Eric W. Sawyer

Infobox actor
name = Eric Sawyer

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nationality = American
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occupation = composer
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homepage = http://www.ericsawyer.net/
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Eric W. Sawyer or Eric Sawyer (born June 2, 1962 in Brookhaven, New York) is an American composer, pianist and associate professor of music at Amherst College. He has studied as an undergraduate at Harvard College, where he was selected as a Harvard Junior Fellow. He undertook graduate studies at both Columbia University and the University of California, Davis (where he completed his doctorate in 1994).cite web | title = Eric W. Sawyer | work = Amherst College | url = https://cms.amherst.edu/people/facstaff/ewsawyer | accessdate = 2008-06-02 ] Before taking up the position at Amherst, Sawyer spent four years as Chair of Composition and Theory at the Longy School of Music.cite web | date = November 8, 2007 | title = Biography | work = Eric Sawyer | url = http://ericsawyer.net/bio.htm | accessdate = 2008-06-02 ]

Sawyer has written a number of pieces that have received multiple public performances. His debut was in 1985 with "Three Pieces for Orchestra", performed by the Harvard Chamber Orchestra, was described at the time as an "auspicious beginning".cite news | last = Dyer | first = Richard | date = July 8, 1985 | title = A Wonderful Tribute from the Harvard Chamber Teacher | work = Boston Globe ] Later pieces have included "String Quartet No. 2" (premiered at the Longy School of Music's "SeptemberFest" in 1999);cite news | last = Dyer | first = Richard | date = September 17, 1999 | title = Sound Choice (in African-American Singers are No Joke) | work = Boston Globe ] cite web | last = Miller | first = Steven | date = November 10, 2000 | title = "American" Music Shines | work = San Francisco Classical Voice | url = http://www.sfcv.org/arts_revs/ives_11_14_00.php | accessdate = 2008-06-04 ] "Violin Sonata" (which included Sawyer on piano);cite news | last = Buell | first = Richard | date = August 5, 1997 | title = Sneakers Composers Tread Gently | work = Boston Globe ] "The Humble Heart", a cantata built around texts by American Shakers, which debuted in 2006;cite news | last = Noble Jr. | first = Clifton J. | date = October 06, 2006 | title = 'River of Love' a celebration of Shaker music | work = The Republican | url = http://www.masslive.com/living/republican/index.ssf?/base/living-1/1160034083107030.xml&coll=1 | accessdate = 2008-06-02 ] and "Three for Trio". The 2001 Laurel Trio performance of Three for Trio was well received, being described as "the work of a person who is entirely at ease with traditional tonality stretched to its limits."cite news | last = Reinthaler | first = Joan | date = April 23, 2001 | title = Music | work = Washington Post ] Sawyer's first CD of his work - "Eric Sawyer: String Works" - was released under the Albany Records label in 2005 and featured four of his compositions.cite journal | last = Lehman | date = March 01, 2006 | title = Sawyer: Quartets 2+3; 5 Bagatelles; Pas de Deux | journal = American Record Guide ] Sawyer’s piano trio “Lincoln’s Two Americas” was one of three winners in the Ravinia Festival competition for Lincoln-themed chamber works to be performed as part of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial celebration in 2009.cite news | last = von Rhein | first = John | date = July 21, 2008 | title = Ravinia Festival Notes | work = Chicago Tribune| url = http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-lincoln-0721jul21,0,4133616.story| accessdate = 2008-06-04 ]

Along with librettist and University of California, Berkeley English lecturer John Shoptaw, Sawyer has composed an opera based upon a play set in Ford's Theatre the night United States President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth.cite web|title = Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities News & Events: "Our American Cousin"|url =http://www.mfh.org/newsandevents/newsletter/MassHumanities/Spring2008/cousin.html] The play, "Our American Cousin", by playwright Tom Taylor, is a farce, while the opera "Our American Cousin" contains the play, imagined intrigue among the actors and actresses, and production staff of the play, and historical information about the assassination. [cite web|title = "Amherst Magazine" "Setting murder to music."|url = http://www.amherst.edu/magazine/issues/07spring/college_row/music.html] [cite news | last = Herrmann | first = Michele | title = New Opera Takes a Second Look at an American Tragedy | work = Fairfield Citizen News (CT) | publisher = Brooks Community Newspapers | date = 2007-004-04 ]

The opera had its staged premiere in Northampton, Massachusetts in June, 2008. At this performance reviewer David Perkins noted “passages when words and music come together exquisitely. One is the series of choruses in Act I, when the Ford's Theatre audience turns and reforms into groups representing the war's human aftermath - amputees, freedmen, nurses, carpetbaggers, etc., singing words culled from real diaries and letters. Here is Sawyer's most beautiful music, drenched in a bittersweet chromaticism reminiscent of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem. These, and a final chorus condemning the cycle of "blood for blood," might well be packaged separately. They speak clearly to our day.”cite news | last = Perkins | first = David | date = June 23, 2008 | title = Big themes, big performances boost 'Our American Cousin'| work = The Boston Globe | url = http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2008/06/23/big_themes_big_performances_boost_our_american_cousin/| accessdate = 2008-08-05 ]

A concert version of the opera was performed in 2007 and isolated works have been performed prior to this date. "Hawk's Aria" was performed in 1997, and "Laura Keene's aria" was performed in 1993. (At the 1993 performance, reviewer Robert Commanday noted that at this early performance the music was "appealing and finely written", but found the text to be "too wordy").cite news | last = Commanday | first = Robert | date = January 24, 1993 | title = Bay Area Composers' Symposium - Classical Pitch to Sound Out Talent - Young musicians hear their works-in-progress | work = The San Francisco Chronicle ] In 2007 a concert containing several of the pieces was performed, but, as Jeff Dunn described the event, the decisions to perform excerpts rather than the full production and to accompany the singers with a piano on its own, left the performance "fatally wounded".cite web | last = Dunn | first = Jeff | date = August 23, 2007 | title = Fatally Wounded | work = San Francisco Classical Voice | url = http://www.sfcv.org/2007/09/04/fatally-wounded/ | accessdate = 2008-06-04 ] The Boston Modern Orchestra Project has recorded the opera, "Our American Cousin" on the BMOP/sound label.

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