Daniel Colson
Composer and double bassist Daniel Colson is a recent winner of the Robert Starer Composition Award and has had his music performed by Cygnus Ensemble, the Juilliard Orchestra, Newburyport Chamber Music Festival, New York Miniaturist Ensemble, Second Instrumental Unit, TRANSIT new music, and others; it has been performed in masterclass with the American Brass Quintet, and at diverse venues including Avery Fisher Hall, the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, the Goethe House German Cultural Center, and the Stone. He earned his B.M. and M.M. from the Juilliard School, where he studied with Samuel Adler, Milton Babbitt, and Homer Mensch, and is now pursuing his Ph.D. at CUNY Graduate Center, where he studies with Jeff Nichols. He teaches as an adjunct at Hunter College and Queens College.
About his piece for the New Art Songs project (2012):
"Death and Becoming treats death not as an ending, but as a transformation, even a new beginning. This idea is reflected by the musical transformations withing each song and among them. In "Adam's Task" the musical materials for the cycle gradually come into being. Each new idea subsumes the last one; past events end, but they are then reinterpreted as the musical "background," becoming the basis for new progressions at the surface. The song ends, as every song must, but in its death it gives life to each of the subsequent songs."