Nigritella nigra, for clarinet and string quartet (1998)

Flow, for flute, percussion and piano (2020)

I. Drips & Drops
II. Floating City of Lake Texcoco
III. Aqueduct Run

Just Talking, for chamber orchestra (2024)

Alu, for sinfonietta (2025) *premiere

Jean-François Charles (b. 1974)
Nigritella nigra, for clarinet and string quartet (1998)

Nigritella nigra is composition is a musical portrait of the black vanilla orchid, a flower you can meet when you hike in the Alps. The piece opens with a musical rendering of the flower’s vanilla scent. This microtonal concentration of energy turns into more extravert gestures in the second part, reflecting the orchid’s strong character.
 

     Composer and Associate Professor at the University of Iowa, Jean-François Charles is also a clarinetist, an electronic musician, and a Max Certified Trainer. Creating at the crossroads of music and technology, he has performed dozens of concerts with his Spectral DJ instrument. His 2024 album Tenebrae was reviewed as "Five stars: A fascinating excursion into Charles’ mind, superbly engineered." in Fanfare Magazine. His polystylistic Missa brevis Abbaye de Thélème was released on the New Flore Music label in 2023, starring Anika Kildegaard. Jean-François Charles directed the associated award-winning Agnus Dei music video. This same year, he co-composed with Nicolas Sidoroff a full soundtrack to the 1923 Hunchback of Notre Dame movie starring Lon Chaney. Other highlights include the award-winning album Jamshid Jam - a duet with setar virtuoso Ramin Roshandel, and the opera Grant Wood in Paris, commissioned by the Cedar Rapids Opera Theatre (premiered in 2019). 

David Dzubay (b. 1964)
Flow (2021)

Composed for and dedicated to my good friend and long-time professional colleague, flautist Alejandro Escuer, FLOW is a concerto for flute and orchestra. One can imagine many things “flowing”: air, creating the flute’s sound; water traveling from here to there around this whole planet – giving us all life and a shared elemental experience; people, moving to and fro; and of course, music, especially music passing ideas back and forth among musicians or taking one or more motives on a journey across a piece of music lasting some 20 minutes, as in FLOW. Each of these examples of flow also involve transformation, in a process that might be circular, or perhaps never-ending.
     While composing this concerto, I thought much about the flow of water, and even specifically, about the flow of and history of water in Mexico City, which of course was built upon a lake and continues to have challenges relating to water. Supplying fresh water to the population is not easy, and while extracting twice the amount of water as that replenishing the underground aquifers, the city continues to sink, such that the zócalo is now below the level of Lake Texcoco, which was the lowest point in the Valley of México.
     The first movement is called “Drips & Drops.” Over the course of about six minutes the music gradually transforms from the opening single short note played by the flute into short motives and then longer lines and gestures; many of these descend in the way of water following gravity, not unlike the Aztec’s aqueducts. The slow central movement contemplates the shifting ground beneath the city afloat on the aquifers below lake Texcoco. Blocks of sound shift in relation to each other throughout, and the climax presents a large imposing structure arising and then sinking. The closing movement imagines water traveling the paths of the old aqueducts but is also inspired by the bustling activity and flow of people around the city.
 

     David Dzubay has received commissions from Meet the Composer, Chamber Music America, the National Endowment for the Arts, the US-Mexico Fund for Culture, and the Fromm and Barlow foundations, among others. Honors include Guggenheim, Bogliasco, MacDowell, Yaddo, Copland House and Djerassi fellowships, and a 2011 Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His music has been performed by orchestras, ensembles and soloists in the U.S., Europe, Canada, Mexico, and Asia, and is published by Pro Nova Music and recorded on the Sony, Bridge, Centaur, Innova, Naxos, Crystal, Klavier, Gia, and First Edition labels. Currently professor of music and director of the New Music Ensemble at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music in Bloomington, Dzubay also spent three years as Composer-Consultant to the Minnesota Orchestra and one as Composer-in-Residence with the Green Bay Symphony. Since 2011, he has taught composition for three weeks each summer at the Brevard Music Center.

John Berners (b. 1961)
Just Talking, for chamber orchestra (2024)

Just Talking begins with the percussion fidgeting and clearing the orchestra's throat--ahem--and soon the violins begin to speak. The bass clarinet and trombone respond and soon most of the orchestra is talking among themselves. This piece is conversational; almost every phrase played is a solo. Outbursts, bickering and other modes of chatter form waves that rise and fall musically over the five minutes' duration. The piece is meant, on the one hand, to have humor--I love those performers who do wonderful speech mimicking with their instruments. But, by getting loose and having each instrument show an independent and rebellious character, it is also a response to the traditional, incredibly unified mode of orchestral playing. Further, simple conversation; talking and listening; being open, is something we need more of. Obviously most of the world's problems could be solved with the right kind of conversation. So--here is a moment of music about talking.
 

     Called "captivating" by the New York Times and "vivid" and "cheeky" by the Indianapolis Star, the music and words of John Berners are also "delightfully surprising and quirky," and "near madness" according to Indianapolis Nuvo Weekly. Berners's music has been performed by the Detroit Symphony, Virginia Symphony, Kiev Philharmonic, Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, and featured at festivals like Tanglewood, June in Buffalo, Composers Now, Music X, Walla Walla Chamber Music Festival, and the Missouri New Music Festival. 
     Following bachelor’s degrees in music and math from Northwestern, Berners earned an M.M. and Ph.D. in composition at Michigan. He is now Professor of Music at the University of Indianapolis. Berners has served on the faculties of the University of Iowa, American University in Washington, DC, the Colburn School in Los Angeles, California State University at Fullerton, and Kalamazoo College.

Gregory Rowland Evans (b. 1995)
Alu (2025)

Alu - The title word "Alu" is a somewhat gnomic term found on a variety of runestones. While a clear definition of the term is not agreed upon, it is used in the context of benediction in the closing of rune texts and perhaps derives from "ale." In this composition, some inspiration was taken from the encryption techniques used to hide deeper meanings within the poetic, ceremonial inscriptions on runestones. In addition to the association of runes with the practice of encoding, there remains an association of runes with the crudeness of the technology of antiquity. This association, combined with the notion of monoliths as unwieldy objects, led to a musical vision of the chamber orchestra as a fairly uniform body articulating swarming, mass textures. The music takes a step back from many of the modern advances in experimental or virtuosic performing technique, preferring a crude and jagged approach to both form and material.
 

     Gregory Rowland Evans is a composer and cellist whose music explores narrativity, memory, and abstract structuralism. He holds degrees from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (BM), the Frost School of Music (MM), and a Ph.D. in composition from the University of Iowa. His mentors include Jean-François Charles, Sivan Cohen Elias, and David Gompper, with additional study under Trevor Bača, Ann Cleare, Michael Finnissy, Hèctor Parra, and Chaya Czernowin.
     Evans’ works have been performed across North America and Europe, with premieres in the UK, Spain, Slovenia, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. He has collaborated with JACK Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Frost Saxophone Ensemble, Eric-Maria Couturier, and Tony Arnold and is composer-in-residence with the Cleveland-based Antigone Music Collective focusing on a collaboration with Greek author Dimitris Lyacos. His compositions, inspired by writing systems, esoteric texts, and time manipulation, create shifting sonic landscapes where performers and audiences engage in a shared act of discovery and transformation.