Tria ex uno (sextett nach Josquin Desprez (2001)

I. Tria ex uno I
II. Tria ex uno II
III. Tria ex uno III

Alchymia for clarinet quintet (2021)

I. A Sea-Change (…those are pearls…)
II. The Woods So Wild
III. Lachrymae
IV. Division on a Lute Song (Wedekind’s Round)

Cristales De Tiempo (2025)

for small ensemble, in five movements

Solstice Ritual-Homage to Varèse and Ravel (for 14 virtuosi) (2025)

Grammy award winner, Michael Norsworthy, has been heard in major concert halls around the globe and is a recognized educator, technician and consultant. His personal approach to presenting, developing and nurturing the artistic possibilities around him have resulted in partnerships with world class musical collaborators, schools of music and manufacturers. As soloist with numerous orchestras around the USA and abroad, as a captivating recitalist and chamber music performer and as one of the most celebrated champions of the modern repertoire having premiered over 150 new works at such venues as Carnegie Hall, Vienna’s Musikverein, Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Hall, The Casals Festival and the Aspen Festival, Norsworthy has defied categorization, dazzling critics and audiences alike.  His discography, numbering over 80 releases, can he heard on Naxos, Mode, Gasparo, Albany, New Focus, New World, BMOP/sound, ECM, Navona, Nonesuch, Canteloupe and Cauchemar records. He is the owner of New York City Woodwinds and is a proud performing artist for Selmer Paris and Vandoren.

Georg Friedrich Haas (b. 1953)
Tria ex uno (2001)
.    Tria ex uno refers to the Agnus Dei II from Josquin Desprez’s Missa "L'homme armé" super voces musicales — a three-voice setting featuring the same melodic motif presented three times, at three different speeds and three different pitch levels. In Part I, this setting is heard in its unaltered, original form.
     In Part II, the setting is freely orchestrated with the aim of clarifying the motivic connections through the differentiation of the musical textures. Part III is a new, independent composition in which the music of the *Agnus Dei* is paraphrased, transposed, and overlaid.
 

Georg Friedrich Haas was born in Graz on August 16, 1953. Between 1972 and 1979 he studied composition at the University for Music and Performing Arts Graz, with Ivan Eröd and Gösta Neuwirth, and later with Friedrich Cerha in Vienna. Haas taught composition at the Kunstuniversität Graz and the Musikakademie Basel, and in 2013 was appointed Professor of Music at New York’s Columbia University.

Thomas Adès 
Alchymia for clarinet quintet (2021)
     The clarinet quintet Alchymia is woven from four threads leading out of the alchemical world of Elizabethan London. The movement titles refer to:
    •William Shakespeare, The Tempest 1611 - the  king’s eyes transformed by the sea into pearls.
    •The Woods So Wild 1612 - Tudor popular song transformed by William Byrd into keyboard divisions (variations).
    •Lachrymae 1600 - (Tears) - John Dowland’s lute-song, which he transformed into viol consort Fantasias.
    •Divisions on a Lute-song: Wedekind’s Round - variations on the playwright Frank Wedekind’s Lautenlied (lute-song), which is played by clarinet, imitating a barrel-organ in the London street, in the final scene of Alban Berg’s opera Lulu.

Born in London in 1971, Thomas Adès studied piano at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, and read music at King’s College, Cambridge. A prodigious composer, conductor and pianist, Adès was described by the New York Times in 2007 as one of today’s ‘most accomplished overall musicians.’

Santiago Santero
Cristales De Tiempo (Time Crystals) (2025)

I wrote Time Crystals in 2025. The work was premiered that same year in Buenos Aires.

It is made up of five pieces for a small ensemble of six instrumentalists. The title comes from a scientific idea that I followed with some interest for a while: so-called time crystals. In very broad terms, they can be thought of as physical systems that, much like an ordinary crystal -which repeats its structure in space- repeat their behavior periodically in time.

What particularly interested me was that image: that of crystallized time. A time that, rather than moving forward, seems to remain suspended; a time that does not necessarily project a musical or sonic idea ahead, but instead turns back on itself, repeats, transforms, and reappears.

Inevitably, this idea finds certain echoes in the history of music. I think above all of K. Stockhausen’s “moment form” and, further back, toward the beginning of the twentieth century, of certain works by Igor Stravinsky. In different ways, they embody a conception of time that moves away from the idea of musical expression as necessarily oriented toward a point of arrival.

