Heather A. Hitchens, President of Meet The Composer, and Jesse Rosen, Vice President of the American Symphony Orchestra League, recently announced eight orchestra and composer residencies for the 2000-2001 kick-off season of Music Alive, a nationwide program bringing American orchestras and composers together in a mutual effort to generate ongoing, long-term support for today's orchestral music. The first eight participant orchestras, which represent a variety of geographic areas, budget sizes, and new music objectives, have each selected composers for residencies of two to six weeks in duration. The participants are: the Albany (GA) Symphony and Adolphus Cunningham Hailstork; the American Composers Orchestra (NY) and P. Q. Phan; the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra and Stephen Paulus; the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Osvaldo Golijov; the Milwaukee Symphony and Daniel Schnyder; the New Jersey Symphony and Bun-Ching Lam; the Philadelphia Orchestra and Roberto Sierra; and the Seattle Symphony and Bright Sheng. Each residency will feature the performance of at least one major work of the composer-in-residence, public presentations by the composer to generate interest in the orchestra's new music activities, and collaborations between the composer and the orchestra's artistic and administrative staff to design new music strategies. Composers and key orchestra personnel will attend a two-day planning and orientation workshop in Spring 2000 to develop effective residency plans.

Music Alive is one of several residency programs of Meet The Composer's Residency Works project, designed to give composers an active presence in the performance of their work and to encourage audiences to become informed advocates for contemporary music. The other programs of the Residency Works project are: New Residencies, which places composers in community residencies for three-year periods; the Meet The Composer Fund, designed to engage audiences by having composers participate in performances of their work; and New Music for Schools, which places professional composers in school residencies for periods of up to six months.