La Fleur du ciel for string trio (2010)

Catching Light: Alto Saxophone Concerto (2024)

     I. within darkness
     II. crepuscular
     III. within light

Unrest-cure (2014)

Abracadabra (Suncatchers, for 11 virtuosi) (2024)

each movement is played without pause

     I. Aurora’s Riddles
     II. Theia’s Crystals
     III. Capers of Arcus
     IV. Re’s Lattice

    Dietz’s La Fleur du ciel , The trio is a reflection on the passage from Camus found below.
 “At the time, I often thought that if I had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowering overhead, little by little I would have got used to it. I would have waited for birds to fly by or clouds to mingle, just as here I waited to see my lawyer’s ties and just as, in another world, I used to wait patiently until Saturday to hold Marie’s body in my arms.”
Camus, Albert. The Stranger. Reissue ed. New York: Vintage, 1989. p.77.
 

Christopher Dietz composes music inspired by a wide variety of sources, both real and conceptual. Poetry, sound as sculpture and color, how toddlers play, deep time and the cosmos, rhythm as geometry, religion and politics, animal behavior, and the music of others are a few of the subjects that have informed his musical imagination. His music has been performed by contemporary music ensembles including Alarm Will Sound, Decoda, Ensemble Échappé, NODUS, The Orchestra of the League of Composers, Ogni Suono, Duo Scorpio, The East Coast Contemporary Ensemble, and Trio Kavak as well as traditional ensembles such as L’Orchestre de la Francophonie, The San Jose Chamber Orchestra, The Orange County Symphony, The Toledo Symphony, and many university ensembles. Christopher holds degrees from the University of Michigan, the Manhattan School of Music, and the University of Wisconsin. He was previously on the faculty at the Oberlin Conservatory and is currently an associate professor of composition at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

Catching Light is musical work for solo alto saxophone and chamber ensemble that explores the representation of light in three distinct ways: within a darkened storm, through crepuscular rays, and with the rising of the sun at dusk. Through quick melodic and rhythmic gestures in the first movement, cluster chord bursts of the second movement, and the orchestrated build of melodic and textural material of the final movement, I explore the saxophonist’s ability to act as a force of light working to find its way out of the darkness. This piece serves as a personal investigation of identity, revelation, and the composition process. Elements of the piece are continuously modified and stripped away throughout each movement, imploring the saxophone to discover new roles as a solo voice within the larger ensemble.

Saxophonist Nick May is sought after as “a highly expressive, virtuosic, and fresh performer” (David Del Tredici, Pulitzer Prize and Grammy-winning composer) that “brings his personality to every performance - full of genuine joie de vivre!” (Javier Oviedo, Classical Saxophone Project). Since his solo debut at the age of eighteen with the Lincoln Symphony Orchestra, May’s career has taken him throughout the United States, Singapore, Germany, Sweden, and Denmark, appearing recurrently as a guest artist and recitalist.  Additionally, May has garnered prizes at many prestigious national and international competitions with recent Carnegie Hall performances.
   He is the founder of the I Exist Project, which aims to advocate for, bring light to, and celebrate the multifaceted aspects of queer life, culture, and artistry through the collaboration with a diverse range of queer composers and performers to promote the creation and visibility of new queer repertoire. Nick May is an endorsing artist for Key Leaves and Légère Reeds. 

Zachery S. Meier is a composer, collaborator, and flutist who resides in central Ohio. As a composer, Meier’s work seeks to meld physical and sonic art forms while engaging with his Queer identity. Much of his output exists in solo and chamber works and has received notable performances from the JACK Quartet, ETHEL (String Quartet), United States Air Force Band, and the Ho Chi Minh Ballet Orchestra. His work has been featured at National and International conferences and festivals; National Flute Association, International Trombone Festival, International Tuba Euphonium Conference, and the College Music Society National Conference. As a collaborator, his work focuses on interdisciplinary exchanges, with a focus on movement in communication with music. His recent collaborations have been featured with Mad Shak Dance Company (Chicago), Macaranas Dance Company (Iowa), and the Denison Theatre Department. Meier is currently serving as Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Theory and Composition at Denison University in Granville, OH.

