Van Stiefel Composer, Guitarist, and Educator

Woven Light

Community Partners Grant American Composer Forum, Philadelphia

With the goal of creating a new work for children's chorus, electric guitar, laptop, and percussion, Van Stiefel will serve as composer-in-residence with the Kennett Symphony Children's Chorus (KSCC). The residency will integrate a series of 7 lecture-rehearsals led by the composer Van Stiefel and poet David Livewell within the framework of scheduled rehearsals preparing the choir for its 2012 winter concert at Asplundh Hall on the campus of West Chester University. These lectures, led by the composer, will address the compositional process through improvisation, demonstrations of digital sound design/synthesis, real-world sounds in music, poetic language and setting, and inter-disciplinary art concepts and collaboration. Philadelphia-based, award-winning poet David Livewell will discuss the poems to be set for the commissioned work from his book Woven Light: Poems and Photographs of Andrew Wyeth's Pennsylvannia. The lecture-rehearsals will also result in a short collaborative composition by the choristers (and the composer-in-residence) to be performed at 3 Chester County public schools.