PROGRAM NOTES
The music for Sergei Prokofiev’s Quintet, Op. 39 (1924) originated from a chamber ballet, Trapeze, which he composed in Paris for a traveling troupe of five musicians. Unique in its instrumentation and vibrant textures, the piece has been called “one of Prokofiev’s most radical scores.” In this performance, the Quintet is brought into dialogue with excerpts from a contemporary essay, River Notes (2024), which Alison Hawthorne Deming wrote specifically for the Watershed Soundscape project. Here, Prokofiev’s six movements are unceremoniously excerpted and tossed out of order. Mapped onto the themes and colors of Deming’s prose, the music becomes both illustrator and provocateur, providing sonic commentary on themes of our watershed’s environmental and cultural histories.
The groundwater section of River Notes is adapted from: Nicole C. Vicenti, Natural Tracer Study to Constrain Transit Times and Flowpaths of Groundwater from Davidson Canyon to Lower Cienega Creek. MS Thesis, University of Arizona, 2018.
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The Rain Song for baritone, double bass, and electronics was commissioned by double bassist Philip Alejo. Philip came to me with the beautiful idea to create a multimedia work which paints a portrait of the Sonoran Desert. We chose to set two poems by Ofelia Zepeda as a way to honor one of the unique cultures of this land. Zepeda is a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation. Her poetry embraces O’odham traditions, the natural world, and experiences and stories of contemporary O’odham life.
Ju:kĭ Ñe’i
Wa nt o m-ñe’i g ju:kĭ ñe’i. Wa nt o ñ-keihi m-we:hejeḍ.
I would sing for you rain songs.
I would dance for you rain dances.
Bury Me with a Band
My mother used to say, “Bury me with a band,” and I’d say, “I don’t think the grave will be big enough.”
Instead, we buried her with creosote bushes, and a few worldly belongings.
The creosote is for brushing her footprints away as she leaves.
It is for keeping the earth away from her sacred remains.
It is for leaving the smell of the desert with her, to remind her of home one last time.
While composing this piece, I drew inspiration not only from culture, landscape, and Sonoran ecosystem, but also from folk songs and stories of the borderland region. The goal is to provide the audience with a three-dimensional audiovisual experience of the beautiful Sonoran Desert.
This project was funded in part by Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona with funding from National Endowment for the Arts, City of Tucson, and Pima County. “Bury Me With a Band” and “Ju:kĭ Ñe’i” used with permission from the University of Arizona Press and Ofelia Zepeda. –– Yuanyuan Kay He
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Pine Chant (2021)
all we had to do was put our ears to the trees and listen very carefully
— Valerie Trouet, Tree Story
Responding to this quote from dendrochronologist Valerie Trouet, Pine Chant represents a kind of tree-listening of my own. I composed music to align with the rhythms of annual tree growth, drawing on a set of data shared with me by the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona in Tucson. But the work also reflects my own lived experience amidst the current climate uncertainty, as heard in the deep sadness pervading the harmonic cycles upon which I mapped the tree data.
Each of the work’s three sections deals with a particular tree species: Colorado pinyon, Ponderosa pine, and Douglas fir. I used the annual growth data to control various musical parameters including the temporal placement, density or length of the instrumental gestures. For the most part this plays out over a floating sonic landscape abstracted by the use of reverb, echo and distortion in the electronics. But in the faster third section of
the work the sonification becomes more explicit: I wanted the listener to hear the changing climate.
Noticing a declining trend in the annual growth of Arizona’s Douglas Fir population across the twentieth century, I mapped this data to the space between each musical gesture (in this case rapidly falling arpeggios). The reduced growth over time creates an increasingly frantic texture as the gestures become closer together. We can also notice a greater synchronisation between the three instruments, and their coming together in rhythmic unison at the climax is for me symbolic: nature’s messaging is loud, clear and urgent.
