Sunday, January 29 see the premiere of a brief setting of Langston Hughes’ “Harlem” by Words and Music and the Boston-based Wordsong project at the Lyseum in Alexandria, Virginia.

On February 12 I will be in Eugene, Oregon for the first preview performance of my third symphony, Symphony: Savage Howls with the University of Oregon Wind Ensemble and its director, Robert Ponto. Savage Howls was commissioned by a consortium of bands led by the University of Oregon and this will be the first of several performances of the work during the 2011-12 and 2012-13 seasons. Stay tuned for details on future performances of this piece.

On March 2, 2012, I will be conducting Great Noise Ensemble at the 2012 Intersections New American Art festival at the Atlas Performing Arts Center in Washington. The program includes works by Rob Paterson, D.J. Sparr and Marc Mellits as well as my first symphony, Chamber Symphony: Illusory Airs. The program will be recorded for GNE’s upcoming debut CD.

08.31.2011– Composer Armando Bayolo will make his Carnegie Hall debut, Sunday October 9 at 7:30pm, with the premiere of Lullabies, commissioned by clarinetist Marguerite Levin for Trio Montage at Weill Recital Hall. Premieres from Valencio Jackson, Jr., Allen Feinstein, Brian Balmages, and Joseph Ness will also appear on the program, entitled “Five Premieres Inspired by Five Decades.” Trio Montage includes Levin and collaborators Phillip Collister, baritone, and R. Timothy McReyolds, piano.

In preparation for this debut, Bayolo reflects on the perspective this brings to his work: “The musicians I’ve had the honor and pleasure to work with in New York have been some of the warmest, most welcoming and supportive musicians I’ve met in my career. I have enjoyed working with the New York music community over the past year and am thrilled, honored and humbled to have my music heard in Carnegie Hall in October.”

Colleagues welcome the opportunity to hear Bayolo’s music in New York. “Armando Bayolo is a tireless advocate for others’ music. His persuasive style as an essayist and esteemed work as the conductor of Washington, DC’s Great Noise Ensemble could easily overshadow his own compositions, if they weren’t so attractive in their own right. Armando’s music combines the audacity of popular music, the verve-filled rhythmic language of Latin America, and the pugnacity of postmodern classicism into a heady, formidable concoction,” according to Christian Carey, composer and senior editor of Sequenza 21.

Bayolo’s Lullabies, for baritone, clarinet/bass clarinet and piano, ca. 15 minutes, consists of 6 movements, alternating between songs and dances that depict scenes of early fatherhood. “Each song in the cycle treats with the various anxieties, fears, uncertainties and, most of all, joys of having young children and the ruminations that leads to. The dances, meanwhile, present musical portraits of my own children in sound.”

Armando Bayolo
LULLABIES
For baritone, clarinet (doubles bass clarinet) and piano

1. Nocturne, with text by Gennady Aygi
2. Dance 1
3. New Tooth, with text by Thomas Lux
4. Dance 2
5. Father’s Song, with text by Gregory Orr
6. Dance 3

World Premiere: Sunday October 9, 7:30pm
Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall
154 West 57th Street New York, NY

Trio Montage
Marguerite Levin, clarinet
Phillip Collister, baritone
R. Timothy McReyolds, piano

Tickets $30 General Admission through the Carnegie Hall Box Office; Carnegie Charge 212-247-7800 or online ticket service carnegiehall.org.

ARMANDO BAYOLO

Born in 1973 in Santurce, Puerto Rico to Cuban parents, composer Armando Bayolo began musical studies at the age of twelve. He holds degrees from the Eastman School of Music (B.M. 1995), where his teachers were Samuel Adler, Joseph Schwantner and Christopher Rouse; Yale University (M.M. 1997), where he studied with Roberto Sierra, Jacob Druckman, Ingram Marshall and Martin Bresnick; and the University of Michigan D.M.A. 2001) where he studied with Michael Daugherty, Bright Sheng and Evan Chambers.

Mr. Bayolo’s music, which The Washington Post hailed as radiant and ethereal, “full of lush ideas and a kind of fierce grandeur (which unfold) with subtle, driving power,” encompasses a wide variety of genres, including works for solo instruments, voices, chamber and orchestral music. His music has been commissioned by the Aspen Music Festival, the National Gallery of Art, the Syracuse Society for New Music, Duo 46, The Percussion Plus Project, and the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra, among others, and has received performances at venues including the Aspen Music Festival, the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Galapagos Art Space and Symphony Space, and, in 2011-12, Barge Music and Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall.

Mr. Bayolo has been featured on Public Radio International’s Studio 360 broadcast on WNYC, on the NPR’s Fresh Ink broadcast, The Washington Post, The New York Times Opinionator Blog, and has contributed to New Music Box and Sequenza21, where he is a contributing editor. He has served on the faculties of Reed College and Hamilton College, where he served as a Consortium for a Strong Minority Presence Fellow from 2006-2008, as well as the music theory faculty of the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University. Mr. Bayolo is the recipient 2008 Brandon Fradd fellowship in music from the Cintas Foundation, and has received awards from Hamilton College, the Minnesota Orchestra Composers Institute, and the American Composers Forum.

A tireless advocate for new music, Mr. Bayolo is the founding Artistic Director and conductor of Great Noise Ensemble, which in just six seasons has become one of the most important forces in contemporary music in the Washington, D.C. region and the Curator for New Music for the Atlas Performing Arts Center in Washington, where he directs a 6-9 concert new music series. He lives outside Washington, D.C. with his wife and two daughters.