bio

Geoffrey Pope, composer and conductor, has been recognized through numerous commissions and awards in the orchestral, chamber music and jazz realms. As a conductor, he has premiered pieces with a variety of ensembles and performers in the Los Angeles area, and while studying at the Thornton School of Music at USC, Pope founded the Starving Composers’ Ensemble, a modular group devoted to encouraging the composition and performance of new works for chamber orchestra. He served as assistant conductor to Donald Crockett of the Thornton Contemporary Music Ensemble, and was the inaugural composer in residence of the Chamber Opera of USC. In 2007, his music was performed in European cities including Prague, Budapest and Leipzig by the Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra. Pope recently completed Srebrenica Fields, a commission for the Bay Brass in recognition of the thirteenth anniversary of the massacre, and his ongoing projects include a second opera—set in Sarajevo in the 1990s—in collaboration with visionary tenor and concept artist Timur Bekbosunov, who commissioned and produced his chamber opera, The Stone House. The forthcoming opera, Sarajevo Vespers, recently received endorsement from the America-Bosnia Cultural Foundation to aid research in Bosnia and promote international recognition of the project. Courtney Angela Brkić, the librettist, is most renowned for her writings on the forensic work she undertook in eastern Bosnia in 1996, and has served with the International War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague. Brkić is the recipient of a New York Times Fellowship and a Whiting Writer's Award, and “her talent with the language of fiction brings on a nonfiction narrative with true softness...” (Peter Maass, New York Times Book Review). The protagonist part is being crafted for the voice of John Duykers, perhaps most recognized for creating the role of Chairman Mao in John Adams’ Nixon in China. As a fledgling theorist and teacher, Pope concentrates on the Second Viennese School, particularly the music of Alban Berg. He was an inaugural recipient of the $10,000 Discovery Scholarship for continuing studies from USC, where his primary instructors were Donald Crockett, Tamar Diesendruck and Frederick Lesemann. Pope is pursuing an MA in Composition at the Eastman School of Music, where he studies with Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, and is a frequent conductor of several New York groups including the OSSIA contemporary music ensemble and the Eastman Composers' Sinfonietta. Pope's recent work for solo viola, Disembarking, commissioned by Los Angeles Times award winner EM Lewis for her play Song of Extinction, was hailed by the Santa Monica Daily Press as "the most amazing element of all... mirroring [the protagonist's] desperate confusion and grief." The piece was most recently performed in Johannesburg, South Africa, by violist Renata van der Vyver. Next fall, Pope is co-producing a concert with international prizewinning violinist Anyango Yarbo-Davenport, featuring new concertos written by Frederick Lesemann, Robert Morris and himself. Pope's music has been broadcast on Classical KUSC 91.5 and Southern California Public Radio 89.3, and is published in the United States by Klangfarben Press.