In the work’s final moments, I added into the electronics the “voice” of another Douglas Fir dating from 1772, by far the oldest tree in the data set. These bell-like sonorities above the trio’s sustained chord hark back to a time before industrialization. And I can’t help but think that the footprint of humanity is there in the trees, and it is upon all of us to listen, and to act. — Lachlan Skipworth
Pine Chant, recorded by Sara Fraker, Jackie Glazier and Marissa Olegario for Equilibrium Records, is available via all major streaming platforms. It was the winner of the 2023 Australian Art Music Award for best chamber work.
Valerie Trouet, Tree Story: The History of the World Written in Rings. p. 89. © 2020 Johns Hopkins University Press.
Reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.
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ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Philip Alejo is Associate Professor of Music, Double Bass at the University of Arizona and Artist at the Bay View Music Festival. Philip collaborates regularly with harpist Claire Happel in River Town Duo, which will release a recording of new commissions in 2020, sponsored by the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Philip additionally teaches at the Arizona ASTA Bass Jams and the Richard Davis Bass Conference at the University of Wisconsin. He was recently named MusAid Teaching Artist at El Sistema, El Salvador. Philip holds degrees from Oberlin College (BA/BM), Yale University (MM), and University of Michigan (DMA).
Cassandra Bendickson is a freelance bassoonist and contrabassoonist based in Tucson, Arizona and teaches the largest bassoon studio in Southern Arizona. She currently performs with the Sedona Symphony, LuftBassoons, Tucson Duo Project, the Peregrine Rose Trio, the Ladies’ Reeding Society, as well as freelancing in orchestras across the southwestern United States. She holds an MA in bassoon performance from the University of Arizona and enjoys a busy schedule of teaching bassoon, reed making, performance, and ensemble coaching. An advocate for composers and new music, Ms. Bendickson won a sizable New Works grant in 2019 from the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona to fund brand new music for bassoon quartet by Tucson composers Jay Vosk, Marco Rosano, Russell Ronnebaum, Samantha Bounkeua, and Dante Rosano as a year-long project for the LuftBassoons Quartet. This project expanded beyond 2020 into international premieres at the 2021 Meg Quigley Vivaldi Virtual Symposium of Samantha Bounkeua's "OCEANS for Bassoon Quartet"; and Jay Vosk's "Canción de Cuna" at the International Double Reed Society Conference in 2021.
Prizewinner of the Aleksander Glazunov International Competition (Paris), Elena Chernova-Davis has enjoyed a multifaceted career as a soloist, chamber musician, and concertmaster in her native Uzbekistan and throughout the United States. After graduating with honors as a full-scholarship student from the Tashkent State Conservatory, she came to the United States to continue her studies with Misha Vitenson, Elmar Oliveira, and Shmuel Ashkenasi. She is a recipient of the Concertmaster Fellowship and the Irene Alm Memorial Award for Excellence in Performance and Scholarly Research and has worked with conductors such as Bernard Haitink, Esa Pekka-Salonen, Gerard Schwarz, Miguel Harth-Bedoya and Jeffrey Tate to name but a few. Collaborating with various New York ensembles including musicians from the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, MET Opera Orchestra, and the New Jersey Symphony, her recent performing venues include Carnegie Hall – Isaac Stern Auditorium, Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, Le Poisson Rouge, Madison Square Garden, and Radio City Music Hall.
