Internationally acclaimed Maricopan composes every day

Judith Lang Zaimont works every day at her home in Maricopa. She has to in order to keep pace with her celebrated career as an internationally known and highly acclaimed composer, educator and author.

Zaimont and husband Gary moved to Maricopa in 2006 after her early retirement from the University of Minnesota. The Zaimonts made their first trip to Phoenix in 1979. “We stepped off the plane from New York on an August evening and promptly joined everyone else in the pool,” said Zaimont. Although temperatures reached 108 degrees the next day, “we really enjoyed the clean spareness of the environment.”

The Zaimonts have a son, Michael, who is a video game programmer for a studio in Los Angeles. Gary, a well-known artist, has his studio at a location separate from their Rancho El Dorado home. (See photo of his 5 x 8 foot, cut paper on paper “Warthog” from his 2007 large animal series done in Maricopa.)

Judith composes at their home in Maricopa daily. This year’s “big piece” is a concerto for piano and wind orchestra, commissioned by 10 wind ensembles from universities all over the country. Its premieres will take place over 2009 and 2010. “It is subtitled ‘Solar Traveler’ and is one of a number of my compositions inspired by the wonderful impression upon our consciousness and imagination of the vastness, wonder and beauty of the natural world of sky, season and space,” explained Zaimont.

Judith will be the central composer in residence this month at two annual music festivals; one at Murray State University in Ky. and the other at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, in N.Y.

Noted for its strength and dynamism, Zaimont’s style is distinctive. Her music, widely performed in this country and throughout Europe, has been recorded on nine different labels, and four different houses publish her compositions.

In 2010 Naxos, one of her nine labels, will release a CD of Zaimont’s recent orchestra music, recorded last fall by the Slovak National Symphony Orchestra. “Gary and I flew over to the Slovak Republic and enjoyed meeting the excellent players from that part of the world,” said Zaimont. She has also recorded in London, Berlin and Prague. “These trips are eye opening to the vastly differing conditions for professional performers and composers in other parts of the world,” she added.

In addition to her compositions, Zaimont, who retired as Emeritus Professor of Music Composition at the University of Minnesota, is an educator. Since her move to Maricopa, she has been invited to give master classes at ASU for graduate students in composition and in the conducting program.

She is editor and founder of the prize-winning book series “The Musical Woman: An International Perspective.” Additionally, her writings have been studied at universities throughout the U.S. as well as at the International Center for Contemporary Music in Paris and conservatories in Beijing, Prague and the Ukraine.

On April 1 in Atlanta, Ga., she will receive an award for Article of the Year from the Music Teachers National Association and its 4,000 members. Her essay, featured in the August/September issue of American Music Teacher magazine, explores the reasons recent music is such a small percentage of student repertoires performed in concert.

In her essay, she says, “In music whose idioms we know well we navigate with artistic comfort. But in other idioms we are less certain–perhaps less certain both of the music’s intrinsic quality and of its suitability to sustain the long acquaintanceship inherent in practicing it up to performance level.”

To hear sound clips of Zaimont’s work, go to www.jzaimont.com or www.myspace.com/judithlangzaimont.

Submitted photos