- Prior to moving to Los Angeles in 1984, Ginger Mayerson studied composition with Dr. Edith Smith and theory with Dr. Norma Butcher at Orange Coast College. She decided to move to Los Angeles to continue her music education, and subsequently completed the Arranging and Composition course at the Dick Grove School of Music in Studio City. She studied composition with David Angel at Grove as well as privately. She also studied privately with Hugo Davise. During this time she composed film scores for student films at the University of Southern California Film School, but chose not to pursue a commercial music career. She was a founding member of the Composers Group and gave concerts and recitals in Los Angeles with and without the group from 1990 to 1992, frequently conducting her work. In August 1992 she left Los Angeles to teach English in Central Europe.
Mayerson lived in Central Europe for three years. During that time she studied privately with Marian Borkowski at the Warsaw Conservatory. From 1993 to 1995 she wrote four large compositions: Contrabass and Piano, Violin and Piano, Flute and Piano, and a Piano Trio. The Contrabass and Piano composition was performed in Berlin in 1994 and the Flute and Piano composition was performed at the Prague Conservatory in February 1994. In June 1994 she attended master classes with George Crumb in Prague. Since 1995 She has focused mainly on composition and has completed several pieces for mixed brass, various percussion compositions, an oboe solo, and a suite for solo tuba. She has learned much of what she knows by writing pieces, producing their performance and discussing them with the musicians. She has mainly composed atonal, serial music for small groups and soloists. She feels that this type of chamber music is the best expression for her compositions.
While in Europe, Mayerson also began to work with the idea of a sonic collage. These pieces were composed of ambient and directed sound. She made tapes of the sounds she heard daily in Prague, Czech Republic and Portland, Oregon, and sounds made on the strings and soundboard of a piano, and blended them with text.
Mayerson began to work with layers of sound and text in 1986 when she created Kirtan 1986 and later Kirtan 1987. For these collages, she used Sanskrit text from the "Bhagavadgita" and conducted musical and percussive motifs around it. She further developed this work in 1994 in Prague for a staged reading of a play. There were four actors, and the director gave each their own cassette player with instruction to raise and lower the volume as they felt appropriate. She titled this piece "Music for four tape players." She also sent it to a dancer, Gregg Bieleimeier, in Portland, Oregon, who performed it at the Portland Art Museum in February of 1995, where it was well received. It was her intention in these pieces to create an aural collage.
In 1996, after a brief stint in Almaty, Kazakhstan, Mayerson returned to the United States and settled in Portland, Oregon for a year. While there, she wrote several works for ensembles and obtained the rights from the copyright holder to use the texts of Bruno Schulz's stories "The Gale", "The Street of Crocodiles", "August", and "Cinnamon Shops." In 1996 and 1997, she made two more four tape sonic collages that included the text of two stories by Bruno Schulz: "The Gale" and "Street of Crocodiles." In 2000 she mixed these pieces onto tape at the Emmons Studio in Los Angeles.
Residing in Los Angeles again, Mayerson began to compose a piece for solo tuba. Partly composed and partly free improvisation, this piece was composed for and performed by William Roper, a prominent freelance tubaist. It was recorded in 1998. Also in 1998, her composition, Kirtan 1987, was broadcast and archived on Art@Radio at the University of Maryland at Baltimore.
In the winter of 2000, Mayerson's composition for solo tuba, "Paths and Destinations," was published by Bayside Music Press. She spent April 2000 as composer in residence at the Fundacíon Valparaíso in southern Spain, where she worked on a Viola Quartet. In 2005 she granted Lene Taylor permission to use her music for the "I Read Comics" podcast. In 2007 Israel López Escudero received Mayerson's permission to include "Ananda Waltz #1" in his short film, "Manhattan Pictures." Lately Mayerson spends more time listening to music than writing it. She has also written and published four of the five "Dr. Hackenbush and Her Orchestra" novels about the Los Angeles jazz scene in the 1980s. These novels were published by the Wapshott Press.- IMDb Mini Biography By: G Mayerson
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