Alison Hawthorne Deming was born and grew up in Connecticut steeped in literary and naturalist traditions. A Guggenheim Fellow, she has two books forthcoming in 2025: the poetry anthology The Gift of Animals: A Celebration of Animals and the People Who Love Them from Storey Press and the new poetry collection Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower from Red Hen Press. Her most recent nonfiction book A WOVEN WORLD: On Fashion, Fishermen, and the Sardine Dress was published by Counterpoint Press in 2021. Her most recent poetry books are Stairway to Heaven (Penguin 2016) and Death Valley: Painted Light, a collaboration with photographer Stephen Strom (George F. Thomson 2016). The essay collection Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit was published by Milkweed Editions in 2014. She is the author of Science and Other Poems (LSU Press, 1994), winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets; The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence (LSU, 1997), Genius Loci (Penguin Poets, 2005), and Rope (Penguin Poets, 2009); and three additional nonfiction books, Temporary Homelands (Mercury House, 1994; Picador USA, 1996), The Edges of the Civilized World (Picador USA, 1998), finalist for the PEN Center West Award, and Writing the Sacred Into the Real (Milkweed, Credo Series). She edited Poetry of the American West: A Columbia Anthology (Columbia University Press, 1996) and co-edited with Lauret E. Savoy The Colors of Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Natural World (Milkweed, 2002; revised and expanded edition, 2011).
Sara Fraker is associate professor of oboe at the University of Arizona. A member of the Tucson Symphony Orchestra since 2005, she is principal oboist of True Concord Voices & Orchestra and faculty artist at the Bay View Music Festival in northern Michigan. She has presented recitals and masterclasses across the US and in Mexico, Canada, Japan, Australia, and the Tohono O’odham Nation. Her innovative collaborations, which often explore intersections of music and ecology, include projects with ecologist/author Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass); dendroecologist Margaret Evans (UArizona Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research); and composers S. Maggie Polk Olivo and Asha Srinivasan. Her commission, Pine Chant for reed trio and electronics, by composer Lachlan Skipworth, won Best Chamber Music at the 2023 Australian Art Music Awards. Her recent recording and publishing project, Johanna Beyer: Music for Woodwinds, was released by New World Records and Frog Peak Editions in 2023. Most recently, Sara helped build a multidisciplinary team that was awarded an AIR Annual Resilience Theme grant that explores stewardship, restoration and soundscape in the Santa Cruz River Watershed. Her discography includes a solo album, BOTANICA: music for oboe and English horn (MSR Classics, 2019) and projects for Naxos, Summit Records, Toccata Classics and Reference Recordings. She has performed in festivals at Tanglewood, Aspen, Chautauqua, Spoleto Festival USA and the Schleswig-Holstein Orchesterakademie in Germany. Raised in New Haven, Connecticut, Sara is a graduate of Swarthmore College (BA), New England Conservatory (MM) and the University of Illinois (DMA).
Hailed for her “robust playing and virtuosic performance” (San Diego Tribune) and “beautiful and clear tone” (The Clarinet Journal), Jackie Glazier is an active soloist, chamber musician, orchestral clarinetist, pedagogue, and advocate of new music. As associate professor of clarinet at the University of Arizona Fred Fox School of Music, Glazier is a committed pedagogue and mentor to future generations of clarinetists. As a soloist and chamber musician, she has performed throughout North America, Europe and Asia at many prestigious venues, including the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall. Glazier is a founding member of the clarinet and saxophone ensemble, Duo Entre-Nous, with Belgian-based saxophonist Don-Paul Kahl. The duo is active in commissioning, performing, and recording works for clarinet and saxophone, and has been responsible for the creation of over 20 new works for the genre since 2016. In April 2021, they released their debut album, Fresh Ink, on Equilibrium Records, which received acclaim in The Saxophonist. Much of her work is connected to contemporary performance and intercultural arts research. Her performances have featured many world premieres, experimentation with choreography, multimedia, technology and exploration of scientific fields and the human experience. As a soloist and chamber musician, Glazier has recorded for Parma, Centaur, Naxos, Toccata Classics, Mark Records, Equilibrium Records, New Sound Records, and Navona Records. In addition, Glazier is a frequent orchestral performer, having played with orchestras across the country as guest principal, second, Eb and bass clarinet. An active clinician and educator, Jackie has presented guest master classes at major universities throughout the United States. She has earned degrees from Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, University of Florida, and Florida State University. Jackie was named one of the University of Florida’s Outstanding Young Alumni in 2018. She is an artist with Buffet-Crampon and Vandoren, and performs exclusively on Buffet-Crampon clarinets and Vandoren reeds.