Unrest-cure is loosely based my piece on a short story by Saki with the same title. The viola plays the most important role in the piece which shows two characters: an elegiac opening and a closing melody, interrupted by an impulsive march to which I found my inspiration during a visit to the Augarten Park in Vienna, where monumental flak towers disturb the charming baroque idyll of the garden.

     Born in Hastings in 1973, Morgan Hayes studied at the Guildhall School of Music, where his teachers included Simon Bainbridge, Robert Saxton and Michael Finnissy. Since early recognition of his composing and piano playing talent there he has made his home in central London, producing an Impressive body of work while making a day-to-day living as a resourceful ballet pianist and teaching composition at the Royal Academy of Music.
   Very often Hayes composes with particular performers in mind. One special ally is the pianist and composer Jonathan Powell, who has commented on the fact that much of his music seems to derive from a sense of the purely physical, of how fingers naturally cluster on keyboard, for instance. He is practical rather than outwardly aspirational, a craftsman. But what results is as far from the merely functional as it is possible to be.
   His largest-scale work to date is the full orchestral piece Strip, commissioned for the 2005 BBC Promenade Concerts, whose title refers both to its layer-like structure and to a certain paring down from the ultra-complex textures for which he had hitherto shown a predilection. Perhaps an even finer achievement is the highly personal single movement of the Violin Concerto (2006) where he explores in an entirely original way the notion of the traditional Romantic concerto.
   The essence of Hayes’s art is contrast. Something simple and spare – single lines, heterophonic  decorations, static harmonic fields – might be pitched against something else of great complexity and violence. There’s the contrast of linear and vertical. Singularities somehow come together as compound wholes.
   The French music critic Renaud Machart remarked of Hayes’s piano duet ‘The Black Cap’ that it’s as if ‘Morgan Hayes meets Erik Satie, meets Igor Stravinsky, meets Conlon Nancarrow,  meets Ned Rorem- all drunk’. (Stephen Pettitt, 2016)

