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Composers society honors CSUMB lecturer

For the second consecutive year, Dr. Lanier Sammons, a lecturer in the Music and Performing Arts Department, has won the ASCAP Plus Award – Concert Music Division. The ASCAP Awards are made by the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers to honor the past catalog and recent performances of member composers. With the cash award, ASCAP supports the careers and fosters the continuing development of American composers in various genres.

Dr. Sammons, a composer and guitarist, teaches analog mixing and digital editing as well as the MPA capstone class and master classes. His music explores audience interactivity, improvisation, the intersection of popular and classical music, and the pairing of electronic and acoustic sound. As a performer, he explores multiple genres on electric guitar, classical guitar and other instruments. Dr. Sammons has also been selected to contribute a piece to the Cellotronic Games, a competition that features pieces for cello and electronics that offer a commentary on our game-involved culture. “The proposal I sent them involves using Google image searches to pull up images of graphic scores – notation based on symbols other than standard notation,” Dr. Sammons explained. “The two performers take turns improvising in response to the image that gets pulled up, and the audience votes on their preference to award one of the performers a point. . . .” Dr. Sammons is in his second year at CSUMB. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and a master’s and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. His research interests include composition and audience-interactive music, the relationship between play and composition, new music for the guitar, and the intersection and overlap between "popular" music and "art" music.?

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