Rebecca Ashe, Flute 

Cheryl Melfi, Clarinet
    

17'

American astronaut Joseph Allen wrote the following of his orbital experience above planet Earth:

We orbit and float in our space gondola and watch the oceans and islands and green hills of the continent pass by at five miles per second.  We move silently and effortlessly past the ground.  I want to say “over the ground” as I write this, but remember that in space your sense of up or down is completely gone and my description must reflect this fact.  In addition, the breathtaking speed of the ship is an odd and confusing contrast to the feel of perpetually floating within the spaceship.  You do not sit before the window to view the passing scene, but rather you float there and look out on the scene, certainly not down upon it.  Are you speeding past oceans and continents, or are you just hovering and watching them move beside you?

All the electronic sounds in Orbit were created using samples from Rebecca Ashe and Cheryl Melfi.

Tara Byrdsong, Flute

Noah Tucker, Oboe

Kaci Schick, Clarinet

Kristin Gates, Horn

Austin Way, Bassoon

12'

Fading Light began as a memorial to my grandmother who died in early 2009.  As her health declined, she began to gradually lose her mental faculties as well as her ability to carry on meaningful conversations.  She would often babble incoherently or begin a lucid thought only to trail off incoherently.  This piece is not intended as a programmatic work.  Instead, its premise is an inability to hold a single idea for an extended period.  There are frequent interruptions and tangents but all the musical material is through composed and developed.  The music searches for a sense of resolution but is foiled by its own internal motion. 

Cheryl Melfi, Solo Clarinet

Mahidol University Clarinet
 Ensemble

4'

This is a short arrangement of the folk tune “Black is the Color.”  It is scored for solo Bb clarinet and 4-part Bb clarinet choir.

 Written for and premiered by Cheryl Melfi and the Mahidol University Clarinet Ensemble.

Fünf

5'

In 2003, I suffered a bout of a rare mental condition known as Composerus Seriousitis.  Symptoms of this disorder include an intense desire to write deep, meaningful music, an overwhelming urge to distance oneself from any music that is less than the “High Art,” and an innate need to “suffer” for one’s Art.  In an effort to exorcise my mental condition, I set out to write Fun and Games as a way to recapture the sheer joy of writing a piece that poked fun at itself and never once threatened to be “High Art.” 

Lauren Wells, Violin
Mark Stauffer, Cello
Kari Johnson, Piano

11'

Ozymandias

By Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
(this version from the Norton Anthology of Poetry, 3rd ed.)

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert  . . .  Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Kirk Patton, Voice

Xu Zhou, Piano

8'

Maybe Next Season represents my first collaboration with Kansas City poet Tim Pettet. Tim regards this setting as "operatic." My goal was to explore the psychological state of the baseball-loving narrator as he searches for his "new layer of heaven above the lighted field."

Quadrivium

4'

Nearer. . . was written in June 2009 as the inaugural commission by Quadrivium.  The word “nearer” takes a double meaning in this work.  It refers to the hymn “Nearer My God to Thee,” which forms the basis of the musical material, as well as the foiled attempts to perform an unadulterated version of the melody. 

Cheryl Melfi, Clarinet

5'

     I have always been enamored with the music of Bach.  Bach’s fugues and cello suites excite me as wonderfully intricate, dense pieces.  Bach loves to superimpose multiple lines on one to create a compound melody.  While listening to Bach’s music, a question dawned on me: Is it possible to adapt these styles to an instrument capable of playing only one note at a time? 
     The Prelude of Bach’s G Major cello suite opens with a G major arpeggio that becomes the basis of my Prelude.  I use the intervals of the arpeggio freely to build sequences of rising pitches, and intervals not from the arpeggio to create falling lines.  My Fugue is built using the same interval selection as the Prelude but features compound lines with much greater density.  The original clarinet version was written for Cheryl Melfi and the alto saxophone version is for Shyen Lee.

Thailand Saxophone Ensemble

Shyen Lee, Director

5'

     Shyen Lee, saxophone professor at Mahidol University, asked me to write a piece for the Thailand Saxophone Ensemble that uses all the saxophone types in their arsenal, from sopranino to bass.  The genesis of the piece comes from Shyen Lee’s daughter, Rachel.  While attending a wedding, I had the opportunity to watch his precocious young daughter, Rachel, spinning exuberantly about the dance floor to the music of a jazz band.  This image, an unbalanced, frenetic, jazzy spinning became the inspiration for the piece.  The saxophones trade jazzy, screaming licks and the music grows ever wilder while Rachel dances.

 Written for and premiered by Thailand Saxophone Ensemble.

