PETER JOSHEFF
Bass Clarinet
As a composer, clarinetist and bass clarinetist, Josheff is proficient in many different styles, specializing in the performance of contemporary music. Over the years he has premiered and performed hundreds of virtuoso works by a wide range of composers.
He performs, records and tours both with Earplay, a highly-acclaimed ensemble based in San Francisco that he co-founded in 1985, and with the Empyrean Ensemble, in residence at the University of California, Davis; and is a member of the Berkeley Contemporary Chamber Players (UC Berkeley). He has performed with most of the new music ensembles in the Bay Area, including the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Composers Inc., and the Left Coast Ensemble.
He has appeared on many concert series and festivals devoted to new music, among them, Asian Music Week 2000 (Yokohama, Japan), the Centro Nacional des las Artes (Mexico City), the Music on the Edge Series (University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), the Monday Evening Music Series (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), the Other Minds Festival (San Francisco), the Pacific Rim Festival (UC Santa Cruz), the Mills College Concert Series, the Tempo Festival (UC Berkeley), and the Sacramento Festival of New Music.
Recently Josheff performed in a production of Erling Wold's chamber opera "A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil" at the ODC Theater, and with the Lawrence Pech Dance Company at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco); and recorded music of Richard Felciano with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and music of Mario Davidovsky with the Empyrean Ensemble.
He has had numerous works dedicated to him by composers Alexis Alrich, Ross Bauer, Edwin Dugger, Andrew Frank, Michiko Kawagoe, Hi Kyung Kim, Eric Moe, David Rakowski, Jody Rockmaker, Allen Shearer, and Mark Winges.
Josheff has an active interest in popular and improvised music and has taken part in multi-media collaborations at many of San Francisco's best-known performance spaces, including Intersection for the Arts, New Langton Arts, the Marsh, Radio Valencia and Bruno's. He has performed and recorded with the Club Foot Orchestra and Beth Custer's Clarinet Thing. He has collaborated with many spoken word artists, most recently, poet Jaime Robles, with whom he created Variations for Poet and Dancer for spoken voice and bass clarinet. His playing can be heard on recordings by Erling Wold, D'Arcy Reynolds, Hi Kyung Kim, Richard Festinger, the Empyrean Ensemble, the Club Foot Orchestra, Beth Custer, Earplay and others, on the Elektra, CRI, Centaur, Arhoolie, Spooky Pooch, and Rastascan record labels.