Forrest Pierce

Assistant Professor

department: Music
office: 018 Evans Center
phone: 503-768-7468
e-mail: fpierce@lclark.edu

Forrest David Pierce, composer and angler of little blue streams, has been haunted lately by the fifty-meter lilac hedge that bounded his childhood home in Pullman, Washington. Late spring lilacs have regularly harried his studies in Tacoma, Minneapolis, and Bloomington, Indiana since he left home twelve years ago. His alternately lyrical, irreverent, sinister, and elegant voice has traveled as well: at each stop a new dialect; in each piece the same sweet hankering. He likewise remembers Dominick Argento, Judith Zaimont, and Don Freund, although more for their teaching than for their flowers or perfume. Though his studies as a pianist and cellist have left him with large bodies of instrumental music, he has also been captivated by the human voice, leading to twelve song cycles, an opera, and 15 works for chorus in the past five years.

Sadly, spring in Austin, where he taught at the University of Texas, brought no lilacs, since bluebonnets and cacti dominate the browner, hotter landscape. Now Assistant Professor of Music at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, Forrest Pierce has come to identify with the sea-run cutthroat he chases each northwest June. After a long while at sea, he has come home.