May 5, 2016
COMPOSER EMILY DOOLITTLE RECEIVES GRANT FROM OPERA AMERICA
Jan Tait and the Bear
Jan Tait and the Bear
Meilo So

Composer Emily Doolittle has been awarded a Discovery Grant by Opera America to develop and have her chamber opera Jan Tait and the Bear premiered by Glasgow-based Ensemble Thing. Emily is one of seven recipients of this year’s Discovery Grant, worth £8,515 GBP / $12,347 USD, awarded by the United States’ national service organization for opera under the banner Opera Grants for Female Composers. The premiere will take place in Glasgow in October 2016.

Emily is a native of Nova Scotia who recently relocated to Glasgow. Her 45-minute chamber opera Jan Tait and the Bear is based on a folk tale from the island of Fetlar, which dates back to the 15th century, when Shetland was under Norwegian rule. At that time Shetlanders were required to pay tax to the Norwegian king in the form of barley, sheep, oxen, and butter. Jan Tait is accused of cheating on his butter payment, argues with and kills Sigurd the tax officer, and is taken to Norway to be put to death. A rough and rugged man, Tait appears before the Norwegian King Harald with bare, bunioned feet. When the king expresses disgust, Tait cuts off his bunions with an axe. Seeing that Tait is strong and impetuous, the king offers him a reprieve if he will kill a bear who has been wreaking havoc in the mountain villages. Rather than killing the bear, Tait lures it with butter laced with sleeping potion, ties it up, and brings it back to Shetland. At that time bears were of great interest to Shetlanders, since the island had no native land mammals. The small island of Linga, visible from Fetlar, is reported to be where the bear lived out its days. This story, which is partly factual, continues to resonate with Shetlanders and Fetlar remains populated with descendants of the Tait family. The libretto for Jan Tait and the Bear is based on a theatrical telling of the story by 21st century Shetlander Peter Guy, and has been adapted by Emily for her chamber opera which was written in 2015 with the support of a Canada Council grant.

Founded in 2004 by John De Simone, Glasgow-based Ensemble Thing performs music by contemporary composers whether newly written, co-collaborated or taken from minimalist or experimental repertoire. Ensemble Thing showcases professional musicians based in Scotland who are committed to exploring and performing contemporary music. John and Emily both studied at the Koninklijk Conservatorium in The Hague, which Emily attended on a Fulbright Scholarship to study with Louis Andriessen, and were introduced by mutual colleagues when Emily first travelled to Glasgow in 2007 for a residency at the Centre for Contemporary Arts. When discussing potential collaborations, it became clear that Jan Tait and the Bear would be the perfect fit. The opera will be directed by American-born, Glasgow-based Stasi Schaeffer who specialises in new works, opera and musical theatre. She has directed at King’s Theatre, Oran Mor and Edinburgh Fringe, and assistant directed at Scottish Opera and at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

Thomas Butler, Musical Director of Ensemble Thing comments, “It is Ensemble Thing's mission to bring exciting, brand new music to Scottish audiences and we are thrilled to be presenting Emily Doolittle's Jan Tait and the Bear. We look forward to working with Emily on this project having been big fans of her music for a long time.”

Emily’s presence on the UK shores has been amplified by the recent premiere of her work green/blue by the English Symphony Orchestra and Music Director Kenneth Woods, described by The Classical Reviewer as “an impressive work full of colour and ever evolving ideas.”

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For further information, image or interview requests please contact Melanne Mueller, MusicCo International, +44 (0) 20 8698 6933 or +1 917 907 2785, melanne@musiccointernational.com

For further details about Emily Doolittle, please visit http://emilydoolittle.com

NOTES ABOUT JAN TAIT AND THE BEAR
The characters in Jan Tait and the Bear are:

Jan Tait (mezzo-soprano)
Sigurd the tax officer (baritone)
Brok the king’s guard (baritone)
King Harald (baritone)
The Bear (baritone)

Jan Tait and the Bear is suitable for audiences of all ages.

NOTES FOR EDITORS
Composer Emily Doolittle was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia and educated at Dalhousie, Indiana University, Princeton, and the Koninklijk Conservatorium in The Hague, where she studied with Louis Andriessen with the support a Fulbright fellowship. From 2008-2015 she lived in Seattle, where she was an Associate Professor of Music at Cornish College of the Arts. She currently lives in Glasgow, UK.

Doolittle enjoys writing for both traditional and less standard instrumentation, and has been commissioned by such ensembles and soloists as Symphony Nova Scotia, the Vancouver Island Symphony, Orchestre Métropolitain (Montreal), the New York Youth Symphony, Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra (Toronto), Ensemble Contemporain de Montreal, the Motion Ensemble (New Brunswick), the Paragon Ensemble (Glasgow), soprano Suzie LeBlanc, viola da gambist Karin Preslmayer, and alphornist Mike Cumberland. Upcoming projects include her chamber opera Jan Tait and the Bear, and a concerto for Canadian bassoonist Nadina Mackie Jackson.

