Biography:
Gregory Rowland Evans is an award-winning composer and cellist. Evans attended the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music from 2013-2017, receiving a BM with a double major in both Cello Performance and Music Composition. Gregory studied cello with Lee Fiser and composition with Ellen Harrison, Mara Helmuth, and Joel Hoffman. During this time Evans commissioned works from local composers and premiered the music of internationally recognized composers while also serving on the board of the Performance and Time Arts series at the Cincinnati Contemporary Dance Theater (2014-2016). From 2017-2019, Gregory attended the Frost School of Music, studying with Juraj Kojš and Charles Mason, and receiving an MM in Digital Arts and Sound Design. Evans organized semi-improvisational works for laptop ensemble and produced installations, some of which premiered at the Miami Beach Botanical Gardens Earth Day event in 2018 and art galleries in the Wynwood art district. In 2024 Evans received a Ph.D. in music composition at the University of Iowa, studying with Jean-François Charles, Sivan Cohen Elias, and David Gompper.
The music of Gregory Rowland Evans has been performed throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe with premieres scheduled in the UK, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Evans has been featured at summer festivals and workshops such as the Cortona Sessions for New Music, New Music on the Point, the New England Conservatory Summer Intensive for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP), the Ensemble Dal Niente & DePaul Summer Institute for New Music, and MIXTUR Festival. Gregory has also been mentored by composers outside of academia through private study and masterclasses including Trevor Bača, Ann Cleare, Michael Finnissy, and Chaya Czernowin. Notable collaborations include four string quartets written for and premiered by the JACK quartet, two mixed chamber works for Ensemble Dal Niente, a saxophone orchestra work for the Frost Saxophone Ensemble, and a work for solo soprano for Tony Arnold. Evans is currently a composer-in-residence with the Antigone Music Collective resulting in several commissions. Evans is also working with emerging artists such as cellist Leah Plave, saxophonist Steph Tamas, Pianist Mik Livadiotis, and trio Ex-Sentia.
In addition Evans has been awarded various scholarships and has taught as a graduate teaching assistant including:
2017-2019: Studio Assistant for the director of the Electroacoustic Music program at the Frost School of Music and a graduate instructor in aural skills, improvisation, and music composition with additional duties as the assistant to the graduate review.
2019-2024: Teaching Assistant of the Electronic Music Studios at the Univerity of Iowa (2019-2020), instructor of Music Theory and Aural skills (2020-2022), graduate assistant to the University of Iowa Center for New Music ensemble, and non-major music composition (2022-2024).
Artist statement:
The intersection of narrativity and abstract structuralism is where my creative efforts are focused. My imagination is sparked by a combined interest in linguistic structure, writing systems and their calligraphy, and alternative methods of expression, for example the cultures of the esoteric which can be seen in the texts of alchemy and magic. I believe in the power of newness, that objects once found repulsive can become beautiful and that old thoughts can be recontextualized and thus recuperated. I believe in the power of the act of decipherment, that hidden meaning, once decoded is somehow amplified above that which is plainly said. The shared experience of taking apart an encrypted work can bring a community into being through the collaborative effort of shared discovery.
I am interested in musical form as the direct activation of the experience of memory. My sense of formal technique is inspired by the filmic experience of time-cuts, flashes forward and back in time, the dilation of time resultant from differing velocities. I view composition as the act of giving life to sound as pleasurable intensity through impossible timelines, fantastic colors, and unusual shapes. Regions of stability and directed moments of the manifestation of newness exchange with one another, sometimes in rapid succession to illicit the impression of changes of scene in the state of an infinite “meanwhile.”
I am aware of many layers of transmutation in operation at once. My works are often the result of a period of intense formalization of large-scale structures and gestural patterns. A coded language of physical possibilities is converted into the symbolic language of music notation. This notation is then interpreted by performers as a series of actions latent with meaning which is later deployed in real-time with all the accidents and imperfections inherent in this practice before an audience who are tasked with the absorption and psycho-embodiment of the sounding experience.
Preparing the score documents carries the same value of intensity and emotional urgency as the process of imagining the intangible sound physicalities which appear during a composition. Creating the score is a symbolic act, the product of which may only suggest a series of potential meanings, however interpretations at all levels, analytic, emotional, or otherwise have the power, when in combination with one another, to grip, concentrate, and lead the audience to a transfiguration of the secret language of symbols. The shared public experience of music should bear the intensity of the knowing and the feeling of the things of our world.
In recent compositions, I begin at the large-scale and proceed by crafting finer and finer detail. I create a story in speeds, the map of tempi which will lead the work. I study the instrumental forces involved and partition out manners of sound production, grouping together similar sound palettes and contrasting accompaniments. From these potential sound qualities, I distill patterns of motion, operations of harmonic elaboration, rhythmic qualities, dynamic trajectories, and other factors of each narratively differentiated material type. The materials are then developed. How can a sound become another sound? How can one material type be made into the doppelgänger of another? I determine the approximate duration of the work and divide the totality into subsections and metrically divide the subsections by a pattern of time signatures. I produce a timeline graph of the exchange of materials, whether they overlap or abut, in which measures they occur. Then begins the task of specifying the details in score notation.