Los Angeles composer Todd Lerew, 28, has won the 2014 National Composition Contest with his work Flagging Entrainment of Ultradian Rhythms and the Consequences Thereof. The piece was commissioned by the American Composers Forum (ACF), along with works of two other finalists — Michael Laurello (Yale School of Music) and Kristina Warren (University of Virginia), all workshopped by So Percussion as part of the the group's Summer Institute at Princeton University and premiered on July 20.
As So Percussion is participating in the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts Visions series this fall, the new works may be heard at UC Davis.
Lerew works with invented acoustic instruments, repurposed found objects, and unique preparations of traditional instruments. He is the inventor of the Quartz Cantabile, which uses a principle of thermoacoustics to convert heat into sound, and has presented the instrument at Stanford's CCRMA, the American Musical Instrument Society annual conference, the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition at Georgia Tech, and Machine Project in Los Angeles.
He is the founder and curator of Telephone Music, a collaborative music and memory project based on the children's game of Telephone. His solo piece for e-bowed gu zheng is entitled Lithic Fragments. His works have been performed by members of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, the Wet Ink Ensemble (New York), the Now Hear Ensemble (Santa Barbara), and the Canticum Ostrava choir (Czech Republic).