Jack Gallagher Featured in One-Hour Interview on WCLV

Conversation with composer Andrew Rindfleisch highlights works and background

WCLV will air its interview with Jack Gallagher on April 15.

WOOSTER, Ohio - A one-hour interview featuring selected works by Jack Gallagher, the Olive Williams Kettering Professor of Music at The College of Wooster, will be broadcast April 15 at 9:30 p.m. by Cleveland's classical radio station WCLV, 104.9 FM. The interview, conducted by Andrew Rindfleisch, professor of music and coordinator of composition at Cleveland State University, will be presented under the auspices of WCLV's "New Music Studio."

The program grew out of Gallagher's invited presentation in February to the Cleveland State University Composition Seminar, during which he discussed several of his compositions. The broadcast will include "Proteus Rising from the Sea," recorded by the Air Force Band of Flight conducted by Lt. Col. Richard A. Shelton; "Berceuse," recorded by the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra of Krakow under Szymon Kawalla; and an excerpt from Gallagher's "Symphony in One Movement: Threnody," recorded by the Kozsalin Philharmonic Orchestra and also conducted by Kawalla.

Each of the three works was the beneficiary of support from The College of Wooster. Expenses connected with the recording of "Symphony in One Movement" were underwritten, in part, by The College of Wooster Henry Luce III Fund for Distinguished Scholarship. "Berceuse" was recorded in Poland with support from the Faculty Development Fund. The composition of "Proteus Rising from the Sea" was made possible by a one-year Faculty Research Leave.

"Faculty at The College of Wooster are fortunate in having their creative and scholarly work generously supported through a variety of invaluable subvention opportunities," said Gallagher. "Through this support, the College affirms the essential relationship between creative or scholarly activity and informed teaching. This makes it possible for faculty to remain productive in and passionately dedicated to their disciplines and for Wooster students to be the beneficiaries of this passion and the professional insight gained by their teachers and advisers."

WCLV's "The New Music Studio" is an hour-long monthly radio program dedicated to contemporary music and the artists and personalities who push the boundaries of art music culture, according to the station's Web site. "Recorded from the Music Composition Resource Center in the Music Department at Cleveland State, internationally renowned composers and performers are featured through music and conversation with the Music Director of the Cleveland Contemporary Players, Andrew Rindfleisch."

Gallagher, a member of The College of Wooster faculty since 1977, has composed more than 40 works for orchestra, chorus, symphonic band, chamber ensembles and solo instruments. His compositions are included on 12 published compact discs on the Musical Heritage Society, Capstone, Vienna Modern Masters, Summit Records and ERM labels. Recent works have included the five-movement "Sinfonietta" for string orchestra, a commission for Cleveland Orchestra Assistant Principal trumpeter Robert Sullivan, and a new vocal work, "Let Me Make Songs," to a poem by Frances E. W. Harper, for faculty performers Nancy Maria Balach and John Schuesselin of the University of Mississippi, scheduled to be premiered there April 16.

Gallagher has been the recipient of awards, grants, fellowships, or recognition from the Ohio Arts Council, the Charles Ives Center for American Music, Meet the Composer, the Yaddo Corporation, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and numerous other agencies. As producer, his recording for TNC Records of Messiaen's Oiseaux Exotiques with pianist Angelin Chang, conductor John McLaughlin Williams and the Cleveland Chamber Symphony won a 2007 Grammy Award in the classical category "Best Instrumental Soloist Performance with Orchestra."

At Wooster he teaches Composition, Twentieth-Century Music Theory, Orchestration, Trumpet, and Seminar in Music of Living Composers, a course he originated.

In addition to conventional broadcast, the April 15 radio program may be heard on WCLV's Web site.