Commissions
Ola Gjeilo | Bronte (World Premiere, 2023)
Chiayu Hsu | To a Lost Year (World Premiere, 2022)
David Lang |
teach your children (World Premiere, 2019)
Stacy Garrop | Terra Nostra (West Coast Premiere, 2014 and 2015)
Garrop envisioned Terra Nostra as a meditation on nothing less than humanity and its place on the planet. For the first portion of the three-part oratorio, she researched creation myths from cultures all over the world.
I wanted to encompass legends from as many continents as possible,” says Garrop. “What’s important to me is writing something that has a strong formal structure,” adding that, among other elements, “it’s partly about the balance between tension and relaxation.”
Olli Kortekangas | Seven Songs for Planet Earth (West Coast Premiere, 2011)
I compose for my listeners,” the composer says. “Yet I am unwilling to speak of influencing my audience. It is neither right nor possible to calculate the listenerʼs reactions. Rather, I prefer to speak of shared experiences.”
Donald McCullough | Contraries: The Human Condition (World Premiere, 2009)
I decided to explore the two contrary states of the human soul, the paradox that resides in all of us, as expressed in Blake’s poetry,” the composer says. “Blake’s point is not that innocence (childhood optimism) is always good, and experience (adult cynicism) is always bad….Blake said, ‘Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.’”
Mark Winges | pax penetralis (World Premiere, 2007)
As with many of my pieces, pax penetralis (peace passing through) starts with a particular, although rather abstract, sound — in this case, the sound of the chorus and strings,” the composer says. “As I begin any piece, I always ask myself, what kind of sound-world does this group of musicians inhabit?”
Emma Lou Diemer | Songs for the Earth (World Premiere, 2005)
My greatest pleasure is to write music that moves people, not that moves them out of the room,” the composer says. This work uses texts from several poets – ranging from Omar Khayyám in 11th-century Persia to the composer’s own sister – to focus the audience on questions about our stewardship of the planet we live on.