Friday, January 22, 2016

New Zodiac Trio Album 2016














FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE from Fortman (ASCAP)

Dreamtime, a newly released contemporary classical CD by the Zodiac Trio, is now available on the Blue Griffin Recording label. Of personal interest is the track "Libra" which was written by Noel Fortman in 2013 (using his own algorithmic composition methods) while he was just a 1st-semester freshman at the University of Illinois School of Music at Urbana-Champaign.

"Libra" is presented as the 4th movement of a 12 part suite of short works entitled "Zodiac: Across The Universe." This unique chamber suite for clarinet, violin & piano resulted from an online call-for-score by the Zodiac Trio themselves. They chose Noel's piece to combine with 11 other selections after auditioning around a hundred submissions from composers all around the world. The suite was previously debuted at live concerts on the trio's multi-city tour of China in November 2013. Their Dreamtime album features the World Premiere Recording of "Zodiac: Across The Universe" (along with several other world premieres) from sessions last year at Blue Griffin's Ballroom Studio in Lansing, Michigan.

Noel Fortman is currently in his 3rd year of studies at UIUC, now pursuing two concurrent bachelor degrees in Computer Science+Linguistics and Music Composition. Having participated in last summer's Workshop in Algorithmic Computer Music on the campus of UC-Santa Cruz, Noel is extremely excited to be returning to California this summer for a coveted 12 week software engineering internship with Google at their Mountain View Googleplex.