Abracadabra - Music for me is an embrace of the world, a way to open myself to being alive in the world — in my body, in my sounds, and in my mind. I care deeply about musicality, imagination, craft, clarity, dimensionality, an elegant balance between material and form, and empathy with the performing musicians as well as everyone who works in the presenting organizations.
   Collaborating with the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble and Timothy Weiss, and with the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and Timothy Weiss, has been one of the most exhilarating experiences of my creative life. It is difficult to express how grateful I am to the many extraordinary colleagues who have made this possible. It is pure magic — deeply rewarding, fun, and sincere.
   Although my music is meticulously notated in every detail, I like it to sound like it was being spontaneously invented. It is always in the act of becoming. I have a vivid sense that the process of the creative journey (rather than a predictable fixed point of arrival) is, for me, essential. I sing and dance while I compose, hoping that my music will feel organic and self-propelled. I work hard to ensure that my music, too, dances; I often create in my mind and ear imaginary flexible dances and ballets, poems, visual art and/or animations. I love virtuosic performances that percolate and spiral with natural musicality. While this is not exactly a "concerto for ensemble," each of the eleven musicians is featured in several soloistic, virtuosic passages.
   The word "abracadabra" has existed for thousands of years. As far back as the second century (101-200 AD), the term has been used by people who believed it had the power to heal and cure. The word has changed from medical to magical over several centuries, but the intention behind the word has remained the same. Abracadabra in Hebrew means "I will create as I speak." By the 16th century, magicians began to perform as they do today. Abracadabra's modern-day definition ranges from "a magical charm or incantation" to "a magic phrase uttered by a stage magician." The earliest recorded magicians date back to Ancient Egypt, Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece — they were believed to have special powers for healing and prayer. In consideration of this history, each of the four Arcs of this 15-minute composition is inspired by an Egyptian, Roman or Greek god or goddess: Aurora, Theia, Arcus and Re.
   In Roman mythology, the goddess Aurora renews herself every morning and flies across the sky, announcing the arrival of the sun. In Arc 1, AURORA'S RIDDLES, Aurora is imagined as an enchanter performing magic tricks. The music is sprightly, spirited and virtuosic. THEIA'S CRYSTALS is resonant, elegant and spacious. In Greek mythology, Theia is the ancient goddess of sight and the glittering bright sky. She was mother of Helios, Selene and Eos. Her name itself means Goddess. Here, some magic ritual of incandescent sky is unfolding as each new resonant bell reverberates and shimmers back to silence, conjuring and spinning off webs of sun threads.
   In Roman mythology, Arcus personifies the rainbow and is known as the goddess of rainbows. A rainbow, which is a display of the colors of the spectrum produced by dispersion of light, often stands for hope and can refer to something much sought after and hard to attain. "Chasing rainbows" can be to pursue an illusory goal. In Arc 3, CAPERS OF ARCUS, Arcus is imagined as crafting capers while chasing rainbows. ["Capers" definitions: verb: dances, skips, romps, jigs, frisks, gambols, cavorts, prances, frolics, leaps, hops, jumps, bounds, springs; and noun: tricks, escapades, stunts, pranks, antics, mischiefs, games, sports, jests.] The music is kinetic and agile.
   One of several Egyptian deities associated with the sun, the god Re was usually represented with a human body and the head of a hawk. It was believed that he sailed across the sky in a boat each day. Imagined in RE'S LATTICE are the interlacing lattices of Re's routes and adventures. The music is animated, effervescent and ardent.
   Organic and at every level concerned with transformations and connections, the carefully sculpted and fashioned musical materials are nuanced, very carefully heard and nimble. Their flexibility allows pathways to braid harmonic, rhythmic, timbral and contrapuntal elements which are constantly transformed — sometimes whimsical and light, sometimes jazzy, sometimes almost balletic, sometimes vaguely akin to lively and enthusiastic music on a caffeine rush, sometimes layered and reverberating with overtly cantabile, melodic resonance, pirouettes, fulcrum points and effervescence.
   ABRACADABRA (Suncatchers) unfolds a labyrinth of musical interrelationships and connections that showcase the world-class musicians of the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and superstar conductor Timothy Weiss. Their playing radiates a virtuosic display of rhythmic and timbral dexterity, counterpoint, skill, energy, dynamic and articulative range, precision and teamwork. When feasible the composition is to be performed with dancers.
   Music’s eternal quality is its capacity for change, transformation, and renewal. No one composer, musical style, school of thought, technical practice, or historical period can claim a monopoly on music’s truths. I believe music feeds our souls. Unbreakable is the power of art to build community. Humanity has and will always work together to further music’s flexible, diverse capacity and innate power.
   ABRACADABRA (Suncatchers) was co-commissioned by Aspen Music Festival and School, Robert Spano, Music Director and Oberlin class of 1984, and Oberlin Conservatory of Music. 

The music of Augusta Read Thomas (b. 1964 in New York) is nuanced, majestic, elegant, capricious, lyrical, and colorful — "it is boldly considered music that celebrates the sound of the instruments and reaffirms the vitality of orchestral music" (Philadelphia Inquirer).
     A composer featured on a Grammy winning CD by Chanticleer and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Thomas’ impressive body of works “embodies unbridled passion and fierce poetry” (American Academy of Arts and Letters). The New Yorker magazine called her "a true virtuoso composer." Championed by such luminaries as Barenboim, Rostropovich, Boulez, Eschenbach, Salonen, Maazel, Ozawa, and Knussen, she rose early to the top of her profession. The American Academy of Arts and Letters described Thomas as “one of the most recognizable and widely loved figures in American Music."
     She is a University Professor of Composition in Music and the College at The University of Chicago. Thomas was the longest-serving Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for conductors Daniel Barenboim and Pierre Boulez (1997-2006). Thomas won the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, among many other coveted awards. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Thomas was named the 2016 Chicagoan of the Year.
     Recent and upcoming commissions include those from the Santa Fe Opera in collaboration with the San Francisco Opera and other opera companies, PEAK Performances at Montclair State University and the Martha Graham Dance Company, The Cathedral Choral Society of Washington D.C., The Indianapolis Symphony, Tanglewood, The Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, Des Moines Symphony, Boston Symphony, the Utah Symphony, Wigmore Hall in London, JACK quartet, Third Coast Percussion, Spektral Quartet, Chicago Philharmonic, Eugene Symphony, the Danish Chamber Players, Notre Dame University, Janet Sung, Lorelei Vocal Ensemble, and the Fromm Foundation.