Mark Weiser
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Biography
Mark Lanz Weiser has had his music performed internationally by such groups as the Baltimore and Indianapolis Symphony Orchestras, the Oakland East Bay Symphony, the Eclipse Chamber Orchestra, the Capitol Quartet, the Peabody Orchestra, the Winnipeg Symphony, and the New Horizons Chamber Ensemble. He has received commissions from the American Guild of Organists, Bank of America, and the Lehigh Valley Chamber orchestra, among others, and his music has been published by Boosey & Hawkes. Weiser has received many awards including annual ASCAP grants since 1996, and residencies at the Yaddo colony in New York and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. His opera Where Angels Fear to Tread was cited in the 1999 annual edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica as a notable American Opera premiere. Weiser’s music can also be heard in many award-winning commercial and independent films that have been shown throughout the U.S., U.K., and Canada.
Frank Ticheli
Professor
Biography
Frank Ticheli’s music has been described as being “optimistic and thoughtful” (Los Angeles Times), “lean and muscular” (The New York Times), “brilliantly effective”(Miami Herald) and “powerful, deeply felt crafted with impressive flair and an ear for striking instrumental colors” (South Florida Sun-Sentinel). Ticheli (b. 1958) joined the faculty of the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music in 1991, where he is Professor of Composition. From 1991 to 1998, Ticheli was Composer in Residence of the Pacific Symphony.
Isaac Schankler
Adjunct Instructor
Biography
Isaac Schankler is a composer, pianist, accordionist and electronic musician living in Los Angeles. Lauded as “extraordinarily eclectic” and “masterfully composed” (Boston Musical Intelligencer), his music is inspired by improvisation, indeterminacy, spoken language, narrative, and puzzles.
Chris Rozé
Senior Lecturer
Biography
Chris Rozé’s music has been performed in New York, Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles by the Atlantic String Quartet, Earplay, the Boston Chamber Music Society, Music Mobile and other new music groups. His clarinet quintet, Crisscross, won the 1989 New England League-ISCM Composition Contest, and his duo for saxophone and marimba, Jitterbug/Ballad, won second prize in the 2001 Percussive Arts Society Composition Contest and is published by Alto Publications, U.K. He won a BMI Award and has also received grants from Meet the Composer and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Rozé holds a master’s degree from The Juilliard School and a DMA from the USC Thornton School of Music. From 1979 to 1992, he was the chairman of the composition department at the Boston Conservatory.
Jonathan Patterson
Lecturer
A native of Portland, Oregon, Jonathan “Capital” Patterson has been featured on over 25 recordings from rock to hip-hop to Brazilian jazz, alongside artists such asAmerican Idol’s Crystal Bowersox, Del the Funky Homosapien, Airto Moreira, Paulo Calasans, Marco Bosco, Swing Out Sister, Cosiner, DJ Nozawa, DJ Akakabe, Otmaro Ruiz, Hussain Jiffry, Ken Okulolo, Kenneth Nash, Ken Ishii, Shing02 and more. Capital’s original Brazilian jazz band, Bossa Zuzu, is produced by multi-GRAMMY-winning drum legend Peter Erskine.
A former high school Oregon state Classical Guitar champion, Capital’s artistry shines through on both electric and acoustic guitar. He has toured extensively in the U.S., Canada, Japan and Brazil, and performed in numerous festivals including Japan’s Fuji Rock Festival and Seattle’s BrasilFest. Capital holds an MM in Ethnomusicology from UC Berkeley and a DMA from USC, where he currently teaches Harmony and Aural Skills in the Division of Contemporary Music, Music Technology and Guitar programs.
Jeffrey Parola
Part-Time Lecturer
Biography
Jeffrey Parola is an American composer of a number of eclectic orchestral, chamber, and choral/vocal works. Recent major professional commissions include Concerto for Clarinet and Chamber Orchestra, which premiered to critical acclaim in Florida with the Atlantic Classical Orchestra (Stewart Robertson, conductor) in March, 2014. this view of life, a piece for chorus and string quartet, premiered in New York City with Choral Chameleon (Vince Peterson, conductor) in May, 2013. Upcoming commissions include a piece for two pianos for the Los Angeles-based Hocket ensemble (Sarah Gibson and Thomas Kotcheff, pianists), a song commissioned by Dana Gioia and Victoria Kirsch for the USC Visions & Voices event, “Earth’s Waters: Rivers, Lakes, and Oceans in Poetry and Music” at the USC Fisher Museum of Art, and a piece for the SFCM New Music Ensemble, to be premiered in San Francisco in the spring of 2016.
Jeffrey is the recipient of numerous notable honors, including the Jim Highsmith Orchestral Composition Prize (2009) for his large orchestral work, The Long Valley, honorable mention for the EAMA Prize (2009) for his work, Sempiterna, the EAMA Prize (2012) for The Long Valley, the Rappaport Prize for Music Composition (2013), and the 2016 Hoefer Prize (2014). A committed educator, Jeffrey is a Lecturer in Music Theory and Composition on the faculty at the University of Southern California. He is a recurring composition faculty member for the Choral Chameleon Summer Institute (NYC), which is a summer program for emerging composers and conductors, designed to immerse composers and conductors of choral music in real-world, practical learning experiences. Also an active performer and conductor, Jeffrey Parola serves as Organist & Choirmaster at St. Thomas the Apostle Church in Hollywood.
Andrew Norman
Assistant Professor
Andrew Norman, assistant professor of composition at Thornton, joined that faculty in fall 2013. A native Midwesterner raised in central California, he studied the piano and viola before attending the USC Thornton School of Music, where he earned a BM in 2002 and MM in 2004, and the Yale School of Music. His teachers and mentors include Martha Ashleigh, Donald Crockett, Stephen Hartke, Stewart Gordon, Aaron Kernis, Ingram Marshall and Martin Bresnick.
A lifelong enthusiast for all things architectural, Norman writes music that is often inspired by forms and textures he encounters in the visual world. His music draws on an eclectic mix of instrumental sounds and notational practices, and it has been cited in The New York Times for its “daring juxtapositions and dazzling colors” and in theLos Angeles Times for its “Chaplinesque” wit.
Robert S. Moore
Associate Professor
Biography
Robert S. Moore, associate professor, composition, received a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and is a graduate of Centenary College. Dr. Moore is a recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Rockefeller Foundation. He is the winner of the Sutherland Dows Composition Prize. His recordings include Music from Distant Places (Music Gallery). He has been a visiting professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the National Center for Experiments in Television. Dr. Moore has previously held faculty appointments at the Oberlin Conservatory and Yale University.
Morten Lauridsen
Distinguished Professor
Biography
Recipient, 2007 National Medal of Arts
The music of Morten Johannes Lauridsen, composer-in-residence of the Los Angeles Master Chorale from 1995–2001 and professor of composition at the USC Thornton School of Music for more than forty years, occupies a permanent place in the standard vocal repertoire of the 21st century.
His eight vocal cycles and two collections—Les Chansons des Roses (Rilke), Mid-Winter Songs (Graves), A Winter Come (Moss), Madrigali: Six “FireSongs” on Italian Renaissance Poems, Nocturnes (Rilke, Neruda and Agee), A Backyard Universe (Witt),Cuatro Canciones (Lorca),
