“Stacy Garrop is a Chicago-based composer who credits her desire to compose to a music theory class she took as a junior at her Bay Area high school,” writes David Weininger in Thursday’s (4/19) Boston Globe. “Creating and maintaining a career as a composer is never as easy as writing a bunch of music, of course. But Garrop, whose sextet ‘Bohemian Café’ is on an April 22 program of the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, has managed to do so…. Garrop’s spacious, vividly colored music thrives on narrative and drama, each piece telling a story.” In graduate school, composer Shulamit Ran was “a helpful role model for Garrop, in that she was a woman who was balancing high-profile commissions, an academic job, and a family. [As an undergraduate] one of her teachers, an older man [advised] her … that composing was a great career choice for her ‘because when you get married and have kids, you can do this on the side.’ … Such rearguard attitudes never dissuaded Garrop… Proof of her tenacity: … two years ago, she stepped down from the teaching job she’d held at Roosevelt University since 2000 to compose full time.”
Posted April 24, 2018
