Featured Composer/Performer -- Marilyn Shrude
Website: https://www.marilynshrude.com/
The music of composer Marilyn Shrude is characterized by its warmth and lyricism, rich
timbre, multi-layered constructions, and complex blend of tonality and atonality. The
result is a bright, shimmering and delicately wrought sound world that is at once both
powerful and fragile (Natvig – New Grove). Her concentration on color and the natural
resonance of spaces, as well as her strong background in Pre-Vatican II liturgical music,
give the music its linear, spiritual, and quasi-improvisational qualities.
Shrude earned degrees from Alverno College and Northwestern University, and has served
on the faculty of Bowling Green State University since 1977. Among her more prestigious
honors are those from the Guggenheim Foundation, American Academy of Arts and
Letters, Rockefeller Foundation, Chamber Music America/ASCAP, Meet the Composer,
Sorel Foundation (Medallion Winner for Choral Music 2011), and the National Endowment
for the Arts. She was the first woman to receive the Kennedy Center Friedheim Award for
Orchestral Music and the Cleveland Arts Prize for Music. She was named a Distinguished
Artist Professor in 2001 and received BGSU’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014. Her
work for saxophone and piano, Renewing the Myth, was the required piece for the 150
participants of the 3rd International Adolphe Sax Concours in Belgium (2002).
Active as a composer, pianist, teacher, and contemporary music advocate, Shrude has
consistently promoted American music through her many years as founder and director of
the MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music (1987-99), as chair of the Department of
Musicology/Composition/Theory at BGSU (1998-2011) and as coordinator of the doctoral
program in contemporary music (2006-present). Together with saxophonist, John
Sampen, she has premiered, recorded and presented hundreds of works by living
composers both in the United States and abroad. Guest appearances as a pianist and
composer include tours to the Soviet Union, China, Japan, Belgium, the Netherlands,
France, and Armenia, as well as numerous performances in the United States.
Shrude’s 1997 award citation from the American Academy of Arts and Letters said
the following:
Marilyn Shrude’s music is imaginative, poetic, at times gentle, at other times powerful.
With few notes, she can write a universe of beautiful sounds that soon cascade into
harmonies of grandiose gesture, such as in the Saxophone Concerto. Her colorful
instrumentation enhances all her ideas, and the elegant scores immediately give
images of her wonderful conceptions, melodic lines, counterpoint, and fresh sonorities.
All these devices come from a refined, sophisticated ear. Her works are perfectly
constructed, genuine, and at all times musical. May 1997.
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