region: Washington, D.C.
MacDowell fellowships: 2017

Douglas Boyce writes chamber music that draws on Renaissance traditions and modernist aesthetics, building rich rhythmic structures that shift between order, fragmentation, elegance, and ferocity. Regarding A Book of Songs (2006, in process), The Washington Post wrote “[they] can only be described as drop-dead beautiful. Easily the most captivating works on the program, these songs of love and death are extraordinarily well written and insightful.” Regarding La Déploration,(2016) Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim wrote that "...the violinist, cellist... and clarinetist... spread out throughout the crypt. Against vaporous harmonics and ghostly fragments of Renaissance music played by the strings, [a] warm, clear clarinet announced itself as very much alive as it sashayed in and out of blues territory and laughed in the face of their mournful keening."

He has been awarded the League of Composers ISCM Composers Award (2005), the Salvatore Martirano Prize (2006), the Robert Avalon Prize (2010), and a Fromm Commission (2012). He holds degrees from Williams College, the University of Oregon, and the University of Pennsylvania. He is associate professor of music at the George Washington University, and is a founding member of counter)induction, a composer/performer collective.

Studios

Monday Music

Douglas Boyce worked in the Monday Music studio.

Given to the residency by the Monday Music Club of Orange, New Jersey, 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…

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