News: October 2000

South Carolina Arts Commission Announces Artist Fellowships And $1.8 Million In Grants For New Fiscal Year

Mark Kilstofte photo by Joanna E. Morrissey

The Board of Commissioners of the South Carolina Arts Commission (SCAC) has awarded Artist Fellowships to four resident, professional artists. Each fellow receives $7,500 in recognition of superior artistic merit. The out-of-state review panels also selected alternates, who do not receive awards, but are considered notable in the competitive selection process.

Two of the four Fellowships were awarded to musicians: one to a composer, and one to a performer. Mark Kilstofte is associate professor of music composition and theory at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the ASCAP Foundation Rudolf Nissim Award, the Aaron Copland Award, the Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Schuman Fellowship from the MacDowell Colony. Kilstofte's compositions have been performed by ensembles such as the Oakland East Bay Symphony, the Louisville Orchestra, and the San Francisco Choral Artists.

Kilstofte is going to use the grant to allow him to take some time off from teaching at Furman and work on two projects. The first of these is a piece for chorus and orchestra that Kilstofte is writing to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Greater Anderson (South Carolina) Musical Arts Consortium (GAMAC). The piece, which uses texts from Chapter 55 of Isaiah, will be performed in April 2001. Kilstofte chose the text because he felt that it dealt with "everything coming in its time," an idea that the Consortium is confronting as it makes plans for a new arts center.

Kilstofte's other project is a symphony, his first. The composer calls the four-movement work "a mid-life symphony," although he is careful to assert that the piece is not programmatic, strictly speaking. In the first movement, Kilstofte explained, he has attempted to write the "reverse of an expanding variation," a formal device that he has used in much of his recent work. In Recurring Dreams, for instance, each variation expands in real time, while the tempo gets faster and faster. In the first movement of the symphony, every section instead "contracts and compresses." He has been working on "depicting a descending spiral in a structural way," inspired both by a colleague's work with pitch spirals and by Dante's Inferno and the Orpheus myth. Kilstofte describes the second movement, which will emerge from the first movement without pause, as a "botched rescue mission." The tempo will be a "blazing" 172 to the quarter, with hocket-like imitation at the tritone. The third movement will be a lament, and the fourth movement is still a "puzzle" waiting to be solved.

Kilstofte characterizes his work as "trying to find the middle road" between his "far-out" training at the University of Michigan, and the needs of his audience in Greenville, where he has lived for eight years. "Sometimes people are still struggling with Stravinsky, and that has put me kind of outside of the box in the musical community here," he admits. At the same time, he feels he has benefited from the challenge of trying, to write music "that people will understand, and will draw them into wanting to understand better," without "blatantly pandering." For Kilstofte, the South Carolina Arts Commission Fellowship is not only "an important resource" that will assist him in his work, but also a meaningful "form of recognition."

Keith Knight photo by Lauren Preller Chambers

Keith Knight is a recording artist, performer, and composer. Knight plays "fingerstyle" acoustic guitar and mandolin, and he specializes in Appalachian, Folk, and Blues (Delta/Ragtime) music. Knight was named one of the "Top Ten Best" at the Austin Music Awards in 1993. In 1996, he established Bear Claw Music, a private, independent record label in Charleston. Bear Claw released Knight's solo album Hammer Thru the Silence in 1998 to rave reviews. He has been included in the North Carolina Arts Council's Touring Artist Directory and in the South Carolina Arts Commission's Artist Roster.

Knight is using the grant money to fund his next recording project, a follow-up album to Hammer thru the Silence that will be released on Bear Claw. Knight plays finger-style acoustic guitar, meaning that he doesn't use a pick or plectrum, and rarely strums. He started out as a rock musician, first becoming interested in acoustic guitar when he heard the bluegrass player Bill Monroe. He also cites Leo Kottke, Ry Cooder, and John Fahey as influences. Lately Knight has been listening to more and more music from the 1920s and 30s, particularly the ragtime of Blind Blake and the Delta blues of Charlie Patton. Knight emulates the ability of these players to "make the instrument sing." He also strives for the "raw, visceral feeling" that Patton evoked in his songs.

Knight points out that the audience for acoustic guitar music, quite large in the early 1970s, has all but dried up. He feels that the SC Arts Fellowship represents a tremendous validation of his work. "An artist in my position is sort of an underdog," he explained. "You specialize yourself into oblivion, and there are a lot of times when you feel like what you're doing is not going to amount to much. When you get recognition [in the form] of a fellowship, it really charges your batteries." The grant, he explained, is a sign that he is "doing something right."

The CD will go into production in approximately two months, and will take four or five months to finish. Knight likes to plan his albums according to a "driving concept," putting thought into both the material and its ordering in order to arrive at a finished product that "keeps the listener hooked." He confessed that he couldn't yet articulate the concept of the album, but alluded to Celtic, deep blues, and Appalachian strains in the songs he has sketched out.

The alternate winner for the composition fellowship is Gordon Richard Goodwin, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Theory and Composition at the University of South Carolina. Dr. Goodwin is a past recipient of the USC Educational Foundation Award for Research in Humanities and Social Sciences, the Kappa Kappa Psi National Distinguished Service to Music Medal for Instrumental Music Education, and ASCAP honors. The alternate winners for performance are Thomas and Anna Joiner, both professors at Furman University, who together form The Joiner Duo. They have performed from South Carolina to South America and are completing their first CD, entitled Intermezzo.

The South Carolina Arts Commission (SCAC) was established in 1967 as an agency of state government to develop and implement a comprehensive statewide program to advance the arts in South Carolina, and to assure their excellence. The Commission directs its resources toward making the arts a part of the life experience of every SC citizen. The SCAC's primary source of funding is state tax dollars appropriated by the SC General Assembly. Grants from the federal government through the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) comprise the Commission's secondary source of funding. Additional support for Arts Commission projects is provided by private foundations and community sponsors