Chamber & Solo

Be Here Now for 10 instruments (2024)

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Serenity for solo piano (2022)

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Prairie Nocturne for woodwind quintet (2016)

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Onomatopoeia for chamber ensemble (2010)
based on the scroll painting Onomatopoeia by Signe Stuart

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Frolics for oboe and English horn (2007)

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Dvorak Variations for woodwind quintet (2004)

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Elegy and Affirmation for cello and piano (2002)

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Fast Track for flute and guitar (2000)
based on the print Fast Track by Sam Gilliam

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Hyperbole for solo piano (1998)

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Four Character Pieces for flute and piano (1992)

Performance inro
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Duo Variations for double bass and harp (1985)

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Fantasy and Fugue on BACH for piano trio (1985)

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Invocation for harp and organ (1984)

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Redolence for solo harp (1982)

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Setting for solo piano (1976)

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Photo of a handmade sign on a path in the Santa Fé National Forest saying "Be Here Now"Be Here Now premiere 9/7/2024

Vassar College Skinner Recital Hall
composed 2024

Marka Young & Rachel Handman violins, Liuh-Wen Ting viola, Jacob Nordlinger cello, Danniel Merriman double bass, Susan Rotholz flute, Cheryl Bishkoff oboe, Ian Tyson clarinet, Peter Reit french horn, Elisabeth Romano bassoon, Eduardo Navega conductor (9/7/2024) 

Be Here Now
composed 2024
duration 16 minutes

This work for ten players fits in a chamber music genre variously known as a dectet, decet, or tentet. Ensembles of this size vary widely in instrumentation. Some of the best-known employ standard wind quintet and string quartet plus double bass, resembling a mini-orchestra. Be Here Now follows this model and, like an orchestra, requires a conductor.

Inspired by sonic imagery found, surprisingly, in a hiking guidebook, the music begins with small groups of hikers setting out at slow but steady and then double-time paces. Soon, instrument groups associate with components of the natural environment: wind instruments with rocks, for instance, and strings with trees. The music responds to guidebook author Edward Henry’s evocations of bellowing boulders, bold staccato rocks, muted forests, lifting melodies, spreading counter-melodies, and harmonizing ridges along the path to a rock promontory in New York’s Shawangunk Mountains known as Gertrude’s Nose. “The crescendos of rock continue to grow, and the forest interludes fade into the background as the land builds to a climax,” culminating in what Henry calls the “final stanza” from the “natural orchestra” (Gunks Trails, 2003).

As for the title of Be Here Now, it comes from a hand-painted sign of mysterious origin greeting hikers near the start of a path to a wilderness area near Santa Fé, New Mexico. Its advice to “be here now” is as germane to music listeners as to hikers. Forego the distractions of modern life and be fully present in this place and this moment. Happy hiking!

Serenity for solo piano (2022)

premiere 1/28/2023
Thomas Sauer, piano
Skinner Recital Hall
Vassar College
Poughkeepsie, NY

Lake Lila dawn, September 26, 2020

Serenity for solo piano
composed 2022
duration 15 minutes

Serenity unfolds slowly in a single movement. Its inspiration was a magical dawn on Lake Lila in New York’s Adirondacks during a kayak camping trip in September 2020. WIth COVID raging at the time, serenity was much sought after and much needed. In the music, an opening peaceful tune harmonized sweetly undergoes a range of melodic and harmonic transformations within a deliberately-restrained palette. Rhythms derive entirely from quarter note values or their multiples, with the exception of grace notes and rolls needed for wide-spanning chords. Contrapuntal techniques of canon (imitating the tune with time delays among multiple parts), inversion (changing descending motions in the melody to ascending ones and vice versa while preserving the size of those motions), and augmentation (lengthening all the notes of the melody by a consistent proportion or amount) delineate one extended section. After a peak of harmonic richness and volume, varied forms of the tune appear leading to a thrice-repeated distillation of the tune into its opening and closing melodic elements. The opening then returns intact followed by a short and quiet coda.

