|
Biography
Roger Tréfousse has written a wide variety of music: film scores, operas and musicals, symphonic works, songs and chamber music.
He has composed three operas, The Monkey Opera, premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; Found Objects, commissioned by the Mannes College of Music; and Blue Margaritas, premiered in New York at the Experimental Intermedia Foundation. Départ Malgache, the first section of a new group of short operas with libretto by Kenneth Koch, was featured on WNYC radio.
Two musicals have been produced in New York City, Snobs Cabaret at Encompass Music Theater and Hoosick Falls at The Theater for the New City. Selections from Raft of the Medusa, a work-in-progress, were featured in concert by Downtown Music Productions. He has written incidental music for many plays, among them On the Verge (The Mark Taper Forum), A Husband's Notes About Her (The Actors Studio) and 1000 Avant Garde Plays (The Robert Wilson Center).
Film scores include the HBO thriller Ladykiller; the PBS documentary Jackson Pollock:Portrait and V.A. Rowlands's award-winnng short films, Ascending Double Helix (score commissioned for Access Contemporary Music's 2019 Music and Film Festival in Chicago ) and Entre Les Images. Television credits include music for The Guiding Light and As the World Turns. His music will be featured in Sandra Prechtel's upcoming film Liebe Angst.
Two new works will be premiered on the Berlin Philharmonie Chamber Music Series at the Neuenationalgalerie in Berlin on October 31, 2021. Tréfousse was featured pianist on the Jewish Museum in Berlin's September 12 program commemorating the Jüdische Kulturbund. He performed Tui St George Tucker's Second Piano Sonata in a nationally broadcast concert from Lincoln Center
This spring, he will record a song cyce by Max Kowalski and his own songs with soprano Alma Sadé of the Komische Oper. A new work, commsisioned by Composers Concordance, will have its New York premiere in June. Upcoming concerts include a violin and piano recital in Berlin with violinist Sophia Baltatzi and solo piano recitals at the Jewish Museum in Berlin and in a feaured concert in Hamburg. He is preparing a program of improvisations with legendary jazz trombonist, Dick Griffin.
Recent performances include the European premiere by pianist Jan Gerdes of Music for Grete; Graceful Exits for solo oboe, commissioned and premiered by William Wielgus of the National Symphony in Washington DC. Tréfousse was guest artist pn the international Summer Organ Series at St Michel Kirche in Berlin, performing his own music and works by his teachers, John Cage and Ben Weber; he will repeat the program in Hamburg and Braunschweig. Selections from his opera Found Objects were showcased at the National Opera Association conference in Atlanta.
Tréfousse divides his time between Berlin and New York, currently living in Berlin, where he is at work on Berlin/Return, a large-scale vocal and orchestral project inspired by his own sense of return home to Germnay–the country where his father's family and his most influential teachers had lived for generations until forced to flee during the Nazi times. He has received a grant for this project from Kulturprojekte Berlin.
From age twelve, he was fortunate to spend summers at Catawba, poet and classicist Vera Lachmann's legendary arts camp, an offshoot of Black Mountain College in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. There he met composer Tui St George Tucker, became her accompanist for the music program and later directed the music program during Catawba's final years. At Catawba, and later in New York through Tui and Vera, he came to know many members of he New York School of composers and artists, including Jackson MacLow, Spencer Holst, Grete Sultan, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Lou Harrison and Ben Weber, an extraordinary group whose input, ideas and influence had a major effect on his development as an artist. For example, his first pieces were settings of Sappho poems in the original Greek, written after studying Greek lyric poetry with Lachmann at Brooklyn College, and Cage was the first to offer him a professional critique of his composition efforts when those songs were performed in concert at the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in 1978.
Tréfousse received a B.A.magna cum laude with honors in ancient Greek from Brooklyn College. He studied composition as a private student of Ben Weber, piano with Grete Sultan and music theory with Siegmund Levarie. He holds an M.A. in Music Composition from Columbia University, where he studied elctronic music with Vladimir Ussachevsky and opera with Jack Beeson. He has taught in the Metropolitan Opera Educational Program in New York and in London at Covent Garden; he accompanies singers and instrumentalists on piano, organ and harpsichord and teaches piano, vocal coaching and opera stagecraft in New York and Berlin, and internationally via Skype.
Publications include Listening to Pollock, an essay about composing the music for Jackson Pollock: Portrait, included in Such Desperate Joy (Thunders Mouth Press, 2001; edited by Helen Harrison, with an introduction by Ed Harris) and The Strange Life of Ben Weber, commissioned by the American Composers Alliance Magazine. My Search for Ben Weber was recently published in NewMusicBox. He is currently at work on a biography on Ben Weber.
Selections from his opera Found Objects were showcased at the Fall 2017 National Opera Association conference in Atlanta, and Tréfousse premiered Don Bachardy Paints a Portrait, a new work for solo piano as part of the Composers Concordance 2018 Art and Sound Festival in May 2018. In July 2018, as a guest artist of the EMX Ensemble, he presented Synesthsia/ Fusion:3 Painters Portrayed, a group of three musical portraits for piano and electric guitar at Ballhaus in Berlin, Germany and in New York at the Cornelia Street Café as a guest artist of Concept Lab. Chet Ayin Mem, a new work for eight part chorus, had its premiere on the Composers Concordance 72 Chorus Project September concert. A selection from Song of the Wolf for violin and piano was performed by violinist Kinga Augustyn and pianist Jasna Popovic at the DiMenna Center in November and a new version of Balanced Boulders for flute and piano had its first performance at the Cornelia Street Café in December. Tréfousse gave a talk and performed four of his musical portraits at Molly Barnes's Art Salon at the Roger Smith Hotel Penthouse Suite in January 2019 and a lecture on John Cage and Ben Weber at the Ohrpheo Musikschule in Berlin. Other 2019 performances include a newly-comissioned orcehstration of Synesthesia/Fusion: 3 Painters Portrayed for the APNM Pierrot Plus Percussion concert at St Peters in Chelsea and the New York premiere of Song of the Wolf for violin and piano at St Marks Church.
In 2020, pianist Jan Gerdes gave the Berlin premiere of Music for Grete, sponsored by Unerhörte Musik; Tréfousse performed his own music and works by Ben Weber and John Cage as featured artist at the International Orgelsommer series at St-Michel Kirche in Berlin; in New York, and will repeat this performance in Hamburg and Braunscweig. Composers Concordance premiered Light Seeking Light, a commissioned work for five instruments; the group will premiere Upcoming events with Tréfousse as performer and composer include a violin and piano recital in Berlin with violinist Sophia Baltatzi a piano recital in Berlin and Hamburg
He is currently at work on a new opera, an evening of improvisations with jazz trombonist Dick Griffin, and a biography of Ben Weber.
There are no productions for this artist in the Season Schedule of Performances which currently only dates back to 1991.
|
Artist Information
All information is derived from OPERA America's Season Schedule of Performances and titles databases which date back to 1991. OPERA America is constantly updating this data. If you feel that a work or an artist has been omitted or that information is incorrect, please use the linked forms below. Title Information Form Artist Information Form
|