Draft:Roger Trefousse

Roger Tréfousse (born October 24, 1951 in New York City) is a composer, conductor, keyboard performer and teacher. He currently divides his time between New York and Berlin. He is the son of the historian Hans L.Trefousse.

Tréfousse has written operas, works for musical theater and a variety of chamber music and songs. Recent concert music includes two works written for the Berlin Philharmonic Chamber Music Series: Serpent Descending for solo English horn (performed by Dominik Wollenweber) and Jackson Pollock Paints the End of Time for flute (Jelka Weber), English horn (Wollenweber) and bassoon (Stefan Schweigert.) The two works premiered in Berlin at the Neue Nationalgalerie in 2022; Wollenweber also performed the solo English horn piece at the German Embassy in Washington DC in 2022 and in Spain and in Japan in 2023.

In 2021, pianist Jan Gerdes gave the European premiere of Music for Grete on the Unerhörte Musik series in Berlin. and the premiere of Berliner Licht on the Unerhörte Musik Series in 2024. Other piano pieces include After That, commissioned by Grete Sultan and premiered by Sultan in New York at the Gershwin Theater, Brooklyn College in 1984 ; All Before Morning by Elizabeth Voldstad at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in 1985 and by Nelly Alva in Peru and Argentina and Uncaged, commissioned by ACM and performed on an Inner Worlds Concert in Chicago by Amy Wurtz in 2020.

The Monkey Opera or The Making of a Soliloquy (libretto by Jane DeLynn premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1982, conducted by Tania Léon, and was included later that year in the Opera America Showcase in Toronto. Found Objects (libretto by the composer) was commissioned by The Mannes School of Music and premiered by the Mannes Opera Ensemble, conducted by Paul Echols in 1991. The first scene from The Composing of the Heliotrope Bouquet, with libretto by Eric Overmyer was premiered by The New York Opera Repertory Theater at Merkin Concert Hall in 1987 and on the In Series in Washington DC in 1998. The composer and librettist received a National Endowment for the Arts grant for this project; other recent grants include a Stipendium from Kulturprojekte Berlin. Départ Malgache, the first in a series of short operas in collaboration with the poet Kenneth Koch, was premiered on WNYC radio in 2001 and performed by The New York Festival of Song at Miller Theater, Columbia University in 2002.

Tréfousse wrote the score for Amanda C. Pope’s 1982 PBS documentary, Jackson Pollock: Portrait. The film will be screened in New York in September 2024 on a Cutting Edge Concert which will also include Tréfousse’s piano suite based on music from the film and a talk by the composer about writing music for the film. Recent film scores include music for two award-winning short films by Vito A. Rowlands, Ascending Double Helix and Entre Les Images

Tréfousse’s musical theater works include Hoosick Falls (book and lyrics by Jane DeLynn,) premiered at The Theater for the New City in 1974 and performed by Encompass Music Theater in New York in 1998. Selections from Raft of the Medusa, a musical based on Joe Pintauro’s award-winning play were featured in a Downtown Music AIDS benefit concert in 1991. He has written a variety of incidental theater music, including music for the Mark Taper Forum 1985 production of Eric Overmyer’s play, On the Verge and the Actors Studio production of Eve Merriam’s A Husband’s Notes About Her.

As keyboard performer, Tréfousse performed Tui St George Tucker’s Second Piano Sonata at a Relevant Tones “Live at Lincoln Center” concert in 2018. He was music director and pianist for The Jewish Kulturbund: A Lifeline in Dark Times, a 2021 concert at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, playing solo piano works and accompanying Alma Sadé of the Komische Oper in a group of songs and Alvaro Parra of the Berlin Philharmonic in Ernest Bloch’s Bal Shem.

Tréfousse studied piano with Grete Sultan, composition as a private student of John Cage and Ben Weber and music theory with Siegmund Levarie. He holds a BA with honors in ancient Greek from Brooklyn College, where he studied Greek lyric poetry with Vera Lachmann, and a Masters degree in music composition from Columbia University, where he studied opera with Jack Beeson and electronic music with Vladimir Ussachevsky. Ussachevsky mentored the composition of his incidental music for the Eye and Ear Theater’s 1987 New York production of Kenward Elmslie’sCity Junket, with sets by Red Grooms.

Writings on music include My Search for Ben Weber, commissioned for NewMusicBox and Listening to Pollock, included in Such Desperate Joy (Thunders Mouth Press, 2000))

He produced a retrospective of Ben Weber’s music at Miller Theater, Columbia University in 1999. The concert included tribute pieces written at Tréfousse’s request by Milton Babbitt, Ned Rorem, Lou Harrison, Michael Colgrass, Francis Thorne and Tréfousse. An opening talk with these composers, moderated by Tréfousse, began the program. John Cage was unable to attend, but with his approval, his mesostic, Remembering Ben Weber, was included in the opening reminiscences, read by Jackson MacLow. He was music director for William Bolcom and Arnold Weinstein’s musical Casino Paradise, starring André de Shields, at the Ballroom in New York City.