An on-going interest for Doolittle is the relationship between music and sounds from the natural world, particularly bird and other animal songs. She has explored this in a number of compositions, as well as in her doctoral dissertation at Princeton and in interdisciplinary birdsong research with biologists and ornithologists. In 2011 she was composer-in-residence at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany, where she collaborated with ornithologist Henrik Brumm in researching the song of the musician wren and presented a concert of her birdsong-related works, performed by members of the Bavarian State Opera.

Other recurrent interests include folklore, musical story-telling, and making music for and with children. These interests are combined in her piece Songs of Seals, based on Scottish folklore and written in collaboration with Gaelic poet Rody Gorman, for the Voice Factory Youth Choir and the Paragon Ensemble (Glasgow), which was premiered in the fall of 2011 in Glasgow and Skye.

Doolittle has received a number of awards for her music, including a 2016 Culture and Animals Foundation Award to research seal vocalizations at St. Andrews University, a 2013 Sorel Organization Medallion in Recording,the 2012 Theodore Front Prize for A Short, Slow Life (commissioned by Suzie Leblanc and Symphony Nova Scotia), two ASCAP Morton Gould Awards, and the Bearn’s Prize. Her work has been supported by grants and commissions from the Artist Trust (Seattle), the Eric Stokes Fund, The Culture and Animals Foundation, ASCAP, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Nova Scotia Arts Council, FIRST Music, the Montreal Arts Council, and the Conseil des Arts et Lettres du Québec, and with artist residencies at MacDowell, Ucross, Blue Mountain Center, Banff, and the Center for Contemporary Art in Glasgow.

Over recent years Ensemble Thing has emerged as a group at the forefront of the Scottish contemporary music scene. In August 2014, Ensemble Thing debuted as the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with their critically-acclaimed show Replaceable Things as part of the prestigious Made In Scotland showcase. They returned to the Festival Fringe in 2015 to present John De Simone's Independence.

In 2011, Ensemble Thing recorded music by John De Simone for the revolutionary piece of iPad theatre Alma Mater which became an instant Festival Fringe hit and subsequently toured to Melbourne, London and Cologne. The ensemble was invited to perform at the Italian new music festival Verona Risuona in May 2012 and at the Handmade, Homegrown 2013 concert series in The Hague, The Netherlands. In the UK, Ensemble Thing has been invited to play at Glasgow's European Music Council Forum on Music, to represent contemporary music at the Aberdeen New Music Scotland Showcase, at Glasgow's Tramway Music Circus, at Sound Festival, Aberdeen, and to perform at the inaugural New Music Week at the University of St Andrews. In 2015, Ensemble Thing returned to Aberdeen to premiere You Can't Get There From Here, a collaboration between six composers that included Francis MacDonald, drummer of Teenage Fanclub.

Glasgow-based Ensemble Thing performs music by contemporary composers whether newly written, co-collaborated or taken from minimalist or experimental repertoire. The group showcases some of the finest early-career professional musicians currently based in Scotland who are committed to exploring and performing contemporary music. Described as “a fine quintet” by The Herald and “electrifying” by The Scotsman, Ensemble Thing performs nationally and abroad.

Ensemble Thing’s founder John De Simone trained as a composer at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and The Royal Conservatoire, The Hague, where he graduated with distinction. Subsequently he was awarded a PhD in composition from the University of St Andrews. He enjoys a growing international reputation with commissions throughout the world from renowned ensembles such as the Percussion Group The Hague, The New Juilliard Ensemble, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Red Note Ensemble and the Mondriaan Quartet, and had his music featured at festivals such as FUSELeeds 2004, Gothenberg G.A.S, Spitalfields Festival, Gaudeamus Festival, Verona Risuona and the BBC Tectonics Festival. His music has been featured on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4, and Polish, Dutch and Italian national radio. He is currently a Lecturer at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

Ensemble Thing’s Music Director Thomas Butler is a composer and conductor based in Glasgow. His expanded approach to composition combines sound and instrumental performance with video, still images and archive material to explore recurring themes of place, psychogeography, technology, authority and illusion. After studying music at the University of Edinburgh, Thomas studied composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and will be awarded a PhD in composition from the University of St Andrews in 2016. Recent work has included Elbow Room for Red Note Ensemble, Sandglass (with choreographer Lucy Boyes) for Sound Festival/Dance Live, and Six Maps for a Fragile Landscape for cellist Robert Irvine (supported by the Hope Scott Trust). He produces the new music podcast I'LL CADENCE WHEN I DIE!, and teaches musicianship, music theory and composition.

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