Prairie Nocturne for woodwind quintet
composed 2016
duration 7 minutes

Prairie Nocturne adapts for woodwind quintet a romantic duet between the protagonists of the composer’s opera Eric Hermannson’s Soul. The opera, based on an early story by Willa Cather, features an unlikely encounter on the Nebraska prairie between a Norwegian immigrant farmhand fiddler and a sophisticated woman from the East visiting land her family owns on a last lark before her marriage into New York high society. The music of this scene underlies a chastely romantic interlude atop a windmill tower the evening before the woman boards the train for home. The characters’ roles are carried by oboe and horn. Flights of fancy in the flute during the second half of the arrangement adorn their magical evening together on the prairie.

Onomatopoeia for chamber ensemble (2010)

Cygnus Ensemble & friends:

  • Tara Helen O’Connor flute
  • Arthur Sato oboe
  • Jo-Ann Sternberg clarinet
  • Calvin Wiersma violin
  • Susannah Chapman cello

Martel Recital Hall
Vassar College
Poughkeepsie, NY
1/30/2011

Onomatopoeia for chamber ensemble
composed 2010
duration 30 minutes

Onomatopoeia (2003) by Signe Stuart detail

Onomatopoeia, for flute, oboe, clarinet, violin, and cello, is a musical response to a 60-foot-long, 11-inch-wide scroll painting of the same name by Santa Fe artist Signe Stuart. The artist experienced synesthesia as she painted – the colors and shapes evoking aural sensations that the music, in part, aims to recreate. Sometimes the relationships between scroll and music are specific, as in the ochre background and spiky lines at one end of the scroll corresponding to oscillating background figures and brittle foreground chords as the music begins. Other relationships between music and scroll are more general, as in their shared vibrancy of color and energy. The music is in five movements, corresponding roughly to twelve-foot sections of the scroll. Onomatopoeia premiered at the Albuquerque Museum in November, 2010, performed by the ensemble Chatter in conjunction with the exhibition “Sensory Crossovers: Synesthesia in American Art.”

Frolics for oboe and English horn

Claire Chenette oboe
Robert Walters English horn

premiere 12/6/2007
Finney Chapel
Oberlin College

Dvorak Variations for woodwind quintet

composed 2004 / revised 2016
duration 12 minutes

Dvorak Variations is based on the principal theme from the Scherzo movement of Dvorak’s “American” String Quartet, composed in the summer of 1893 during Dvorak’s sojourn in Spillville, Iowa. Beginning with an arrangement of Dvorak’s theme, the piece proceeds through a set of four tonal but highly chromatic variations marked “Leisurely”, “Impulsively”, “Slowly, like the blues”, and “With verve and wit”. Dvorak Variations stemmed from a commissioning project by Red Cedar Chamber Music in Cedar Rapids, IA, which invited a number of Iowa composers to create single variations on Dvorak’s theme. Unused sketches from that project served as the basis for this quintet.

Elegy and Affirmation for cello and piano

Thomas Mesa cello
Yoon Lee piano

from the album Division of Memory: Exploring Roots, Trauma, and Revelation Through Cello Works
Parma Recordings/Navona Imprint
CD release concert 8/29/2025

Elegy and Affirmation for cello and piano
composed 2002
duration 16 minutes

Elegy and Affirmation was commissioned through the Iowa Arts Council’s “American Spirit” project for premiere at the Blanden Memorial Art Museum in Fort Dodge, Iowa as part of a memorial event marking the first anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

The music draws on diverse influences. A conversation with the mother of a victim of the World Trade Center collapse, a snippet from a nostalgic Stephen Foster tune, various moving elegies and laments by other composers, a song sung by Afghan girls returning to school, melodies borrowed from repertories of various Asian bowed string instruments, and a poem by W.H. Auden all contributed to the work’s musical language, intended to heal and affirm.

