Composer's Bio: Malcolm Caluori
Malcolm
Caluori
Composer/Music Dramatist
Born and raised in Battle Creek, Michigan, Malcolm Caluori's fascination
since boyhood with both musical construct and recording technologies demonstrates an early creative impulse toward audio,
and an already intense interest in music making and dramatic story telling. In his school
years, he studied piano, baritone horn and trumpet, ultimately achieving solo chair and drum major status, sang in the choir,
competed in state-wide dramatic interpretation tournaments (partnered with future librettist Johnathan Daniel Steppe), and
regularly appeared in leading roles in productions of plays and musicals. During these formative years, Caluori was introduced
to operetta, much musical theatre, developed an appreciation for film scores, and was engaged in more serious training and
repertoire, performing with the Battle Creek Community Chorus, Battle Creek Symphony Orchestra, Battle Creek Youth Symohony
Orchestra, and Battle Creek Boychoir, which inserted Caluori into a culture and study of concert music and opera, and
provided outlet for premiering his orchestral and choral works.
Loath to postpone higher
learning for some future degree, he studied on his own from books on musical form, harmony, orchestration, notation, and history,
appreciating all kinds of music, and learning directly from leading professionals and great masters alike in the study of
recordings, orchestral scores, and video lectures. He was granted an independent line of study in music under Lannette
Calhoun, and received some private music theory instruction under Brooks Grantier. He received First Place and Best of Class
awards for several of his early keyboard and chamber works, judged in public exposition, and is a recipient of the Connie
Amos Memorial Scholarship. His public orchestral and conducting debut at the age of seventeen was received with great audience
enthusiasm. The piece for bass voice, chorus and orchestra, an excerpt from an unnamed opera; its story, an original idea
of Caluori’s own fashioning, later set aside as youthful and impractical. Both, however, effervesce as early examples
of Caluori’s burgeoning ambitions.
From
1987 to 1992 Mr. Caluori toured with the Glassmen Drum and Bugle Corps of Toledo, Ohio as an accomplished brass soloist and
sergeant over the brass line. The drum corps experience was invaluable, boasting numerous formidable mentors, among them
David Tippett (Buddy Rich Orchestra, etc.) and George Sheppard (Dizzy Gillespie, etc.), and the firey dramatics of drum
corps brass arrangements impressed a marked influence on the passionate and epic sound of Caluori’s developing compositional
style. In 1988 the corps awarded Caluori Brass Player of the Year; in 1991 he won the regional championship title in the Drum
Corps Midwest solo competitions; and while defending his title in 1992, he was awarded a scholarship to the Berklee College
of Music in Boston, Massachusetts.
A Canticle for Our Times, a response to the 1991 Persian Gulf War written
for choir and strings, was Caluori’s final premier prior to relocating. After serving a brief post as music
director to a local church, Caluori left Battle Creek for Boston. There, surrounded by composers, musicians, vocalists, and
the electricity of new ideas and discovery which comes with a population of students,
he continued to write, and began to assemble the earliest vocal recordings of selections from his best known work to date,
the musical Dangerous Liaisons. Later auditions for the complete recording would garner the interest of theatre talent
nationwide.
Malcolm
Caluori now resides in Atlanta, Georgia. He is affiliated with BMI, is a member of The Dramatists Guild of America, is published
by Melpomene Music Group, and can be found in regular attendance at the Atlanta Opera. With new publications currently in
development, already concepts for two new dramatic works (an opera on a medieval Scandinavian subject, and a plantation era
chamber opera/cantata with gospel choir) are eagerly standing by.
