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| Rebecca Oswald is an award-winning composer with many areas of experience and excellence. A native of Oklahoma City, Rebecca started playing piano at age four and began taking lessons at age six. After high school shes studied art for three years, then returned to her first love, music. In 1980 she launched a fifteen year career as a solo pianist / accompanist / studio musician in Houston, Texas, playing elegant steady gigs five or six nights a week in fine dining restaurants, hotel lobbies, country clubs, etc., as well as playing in various bands along the way. Eventually she acknowledged her life’s dream was composition, and she realized the necessary musical skills and knowledge would be best pursued through academia. She went back to school in the mid-1990s to study theory and composition and to immerse herself in a formal, classical music education. She now composes for instrumental and/or choral ensembles of all sorts. Coming full circle with piano, in 2005 Rebecca released October Wind, a retrospective CD of thirteen original piano works dating from 1981 to 2005, and one art song for tenor and piano. IndieAcoustic selected track 10, Periwinkle Blue, on her October Wind CD as one of their "Songs of Note 2005." And in July 2009, track 7, Regatta, from her October Wind CD was nominated for a 2009 Just Plain Folks Song Award in their Solo Piano category. Rebecca performs her original solo piano works several times a year, and has concertized in five countries to date. Also, from 2006 to 2009 Rebecca was the music director for the Tango Center in Eugene, where she played tango music at the piano, both as a soloist and in ensembles, several times a month for the dancers.
In 1998 Rebecca earned her Bachelor of Music degree in Music Theory and Composition, summa cum laude, from Westminster Choir College of Rider University in Princeton, New Jersey, where she studied composition with Stefan Young, Joel Phillips, and Ronald Hemmel, and piano with Mrs. Lillian Livingston; her principal instrument was piano, and she minored in voice. At Westminster she won both the hymntune competition and the graduating classes' anthem competition. In 2001 Rebecca completed her Master of Music degree in Music Composition from the University of Oregon School of Music in Eugene, Oregon, where she studied composition with Robert Kyr and David Crumb. At UO she received numerous accolades and awards including a summer reseaerch grant and a Masters Fellowship in Music Research and Scholarly Activity, and she was named Outstanding Graduate Student Composer 2000-2001. During her masters program she was a Graduate Teaching Fellow, leading aural skills and keyboard skills labs. From 2002 to 2004 she was on the adjunct faculty at the University of Oregon School of Music, teaching upper-level aural skills, composition, and orchestration.
Rebecca's instrumental concert music catalog includes works for solo instruments including a piano sonata, various chamber ensembles, full orchestra, a clarinet concerto, and one 22-minute choral/orchestral work. Here are a few highlights from her instrumental music catalogue: Two of Rebecca's orchestral works, Finding the Murray River and Sinfonia no. 1: Of Trees and Stars, won readings by the Women's Philharmonic in San Francisco (reading sessions in 1998 and 2001). Her popular woodwind quintet Aesop’s Fables has been performed at least 25 times, including numerous performances by the Arrieu Quintet of Oregon State University and by the Jewel Winds Quintet in upstate New York. Bowerman, Man of Oregon is a 22-minute symphonic biography about Bill Bowerman, famed inventor of the waffle-soled running shoe, co-founder of NIKE, and track and field coach for the University of Oregon and U.S. Olympic team. The Central Oregon Symphony premiered it on their three October 2007 concerts, and in July 2008 the Oregon Bach Festival Orchestra performed a larger reorchestration of this same work as the centerpiece of a special Bowerman gala tribute concert. And Rebecca has written many other instrumental works. Rebecca composes for all types and sizes of choral ensembles, a cappella or accompanied, and often writes her own choral texts, whether sacred or secular. Here are a few highlights from her choral catalogue: Her SSA choral work Let Him Return received Top Honors in the 2002 Waging Peace Through Singing international choral composition competition. Reciprocity, an 11-minute SATB multi-lingaul, multi-faith choral work was commissioned by the Foundation for Universal Sacred Music and premiered in fall 2005 at the First Festival of Universal Sacred Music in New York City. This ecumenical piece quotes the original teachings of the ethic of reciprocity throughout humankind’s history in the teachers’ native languages, going as far back as 3100 B.C. Journeys to Freedom: Rännakud Vabadusse is a nine-minute work for double SATB chorus and treble chorus, plus four winds and percussion, incorporating folksongs from Estonia and the U.S. in celebration of human freedom and dignity. It was performed by each of its three commissioning choirs in Maryland in spring 2007. In 2008 she wrote the Alma Mater for Linn-Benton Community College in Albany, Oregon. And Rebecca has written many other choral works. In March 2010 Rebecca traveled to Olomouc, Czech Republic, where the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra recorded two of her orchestral works: Finding the Murray River (six minutes, for full orchestra), and Sleep, Child (five minutes, for string orchestra). These two works, produced by PARMA Recordings, will be released on separate CDs in summer and fall 2010 on the Navona label.
Enjoying great variety in her musical output, Rebecca wrote, recorded, and produced the music for two Taiwanese CD-ROM strategy games in 1997 and 1998. In 2003 she orchestrated the soundtrack for the independent, critically acclaimed film Westender. She composed, recorded, and produced the soundtrack for the three-hour video documentary series A History of the University of Oregon (2001, 2007). And she wrote, recorded, and produced the theme song for the weekly interview show UO Today.
Xtreme Music: April 2009 Pianotes: March 2009 Register-Guard: July 3, 2008 KMTR-TV: May 7, 2008 Register-Guard: March 17, 2008 The Bulletin / Go! Magazine: October 26, 2007 Register-Guard: October 18, 2007 Carroll County Times / Encore Magazine: April 19, 2007 Eugene Weekly: May 18, 2006 Register-Guard: July 11, 2002 Eugene Weekly: March 15, 2001 |
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