EMILY REID/Arizona Daily Wildcat Assistant professor of music Craig Walsh works at his office piano yesterday. Walsh recently won the prestigious Lee Ettelson Composer's Award for his viola and clarinet composition, "Schism."

UA music professor awarded for recent composition

Craig Walsh, assistant professor of music at the UA, was recently awarded the 2002 Lee Ettelson Composer's Award.

"It's one of the biggest awards for chamber music, nationally," Walsh said.

"I was thrilled when I got the phone call."

Walsh received the award for a piece he composed last year for the viola and clarinet, titled "Schism." He said that while some pieces he has completed have taken up to a year to compose, he wrote "Schism" in only five months. He said the piece was completed in July 2001 and premiered last fall.

"'Schism' was done in about five months, and then I taught it at the University of North Carolina Greensboro before coming here," Walsh said. "I worked with both players after that point on additions and revisions."

He said the two players the piece was composed for and dedicated to are Kelly Burke and Scott Rawls, faculty members of the UNCG music department.

"(Burke and Rawls) - they were the clarinetist and violist, respectively," Walsh said. "I knew them for three years and I knew what they liked, so I had this idea already of them on stage playing it."

Walsh said Burke and Rawls also recorded the piece, due out this year on Centaur Records. He said the two musicians are working on coordinating a performance of "Schism" in San Francisco for Composers, Inc.'s 2002-03 season concert.

Walsh said that "Schism," like most of his music, reflects his personality.

"('Schism' is) very on the edge, it's very fast paced," Walsh said. "My music tends to be like I am - hyper and rhythmical and on the edge and pointed. It's music that I would define (as) lively (with) sharp edges."

He said his musical style incorporates several genres of music, from classical to popular music.

"I was classically trained, (but) I love the rhythm and syncopation of a lot of pop music. I like the syncopation in a lot of R&B music and jazz," he said. "(Those styles) bleed together into my music (to create) my style."

Walsh added that while he rarely finds time to compose during the school year, he often uses his summers and other breaks to pursue completion of his works.

He said composing is sometimes a frustrating endeavor.

"Composing is a complicated creative issue," Walsh said. "The process one goes through is a torturous process in some ways because it's so slow. You can work all day on a piece and only get two measures. You never know what the day will bring."

He said the decisions one makes while composing are crucial to completing a musical work.

"Composing is all about making decisions about the piece · whether the piece will have a slow ending (or) a fast ending, to make the piece the most successful piece it can (be)."

Walsh said he makes these decisions based on intuition, focusing on the orchestration of the piece and the interaction of the instruments.

"I don't write by any kind of systematic method. It's a very intuitive nature," Walsh said. "(It's) a lot like how people interact in conversation - how you interrupt me or I interrupt you, and within that structure you think of what the overall shape of the piece will be."

In addition to the 2002 Lee Ettelson Composer's Award, Walsh has also received awards from the National Association of Composers, the Ladislav Kubik International Composition Competition and the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Award.