Will Ogdon's latest CD Compositions: 1995-1999 finds the Professor emeritus actively composing.

SAN DIEGO, California -- April 18, 2001 -- Old King Cole Productions is proud to announce the release of a new CD by San Diego experimental composer and founder of the world renowned University of California, San Diego New Music Department, Will Ogdon. Retired from his teaching duties, Ogdon has spent his first decade in retirement in very fruitful labor. He is, as his colleague and friend Thomas Nee says, living his dream to be a "full-time composer." Will Ogdon became the founding Chair in 1966 when the entire UCSD campus was in its infant stage; he retired in 1991 after 25 years. All the pieces on this CD were written once Ogdon found his groove in retirement.

An active serialist composer with a sunny disposition, Will Ogdon forged his own unique style which is both beautiful and assured. His is music the Viennese masters of the style might have written had they been more comfortable and relaxed about the system they developed. For Ogdon there is nothing to be proved -- just a need to be honest and true to his character and inner values. The result is gorgeous.

His music has been wonderfully recorded by Josef Kucera and superbly performed by his eminent musician friends and colleagues at UCSD: the at-Residence violin duo of János Négyesy and Päivikki Nykter, pianists Cecil Lytle and Aleck Karis, percussionist Steven Schick, baritone Philip Larson, cellist Charles Curtis, flautist John Fonville and many others, and features a set of songs sung by the composer's wife, Beverly Ogdon, with the composer himself accompanying on piano.

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WILL OGDON was born in Redlands, California, in 1921, but grew up in the Midwest where he received his education. Graduate studies were at University of Wisconsin, Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the University of Indiana. Ogdon studied musicology with Manfred Bukofzer and composition with the expatriot European Ernst Krenek and the American atonalist Roger Sessions. Later he traveled to Paris on a Fulbright scholarship to study composition with René Leibowitz. Ogdon also spent nine years as the music director of the Pacifica Foundations radio station KPFA. In 1966 Ogdon became the founding Chair of the music department at UCSD where he taught composition until his retirement in 1991.

OLD KING COLE PRODUCTIONS is a San Diego based company founded in 1997 to expose and promote new experimental music on staggeringly original CDs. Visit the company Web site at http://www.oldkingcole.biz/ for more information about its catalog.