Auden’s “September 1, 1939” was the impetus for the “Affirmation” part of the title. The poem begins with despairing language, reflecting on the approach of World War II, but ends with lines that struggle to affirm:

…dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.`

After a tentative beginning, the “Elegy” (movement 1) moves at a measured pace, with a highly ornamented cello melody and steady chords in the piano. The movement culminates in a quote from Stephen Foster’s song “Gentle Annie,” followed by a brief return of the movement’s main theme in canon between the two instruments. 

“Affirmation” (movement 2) begins with and is dominated by a tune transcribed from a National Public Radio news report about the official opening of school for Afghan girls in the spring of 2002. It was sung on the broadcast by a group of girls returning to the classroom for the first time in years. Other borrowed musical elements in this movement come from the instrumental introduction to an Afghan song performed on a ‘ritchak’ or spike fiddle, a melody from China’s Autonomous Uyghur Region performed on ‘satar’ or bowed lute, and a Mongolian melody performed on ‘morin khuur’ or horsehead fiddle. These elements come together in various combinations as the composition builds to its energetic conclusion.

The musical score for Elegy and Affirmation bears the inscription “in memory of Ann Nelson and other victims of September 11 and its aftermath.” Ann was a young bond broker at Cantor Fitzgerald who died in the World Trade Center collapse. Her mother, an art teacher, spoke prior to the music’s premiere in September 2002.

Fast Track for flute and guitar

Recording 1

Jan Boland flute
John Dowdall guitar

from the album Red Cedar Collection
Fleur de son Classics CD FDS57960
concert premiere Cedar Rapids Museum of Art
2/12/2000

Recording 2

John McMurtery flute
William Anderson guitar 

National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education 
“Orpheus Alliance New Music and Technology Conference” Rollins College, Winter Park, FL
6/24/2006

Fast Track (1992) by Sam Gilliam

Fast Track for flute and guitar
composed 2020
duration 4 minutes

Fast Track was commissioned by Red Cedar Chamber Music of Marion, Iowa for the Boland-Dowdall Flute and Guitar Duo as part of their “Artistic Celebration of the 21st Century.”  Seven composers were asked to compose music inspired by works of art from the permanent collection of the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art.  Each piece was to be brief (three to four-and-a-half minutes), with the whole set premiered at the museum early in the year 2000 in conjunction with an exhibition featuring the selected artworks.

This music for Sam Gilliam’s “Fast Track” draws inspiration from the jazzy energy of the print along with its paradoxical combination of density and airy lightness.  Syncopated rhythms and darting melodies abound.  The image’s prominent structural element of a circle inscribed in a square led to the opening musical ideas: the guitar’s solid four-note chords built of harmonic fourths and the flute’s constrained, circular melodies.  Textured white veils rising from the bottom of the image give rise to a gravity-defying melodic figure built of ascending intervals that grow ever larger, which becomes the basis for later sections of the music.  In the end, of course, the notes have an energy of their own, but both the music and Gilliam’s image evoke the frenetic pace of life on the fast track.

Sam Gilliam was born in 1933 in Tupelo, Mississippi and attended the University of Louisville where he received his B.A. in fine art and his M.A. in painting.  After his first grant from the NEA in 1967, Gilliam was acknowledged by a long list of public and private commissions, grants, awards, exhibitions, and honorary doctorates. He died in 2022.

Hyperbole for solo piano

Recording 1

Jonathan Chenette piano
Beethoven Club “Iowa Composers Concert”
Daehler-Kitchin Auditorium, Coe College
Cedar Rapids, IA
4/18/1999

Recording 2

Eugene Gaub piano
Mid-America Composers Festival
Sebring-Lewis Hall, Grinnell College
Grinnell, IA
10/2/1999

Hyperbole for solo piano
composed 1998
duration 8 minutes

Hyperbole‘s title derives from  the exaggerated energetic character and hyperkinetic motion of the music. Melodies in the piece arise from interlocking lines passing between the pianist’s hands. Expanding and shrinking intervals and meters occasionally throw one line across another, resulting in situations that correspond to the Greek origins of the word hyperbole as a throwing beyond or excess. The strident character of some of the musical ideas is balanced by a light-hearted and impulsive side. The composition seeks to present a sustained burst of energy for the listener mirrored by the visible energy of the pianist’s performance.