Rebecca Ashe, Flute

Xu Zhou, Piano

12'

This piece is about the transformation of astronauts from engineers to artists.  It begins in a mechanical, cramped environment and opens into an organic, spacious vista.   Astronauts spend many years preparing for a mission to space in a cramped vehicle only to be shown a view of unparalleled beauty.  As numerous astronauts have reported, their training did not prepare them for the grand spectacle of the Earth seen from space.  Charles Walker, American space shuttle astronaut, reported:

 “My first view- a panorama of brilliant deep blue ocean, shot with shades of green and gray and white- was of atolls and clouds.  Close to the window I could see that this Pacific scene in motion was rimmed by the great curved limb of the Earth.  It had a thin halo of blue held close, and beyond, black space.  I held my breath but something was missing- I felt strangely unfulfilled.  Here was a tremendous visual spectacle, but viewed in silence.  There was no grand musical accompaniment; no triumphant, inspired sonata or symphony.  Each one of us must write the music of this sphere for ourselves.”

 Written for and premiered by Rebecca Ashe.

Joseph Bowman, Trumpet

Leslie Hart, Horn

Supapach Santitammarak, Trombone

Eri Higashide, Piano   

Daniel Eichenbaum, Narrator

14'

University of Missouri-
Kansas City Wind Symphony and
Graduate String Quartet

        A small consort of strings joins a full-sized wind ensemble in Sinfonietta.  Although it is not a concerto, Sinfonietta flips the classical notion of an orchestra on its head.  Whereas the Classical orchestra represented a string ensemble with wind and brass coloration, Sinfonietta takes a full wind ensemble and adds strings for coloration, blending and melding the string timbre with the wind ensemble medium.

As this work is not a concerto, balancing the relatively weak quartet of strings with the full wind ensemble creates challenges, which Sinfonietta addresses in four ways.  It uses the strings as individual and string tutti soloists with sparse accompaniment.  It creates windows inside heavy textures to allow the strings to appear.  It doubles the strings with instruments of similar timbre to add strength in fuller tutti sections.  Finally, it uses the disparity of acoustical power between the strings and full wind ensemble to create dramatic tension.

Sinfonietta relies upon American folk music as a point of departure along with the unique sound combinations available with this instrumentation.  The pentatonic melodies, open harmonic intervals, and regular phrase structure serve as building blocks for the music.  The sound of the human voice, integral to the singing of folk tunes, is embraced in the ornamentation of the solo lines.  Along with this mimicry is a moment of actual singing by members of the ensemble.  Since wind players, brass players, and vocalists all require a breath to make their music, Sinfonietta also celebrates the sound of the human breath.  Written into the score are instructions for the whole ensemble to breathe audibly together.  This airy, musical sound is integral to both the sound of the human voice as well as the sound of a pipe organ, the timbre of which is emulated at the piece's final climax.

Penn State Symphonic Wind 
 Ensemble

    

10'

     5th Avenue Rhapsody is a programmatic view of a busy city street, taking inspiration from College Avenue.  Using quasi-jazz idioms and street-sound imitations, such as car horns, CATA buses, and crickets, the ensemble depicts a series of images.  The winds and brass trade-off rhythmically charged motives.  The opening depicts a busy street scene with fast, frenzied inter-cutting of ideas.  The second section depicts a deserted street and features cricket sounds (flutes) and the rumble of CATA busses (trombones).  As the piece progresses, activity returns to the street scene until it once again settles into an eerie calm.  A tumultuous riot builds and grows out-of-control until dispersed by the police.  After the street-inhabitants scramble away, the opening material is returned.  A canon builds in the winds and brass pushing the piece into the final section.  Finally, the piece concludes with a return of the winds’ opening theme and a dramatic fortissimo climax.

Elena Todd, Soprano

Catalina Chamber Orchestra, 
 Enrique Lasansky, Director

11'

Three Women is based upon three separate poems by Cheryl Melfi.  The poems, all written from women’s points of view, were written without any connection to each other.  I chose these three poems for their content and decided to weave my own unified, single-movement work about different kinds of love.  The first song in this piece is about love for one’s self.  The sound world is bright and ebullient but morphs into despair by the soprano’s descending melodic line acknowledging that she is the only one who can enjoy her own beauty.  In this darker sound world exists the second song about jealous, unrequited love.  The soprano spitefully sings to her intended love who pays her no attention while he writes a love poem to another woman.  After the rage subsides, a subdued, delicate nocturne follows about finding one’s perfect match.  The music climaxes with wordless exultation by the soprano having found her love.  I give many thanks to Cheryl, my perfect match, for the use of her poetry without which this piece could not exist.

1'

     This is a short electronic piece using sound clips from interviews with two women about their personal involvement in car accidents.  Samples from these interviews were electronically manipulated to describe the emotional impact of their car accidents.  This is a stereo mix, the original version was in quadrophonic sound.  Carr Accident was created using ProTools at the University of Michigan’s Electronic Music Studio.