A native of West Virginia, Dr. Taylor Giorgio is recognized as an imaginative performer and teacher. An active orchestral musician, she is a contracted violinist with the Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra, Sinfonia Gulf Coast, Valdosta Symphony Orchestra, and the Ocala Symphony Orchestra. Taylor currently maintains a private violin studio in Tallahassee, where her students have received honors at the regional and state level. She recently completed her doctoral studies in Violin Performance at Florida State University, where she was a graduate teaching assistant for Professor Corinne Stillwell for her Master’s and Doctoral degrees. An active pedagogue, she presented a session at the 2020 American String Teachers Association National Conference, and served as a violinist and teaching artist in Sinfonia Gulf Coast’s String Quartet-in-Residence for the past two years. Taylor graduated Summa Cum Laude from West Virginia University, with undergraduate degrees in Music Education and Violin Performance. While at WVU, she conducted the Morgantown Community Orchestra, won the Young Artist Concerto Competition, and premiered a solo concerto written by a student composer with the WVU Orchestra. Taylor is also a founding member of Invicta Trio, a new music trio comprised of violin, trombone, and piano, and co-directs Classical Revolution Tallahassee.
A noted opera conductor, Otto Luening (b. 1900 - d. 1996) was also a pioneer in the field of electronic music. He was born in Milwaukee and began composing in 1906, moving to Munich with his family in 1912 and later studying at a conservatory and university in Zurich. Luening became an accomplished flautist and played in a local orchestra and opera company there before making his debut as a composer-conductor in 1917. He returned to the United States in 1920 and continued conducting in addition to teaching at various colleges and universities. Luening went on to teach at Columbia for many years, also serving the American Academy in Rome as a trustee and, occasionally, as composer-in-residence. In 1944 Luening became chairman of the music department at Barnard and music director of Columbia's Brander Matthews Theatre. In 1949 he was appointed professor of music at Columbia. Under his leadership, the University continued to present many important operatic works, among them the world premiere of Benjamin Britten and W. H. Auden's Paul Bunyan.
Following years of experimentation with electronic (or electroacoustic) music, in 1959 Luening founded the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, now the Computer Music Center, along with Vladimir Ussachevsky. The center was the first in the United States devoted to the music described by Grove Music Online as that "in which electronic technology . . . is used to access, generate, explore, and configure sound materials," and provided a home for early electroacoustic composers.From the late 1940s until his retirement, Luening served as Columbia's principal instructor in musical composition; among his students were Marvin David Levy, Charles Dodge, Harvey Sollberger, and John Corigliano. In 1965, with Jack Beeson and then-provost Jacques Barzun, he inaugurated the University's doctoral program in composition. In recognition of his many achievements, Luening received an honorary degree from the University in 1981.
First Fantasia for Violin Solo - Otto Luening
Recorded at home in Tallahassee, FL, July 2020
Tayor Giorgio, violin
Mastered by Robert Scott Thompson, Aucourant Records.
Property of Shelter Recording Project, American Composers Alliance