Bird Harris is an artist, curator, and educator who prioritizes caretaking and connection. Her work explores the throughlines between land history and ecological crises, engaging with communities, scientists, and site-specific materials to investigate memory, systems of complicity, and possibilities for emergence. Harris received her B.S. in art history from Skidmore College and master’s degree in education leadership from Columbia University. She has served as principal of a turnaround school in New Orleans and has consulted with school leaders across the South to implement equitable learning practices and anti-racist history education. Recent exhibitions include NADA Curates, the New Mexico State University Museum, Art Fields (Lake City, SC), Stoveworks (Chattanooga, TN), the Barnes Ogden Gallery at Louisiana State University, and Science Gallery Atlanta. She has been an artist in residence at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies (Hudson Valley, NY), The Hambidge Center (Rabun Gap, GA), and was one of 7 artists selected for the Art & Social Justice Fellowship at Emory University in 2023. Current projects include Sonoran Heritage Waters with musicians and ecologists at Arizona State University, Hope Springs Eternal in collaboration with activist organization RISE St. James and New Orleans-based artists, and SITE at the Goat Farm (Atlanta, GA). Bird is an MFA candidate at Georgia State University. She lives in Atlanta with her partner, Josh, and their two children.
Yuanyuan (Kay) He is a composer and multimedia artist with roots in China. Her research uses innovative technologies to blur the boundaries between different fields and combine different art forms. Her works often explore and intertwine various forms of media to create unique audiovisual experiences that engage the audience. Many of her works involve collaborations with musicians, choreographers and dancers, scientists, engineers, photographers, visual artists, and stage design artists. Her immersive multimedia project StellarScape is a convergence research collaboration synthesizing science, humanity, music, visual art, and technology. Kay serves as the Creative Director for Electronic Music Midwest (EMM), which is an annual music festival dedicated to programming a wide variety of electroacoustic music and providing high quality electronic media performances. She is also the founder and director of the TURN UP Multimedia Festival, which works to promote Interdisciplinary Collaboration, Culture-Connecting, and Equality. She is currently an assistant professor at the University of Arizona School of Music, where she teaches composition, electro-acoustic music, multimedia, and orchestration. Kay earned her Bachelor of Arts degree at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and her Master of Music degree at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She holds a Doctor of Musical Arts in Composition from the University of Texas at Austin.
Gretchen Ernster Henderson writes across environmental arts, cultural histories, and integrated sciences through cross-pollinating creative and critical practices. The author of five books across genres, opera libretti and art media, her writings have been reviewed in The New Yorker, Guardian, TLS, and Literary Review, with interviews on NPR and BBC Radio. Her commitments have included being a Faculty Fellow at the Humanities Institute at The University of Texas at Austin, Associate Director for Research at the Harry Ransom Center, Co-Director of an NEH Institute on Museums: Humanities in the Public Sphere at Georgetown University, Annie Clark Tanner Fellow in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah, Distinguished Speaker in Art History at Rutgers University, Hodson Trust-JCB Fellow in Creative Arts at Brown University, and Visiting Artist in Music at MIT’s Center for Art, Science, and Technology. She has taught widely, and her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Opera America, and artist residencies, including the Jan Michalski Foundation for Writing & Literature in Switzerland and the Women's International Studies Center. Recent awards include the 2023 Aldo & Estella Leopold Writing Residency in New Mexico and a Lucas Artists Program Fellowship at Montalvo Arts Center Center (2023-2026). Born and raised in California, she is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin, also teaching eco-writing workshops at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, UA Poetry Center, and Randolph Lundine. Gretchen's book on Life in the Tar Seeps: A Spiraling Ecology from a Dying Sea (2023) is seeping into Dear Body of Water: a poetic water-harvesting project inviting people to write postcard-sized love letters to bodies of water to grow a chorus of care for watersheds across the globe.
