Zach Zubow is a composer/musician living in the Iowa City area. Please visit the Upcoming Events link to see performances of Zach's music.
News!
Zach Zubow’s compositions have won many awards including the 2011 SCI/ASCAP Region V Student Composition Commission Award for his string quartet, Sundown and was the 2011 first prize recipient of the Five College Composition Competition hosted by the University of Massachusetts for his alto saxophone and percussion duo, Rounded Angles. His music has been featured on numerous conferences and festivals in the United States as well as England, Italy and Korea. As well as composing, Zach has presented his research regarding beat class transformations in Ligeti’s Étude No. 4, Fanfares, from Ligeti’s first book of études that has been published in the online journal, Proceedings, for the New Music Festival at the University of Central Missouri. A new CD of works produced by ABLAZE Records titled “Millennial Masters Series” was released in October 2011 that features Nebulaefor flute and tape performed by Dr. Rebecca Ashe. Currently, Zach teaches music theory at Grinnell College and Coe College as well as composition at Cornell College. Zach has received degrees from Luther College, Illinois State University and most recently, completed a PhD in music composition at The University of Iowa.
Past Events
Fugitive Yellow Shirt and Four Vignettes of England were each featured twice on four separate conferences this October. Answers From Nature was the last conference this fall to feature Zach's music at this year's SCI National Conference in South Carolina. Read what was said about Midwest Composers Symposium of the conferences on Sequenza 21, here. Recordings of each conference will be up soon, but look at Zach's recordings to hear the first recordings of these pieces.
Other performances this past fall included Patchwork Pants on October 31st, Prevailing Wind on November 7th, and Jenny, Jenny for solo tuba on December 4th at the University of Iowa.
Zach's Answers From Nature and Prevailing Wind were chosen to be included on five College Music Society Regional Conferences this past spring. Fugitive Yellow Shirt was also be performed at the University of Central Missouri's New Music Festival/SCI Region VI Regional Conference where Zach also presented his research on beat class transformations in Ligeti's "Fanfares" from his first book of etudes, no. 4. Including these performances, Rebecca Ashe performed Nebulae for flute and tape at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the University of Iowa.
Along with Rebecca Ashe's premier of Nebulae in February, Zach also had his string quartet, Sundown, premiered at University of Wisconsin-Madison at the Midwest Graduate Music Consortium on the evening of March 25th. That same weekend, James Skretta and Meggie Aube premiered his alto saxophone and percussion piece, Rounded Angles, at the North American Saxophone Alliance conference at Simpson College in Indianola, IA on Sunday, March 27th at 11:00 am. Also on the agenda of premiers was Zach's piece My Fairy King, for english horn and guitar written for Angela Lickiss and Andy Hanson-Dvoracek, on the March 6th Composers Workshop in Iowa City. On the second Composers Workshop concert of the semester, Zach's solo percussion piece Hiking the Cascade Creek Trail, written for Meggie Aube, was also premiered on May 8th and again on Meggie's DMA recital on May 11th.