Four Character Pieces for flute and piano

Claudia Anderson flute
Richard Gloss piano

Annual Convention of the Iowa Music Teachers Association
Sebring-Lewis Hall, Grinnell College
Grinnell, IA
6/8/1992

Four Character Pieces for flute and piano
composed 1992
duration 12 minutes

The Four Character Pieces were composed in 1992, on commission from the Iowa Music Teachers Association. They were designed to present an interesting challenge to advanced high-school-aged performers. The opening Fanfare mixes upward leaps, downward scales, and arpeggiated flourishes that reappear twice. The Romance consists of a sensuous, ornamented melody over a lush, undulating accompaniment. Wind-Up Toy  has a non-vibrato melody and clockwork accompaniment inspired by the image of a delicate children’s toy winding its way across a table top, stopping just short of the edge. Frolic is a perpetual motion romp based on a 14-measure setting I composed in 1991 for the “Happy Birthday” text in Pig Latin!

Duo Variations for double bass and harp (1991)

premiere 9/22/1991
John Chiego double bass
Jeanmarie Kern Chenette harp

3rd Annual Festival of the Iowa Composers Forum
King Chapel, Cornell College
Mt. Vernon, IA

Duo Variations for double bass and harp
composed 1991
duration 12 minutes

The Duo was composed for John Chiego, Principal Bassist of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra. In the form of a set of variations on an original theme, the composition requires the musicians to share particularly closely in the elaboration of the musical materials, with each instrument completing musical thoughts begun by the other. The variations seek to explore different types and degrees of relatedness between the two instruments, along the way revealing some unexpected similarities in performance techniques and timbres.

Fantasy and Fugue on BACH for piano trio

premiere 12/13/1985

Mirecourt Trio
Kenneth Goldsmith violin
Terry King cello
John Jensen piano

Herrick Chapel, Grinnell College
Grinnell, IA

Fantasy and Fugue on BACH for piano trio
composed 1985
duration 12 minutes

Fantasy and Fugue on BACH is an homage to J.S. Bach, composed for the Mirecourt Trio in 1985, on the occasion of Bach’s 300th birthday. It attempts to re-explore, in 20th century terms, two of the most exhilarating aspects of Bach’s prodigious musical personality – the incredible flights of fancy and harmonic invention in his toccata and fantasia movements, and the wonderful sense of intellectual play in such masterworks as the Art of Fugue. The BACH signature — note order Bb (German B), A, C, and B (German H) – recurs throughout the work in a variety of guises: as a melody, as a chord, as the basis for a canon or round, played backwards, played simultaneously at different speeds, and finally as the basis for most of the fugue (subject, countersubject, episodes, etc. consisting of transformations of the BACH signature strung together.)

Invocation for harp and organ

Jeanmarie Kern Chenette harp
JoAnne Ritacca organ

Herrick Chapel, Grinnell College
Grinnell, IA
2/22/1986

Invocation for organ and harp
composed 1984
duration 4 minutes

Invocation was composed for the dedication of a small organ installed at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Grinnell, Iowa. Much of the melodic and harmonic material draws inspiration from French music of the early 20th century. The ending develops from several repetitions of a melody fitting the words “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.”

Redolence for solo harp

Jeanmarie Kern Chenette harp

Herrick Chapel, Grinnell College
Grinnell, IA
2/9/1996

Redolence for solo harp
composed 1982
duration 3 minutes

Redolence is in a small form, with two lyrical sections framing a more energetic one. The outer sections are punctuated by harmonics, produced when the harpist damps the string at its midpoint. Overall, the musical rhythm is flexible, with a prose-like quality mirroring the subtle inflections of the harmonic language.

Setting for solo piano

premiere 2/2/1986
Jonathan Chenette piano
Herrick Chapel, Grinnell College
Grinnell, IA