Carolina Heredia composes acoustic and electronic music and produces interdisciplinary artworks. Born in Córdoba, Argentina, she has a musical background in Western European Classical and Electronic, South American folk, and Argentinian tango music. She has received prestigious composition awards, including the 2015 Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University, the 2019 Barlow Music Composition Commission, the 2018 Missouri Music Teachers Association, and the 2017 John Corigliano Composition International Competition at Chamber Music OC, among others. Her works have been published by Hal Leonard and released by Orchid Classics, Navona Records, and Alban Records. Her music has been programmed at the Walt Disney Concert Hall Green Umbrella Series, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra series, the NYC SONIC Festival, the Aspen Music Festival, the Lake George Music Festival, and the Bowdoin Music Festival, among others. She was a founding member and the Executive Director of the Khemia Ensemble and is currently a founding member of ANTiCX, a collective of multimedia artists. Carolina holds a Doctorate in Music Composition and was a Research Fellow for the Institute of Humanities at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Missouri and later an Assistant Professor in Music Composition and Associate Director for the Mizzou New Music Initiative before taking the position of Director of Programs for the American Composers Forum. She is currently based in Los Angeles, California.
Hailed by The Australian as possessing a “rare gift as a melodist” and by Limelight as expressing “both exquisite delicacy and tremendous power”, Australian composer Lachlan Skipworth writes orchestral, chamber, vocal and experimental music. His vivid musical language is coloured by three years spent in Japan where his immersion in the study of the shakuhachi bamboo flute inevitably became a part of his muse. Winning the prestigious Paul Lowin Prize for orchestral composition in 2016 established Skipworth’s reputation, and led to a string of major commissions and a stint as composer-in-residence with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra. Recent highlights include performances by Diana Doherty, Genevieve Lacey, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Australian String Quartet, the Tokyo Philharmonic Chorus, and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Skipworth’s recordings continue to gather critical acclaim, including a five-star review for his debut album and an ARIA nomination for his second, as well as frequent radio play across Australia.
Violist Ivan Ugorich is an avid orchestral and chamber musician. Ivan performed with professional orchestras including the Sarasota Orchestra, the Florida Orchestra, Tallahassee Symphony, and the Orlando Philharmonic. Additionally, he won the position of principal violist with Symphony Orchestra Augusta, where he served from 2014-2016. Relocating to Tucson, he now works with The University of Arizona Foundation and performs in small and large professional ensembles including the Tucson Symphony Orchestra, Tucson Pops Orchestra, and The Arizona Opera. As an active chamber musician, Ivan has won The McCauley Chamber Music Competition with his quartet in 2012, and has competed in the International Chesapeake Chamber Music Competition as the 2016 finalist with the Cerulean Trio. He has also performed with his two groups on the radio with WUOL 90.5 and WFSQ 91.5 respectively. As a founder of the Cerulean Trio, with clarinetist Jackie Glazier and pianist Galen Dean Peiskee Jr, Ivan travels and performs at venues throughout the country. In May 2017, he appeared with his trio in New York’s Carnegie Hall as part of the program titled “Home and Abroad.” Additionally, he toured with the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival and performed with the Innsbrook Summer Chamber Music and Indiana University Summer Music Festivals. Ivan also has experience as a soloist winning three solo competitions. Performance opportunities have taken him to Germany, France, Spain, Poland, Denmark, Italy, and China. Engagements have included performances with artists such as Itzhak Perlman, Joshua Bell, Lang-Lang, Anne-Sophie Mütter, Midori, Rachel Barton Pine, Guy Braunstein, Gil Shaham, Renée Fleming, Boston Pops, Pink Martini, and Time for Three. Ivan has earned his B.M. degree in viola performance and M.A. degree in administration from Indiana University and Florida State University, respectively. His teachers have included Alan de Veritch and Stephen Wyrczynski.