William Matthews, Alice Swanson Esty Professor of Music at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, is among Maine composers presenting new music in a Jan. 31 concert. (Doug Hubley/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Prominent composers living in Maine present new music at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 31, in the Olin Concert Hall at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College, 75 Russell St.

This event is open to the public at no cost, but tickets are required, available at . For more information, please contact 207-786-6135.

The Maine composers featured are ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ faculty members William Matthews and Scott Ordway, as well as Vineet Shende, Joshua DeScherer, Beth Wiemann, and Phillip Carlsen.

Ordway has composed three symphonies, of which the third was premiered by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Orchestra last fall; two full settings of the Mass; and numerous other works, many of which have been performed throughout the United States and Europe. He is a visiting assistant professor of music and acting orchestral conductor at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

Matthews, Alice Swanson Esty Professor of Music, has received several national awards and commissions. His works include music for the inaugurations of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ presidents Clayton Spencer and Elaine Hansen. He is interested in electronic and computer-generated music, and in American music of all types.

Matthews teaches composition along with courses in jazz and popular music. A Book of Hours, a recording on the Albany Records, is a compilation of Matthews compositions featuring the Capital Trio, whose pianist is Duncan Cumming ’93.

Scott Ordway is shown conducting the University of Puget Sound Chamber Orchestra, Tacoma, Wash.

Shende is an associate professor of music at Bowdoin College. His music incorporates a wide variety of styles, including North Indian classical music, rock music and a harmonic language described as “hard to characterize, dissonant in some places and with celestial harmonies in others, but unusually accessible” (Maine Sunday Telegram). Recent premieres include “Three Longfellow Poems,” commissioned by the Portland Symphony Orchestra.

DeScherer has performed extensively with professional and amateur ensembles throughout the northeastern United States. As a performer, he focuses on music written after the 1950s. Many of his pieces draw their inspiration from the New England wilderness. With few exceptions, his pieces are for small ensembles. Among his works are numerous settings of poetry from the Beat Generation, particularly the work of Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Wiemann studied composition and clarinet at Oberlin College and received her doctorate in theory and composition from Princeton University. She teaches orchestration, tonal counterpoint, 20th-century musical techniques and other topics at the University of Maine. A CD of Wiemann’s music, Why Performers Wear Black, was released on Albany Records in 2004. Her music also appears on the Capstone, Innova and Americus labels.

Carlsen is a professor of music at the University of Maine at Farmington, where he conducted the orchestra for 20 years and has taught since 1982. In addition to numerous performances at UMF and elsewhere in Maine by such organizations as the Portland Symphony Orchestra and the Sebago-Long Lakes Region Chamber Music Festival, his music has been played at New York’s Town Hall and the Museum of Modern Art Sculpture Garden, at the Kennedy Center and other locations.

As a visiting assistant professor of music, Carlsen taught and conducted the orchestra at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ during the 2000s.

Taska’s work will be performed on Sunday, April 10; Gurney’s on Friday, April 15; and Koster’s on Wednesday, April 27.

Taska has composed a score for the film “Little Otik,” a comedy combining live action and stop-motion animation by Czech director Jan Svankmajer. Based on the folktale “Otesánek,” the film shows a childless couple’s struggle to satisfy the cravings of a voracious stump that they have taken on as their “child.”

” ‘Little Otik’ was just the right movie to score because the extreme overall craziness that reigns throughout seemed particularly exciting in terms of composition,” said Taska, of Lowell, Vt.

Taska notes that 20th-century composers such as Stravinsky and Debussy have influenced his work. Taska’s score contains percussion, French horn, piano, and four wind and four stringed instruments. The piece will be performed by students and visiting professionals led by Hiroya Miura, conductor of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Orchestra.

Gurney, of Arlington, Va., offers a program consisting of a six-movement piece for clarinet, played by Rose Pruiksma; piano (Chiharu Naruse); bassoon (Ardith Keef); and cello (Shannon Allen).

Koster, of Pound Ridge, N.Y., presents music that explores conceptual and extra-musical frameworks for composition. Musicians will perform three of his works, and the composer will present a fourth through computer-generated sound and a PowerPoint display.

Koster received an internal ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ grant, the Ruggles Scholarship, to support his research for the project. His thesis explores the use of non-musical elements, such as video or a harmonic analysis of the human voice, as both the substance and an organizing principle for musical composition.

One of the pieces to be played by live musicians, for example, uses the mapping of a video image as its basis. Meanwhile, the orchestral piece that Koster will present with computer software and PowerPoint is based on the electronic analysis of voices.

One section of the piece uses the rising and falling pitches of speech as source material. Another is derived from a fragment of speech broken down into its component harmonics, which Koster assigned to different synthesized instruments.

“There are many discrete overtones, with their own volumes, in the voice,” he says. “The relationship of all these frequencies and how they interact with each other make up the timbre of a voice.”

His original idea was to travel around the country recording voices with different accents, and compose music that would reveal those regional differences.

“That was a little difficult to achieve, but what I did find was a fantastic method for arriving at intriguing harmonies, and that was the real value of the project,” he notes.

“You have so much information in just one second of audio that I would take one person saying one word, and that would make a 10-minute piece,” he explains, “just fleshing out those ideas and expanding things in different ways.”

So that section of music is derived solely from a resident of the South saying “off.”

A musician with a stylistic reach and imagination of unusual scope, composer and multi-instrumentalist Simon Hutchinson ’02 performs at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 25, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College, 75 Russell St.

The performance is open to the public at no cost, but tickets are required. For more information, contact 207-786-6135 or this olinarts@bates.edu.

Hutchinson’s work spans multiple genres. A seasoned traveler and a person dedicated to the power of cross-cultural communication, he creates music integrating myriad media and influences, and exploring themes of nature, humanity and global community.

Hutchinson earned a bachelor’s of arts in music from ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ in 2002, a master’s from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a doctorate from the University of Oregon.

He spent several years in Japan studying a variety of traditional instruments and folk music forms. Hutchinson regularly performs on shamisen, a three-stringed lute, with Japanese, American and Korean performers. He has appeared on the Japanese national public broadcasting station, NHK, and on the 2006 folk album Tamashi no Hibiki (“Sounds of the Soul”).

Also a bassist, Hutchinson has appeared on a number of albums and is currently principal bassist of the Eugene Contemporary Chamber Ensemble.

His compositions incorporate diverse conventional, electronic and traditional instruments and performance practices. His music has been performed in the U.S., Japan and Korea. .