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Mr. Moe, a composer of what the NY Times calls "music of winning exuberance", has received numerous grants and awards for his work, including the Lakond Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship; commissions from the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Fromm Foundation, the Koussevitzky Foundation, and Meet-the-Composer USA; fellowships from the Wellesley Composer's Conference and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; and residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Bellagio, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, the Montana Artists Refuge, the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, and the American Dance Festival.
His sit-trag/one-woman opera Tri-Stan was hailed by the New York Times in 2005 as "a blockbuster" and "a tour de force", a work of "inspired weight" that "subversively inscribe[s] classical music into pop culture". In its review of the piece, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette concluded, "For an audience, it is one of those rare works that transcends the cultural divide while still being rooted in both sides." The work will soon be available on a Koch International Classics compact disc. Other all-Moe CDs are available on Albany Records (Kicking and Screaming, Up & At 'Em), Koch (Sonnets to Orpheus and Siren Songs), and Centaur (On the Tip of My Tongue), and two new ones are in preparation.
Also a pianist and keyboard player, Mr. Moe has performed works by hundreds of composers, from Anthony Davis to Stefan Wolpe. His playing can be heard on the Koch, CRI, Mode, and AK/Coburg labels in the music of John Cage, Roger Zahab, Marc-Antonio Consoli, Mathew Rosenblum, and Felix Draeseke. His solo recording The Waltz Project Revisited - New Waltzes for Piano, a CD of waltzes for piano by two generations of American composers, was recently released on Albany. Gramophone magazine says in its review of the CD, "Moe's command of the varied styles is nothing short of remarkable." A founding member of the San Francisco-based EARPLAY ensemble, he currently co-directs the Music on the Edge new music concert series in Pittsburgh.
Mr. Moe was educated at the University of California at Berkeley (M.A., Ph.D.) and at Princeton University (A.B.) He is currently Professor of Composition and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh, where he directs the graduate program in composition and the department's electroacoustic music studio.
Visit Mr. Moe online at www.ericmoe.net.
The Winning Work
Eric Moe's composition, Legend of the Sad Triad (Ballade for piano solo), is a lovely, strikingly original and pianistically expert single movement work. The composer himself says of the music:
Legend of the Sad Triad was composed in May and June of 2004, begun in Brooklyn and completed at the Montana Artists Refuge in Basin, Montana. I am very grateful to MAR for the residency that allowed me to complete the work in such an idyllic setting. Legend is dedicated to the pianist Jeanne Golan, in admiration of her artistry. As for the title, the movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn is said on one occasion to have instructed his house composers to use only major triads in their film scores... The piece itself follows in the footsteps of the great Romantic composers. A quotation from Brahms' Horn Trio is found near the geographical and musical heart of the piece.