Tréfousse was the founder and music director of The Golden Attic Chamber Ensemble, in residence at the Staten Island Museum of Arts and Sciences and The College of Staten Island. He has taught in the Metropolitan Opera Educational Program and was head of the Greenwich Academy piano music department in Greenwich, Connecticut from 1974-80. He currently teaches composition and piano in New York and Berlin.

Tréfousse’s music is published by Peermusic Classical and Roger Tréfousse Music.

REFERNCES -- The photos of articles that are older and therefore not online didn't transfer. Where can I upload them? Roger Tréfousse References 1

2 https://www.unerhoerte-musik.de/U-musik-Sept._Okt.20.pdf https://www.nmz.de/kritik/oper-konzert/vom-reichtum-neuer-klaviermusik-recital-jan-gerdes-bei-der-unerhoerten-musik Translation: In a peculiar way, the opening and closing sections of the program touched each other, so that unity was created above all through this: as a paraphrase of Thelonious Monk's famous jazz standard "Round Midnight", "A Little Midnight Music" (2001) by George Crumb is almost inevitably a melodically and harmonically attractive piece, but uses only the first five notes of the theme and can thus also touch on more remote areas. A multitude of "string plays", plucked, beaten and torn, evoke mysterious nighttime moods. A section peppered with tomboyish suggestions leads into the Tristan chord - not unlike Debussy's "Gollywogg's Cakewalk" - to then take on the condensed form of Richard Strauss' "Eulenspiegel" motif, continued as a jazz figuration. A kind of "Pierrot Lunaire" is on the move here at midnight, bizarre, fragile, evil, poetic, which Gerdes painted with a rich palette of sound colors. This complex, pianistically highly demanding piece is contrasted at the beginning of Roger Tréfousse's recital "Music for Grete" (2003), a homage to the pianist Grete Sultan, with whom the composer studied for twenty years. For the visually impaired ninety year old he had to write unanimously, and so he created reduced, melodically accentuated "Bagatelles" that explore a spectrum between gentleness and sharpness. This refined simplicity seems to have been influenced by Tréfousse's teacher John Cage, to whom the Sultan was also on friendly terms and whose "Etudes Australis", written for her, she frequently performed, as well as by Bartók's pieces "For Children", for example. It is fascinating how Gerdes’s subtle art of touch and pedalization filled the long single notes and gently curved lines with color and life; it is also astonishing how strongly the introductory theme, which circles in on itself, resembled the "Midnight" motif of Monks/Crumbs.

3 https://www.field-notes.berlin/kalende/jan-gerdes-vier-kontinente

4

5 https://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/03/arts/music-noted-in-brief-elizabeth-voldstad-in-piano-recital.html

6

7 https://www.nytimes.com/1982/04/19/arts/music-noted-in-brief-two-children-s-operas-presented-in-brooklyn.html

8 https://www.nytimes.com/1983/01/02/arts/music-view-new-opera-may-have-a-future-after-all.html

9

https://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/10/arts/review-opera-a-piece-for-young-singers.html

10 https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1988/06/24/opera-galas-riff-on-scott-joplin/37acbc60-2171-430f-8366-5c02fa8ca6e3/

11

https://www.victoriabond.com/artist.php?view=cal&cid=56329

12 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10740766/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_ql_cl

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12280302/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_ql_cl

13

14

 There have always been one or two moments at concerts where emotion reigns and one has a hard time fighting back tears. It is in those moments when art for art’s sake loses its     relevance. Such was the case with the Tréfousse-Pintauro song San Francisco, a city with personal meaning for this reviewer, who lost her godson there to the scourge of AIDS. We can be sure that the six songs from Mr. Tréfousse’s Raft of the Medusa hold meaning for others in the audience and for the performers as well. After all, the musical comes from an original 1989 play by Joe PIntauro written explicitly for actors with AIDS. Tréfousse’s tunes are melodious, listener-friendly and they may even evoke the name of William Finn, although certainly not imitative. The songs are ambitious and revealing, as musically alive as anything you’ll hear on Broadway today. 

15 https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-12-10-ca-15618-story.html 16 17 https://relevanttones.com/2018/12/18/vanishing-city/

18

19 https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/my-search-for-ben-weber/ 20 (https://www.kinokuniya.co.jp/f/dsg-02-9781560252849) 21 https://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/04/arts/music-review-a-serialist-with-a-penchant-for-lyricism.html 22

External Links Website: rogertrefoussemusic.com Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@rogertrefousse7384