The five pieces are strongly contrasted with one another. And yet, behind this diversity lies the same underlying concern: a question about time. Not so much time as an abstract concept, but rather our experience of it: how we imagine it, how we construct it, and, above all, how we perceive it while listening.

In the poem “Otro poema de los Dones,” Jorge Luis Borges writes, in its final line: “For music, mysterious form of time.” Time Crystals was born out of that attempt: to stop time for an instant, to fragment it, to make it repeat, and to try to perceive what happens when time ceases to be merely that which passes.

Santiago Santero (Buenos Aires, 1962) is a prominent Argentine composer, conductor, and educator with a distinguished career dedicated to the creation, performance, and promotion of contemporary music.

As both a conductor and composer, he has led prestigious ensembles across the Americas and Europe, including the National Symphony Orchestra of Argentina. His musical career has taken him to stages throughout Latin America, the United States, and Europe. His works have been performed by renowned international soloists and contemporary music ensembles, such as Ensamble XXI, Ensamble Sudem, Quinteto Sonorama, Ensamble Tropi, and Compañía Oblicua (Argentina); Piano Circus (London); soloists from the Psaphaa Ensemble (UK); Antidogma Musica (Turin, Italy); Ensemble Modelo 62 (The Hague, Netherlands); Opera Nova (Zurich, Switzerland); Ensemble Recherche (Germany); Ensemble Écoute (France); as well as the National Symphony Orchestra and the Permanent Orchestra of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires.

In the academic field, he maintains an active teaching career as a Full Professor of Music Composition at the Department of Musical and Sonic Arts of the National University of the Arts (UNA). Since 2009, he has also served as the Music Director of the UNA's Contemporary Music Ensemble, leading an intensive program of both pedagogical development and concert performances.

Augusta Read Thomas
Solstice Ritual-Homage to Varèse and Ravel
     Over the past forty-five years, I have composed many works whose titles point to natural and celestial radiances: galaxy, star, sun, earth, moon, sky, light, dawn, illumination, equinox, summer, etc. One central metaphor of my life’s creative work is that of light refracting. Of interest to me, for my work, is to build, sculpt, and compose clean, clear, transparent, translucent, luminous, radiant, shining, resounding and resonant musical materials. 
    Solstice Ritual for 14 virtuosi shares many of these preoccupations. The two solstices happen in June (the 20th or 21st) and December (the 21st or 22nd). These are the days when the sun’s path in the sky is the farthest north or south from the Equator. A hemisphere’s winter solstice is the shortest day of each year, and its summer solstice the longest of each year. In the Northern Hemisphere the June solstice marks the start of summer: this is when the North Pole is tilted closest to the sun, and the sun’s rays are directly overhead at the Tropic of Cancer. The December solstice marks the start of winter: at this point the South Pole is tilted closest to the sun, and the sun’s rays are directly overhead at the Tropic of Capricorn. In the Southern Hemisphere, the seasons are reversed.
     Cultures throughout the epochs, and in all corners of planet Earth, have performed a multitude of rituals to celebrate and mark the solstices. As I composed Solstice Ritual, in my mind’s ear and eye were sonic and visual images of fourteen musicians, a conductor and dancers, performing outdoors (if feasible) during the precise moment of a solstice. For this reason, when it is also feasible, Solstice Ritual is to be performed with dancers. Although the score took most of its inspiration from the vivid illuminations and dazzling rays of the summer solstice, at times Solstice Ritual explores contrasting materials whose shadowy character may also suggest the relative absence of light that marks the winter solstice. 
    A related sonic and balletic image I had when composing this composition was that of a kaleidoscopically radiant light refracting with vibrant and multi-shaped energies in a constant state of transformation. The music’s energy-flows vary and braid together musical materials that are blazing, radiant, kinetic, ritualistic, resonant, lyrical, rhythmic, reflective, fiery, avid, dynamic, effervescent and, at times, harmonically jazz-like. The resulting labyrinth of musical interrelationships showcases the world-class musicians of AXIOM and superstar conductor Jeffrey Milarsky. Importantly, Solstice Ritual was not conceived of as an ensemble piece. Rather, it is a score for fourteen highly virtuosic soloists. 
    Solstice Ritual also pays homage to the composers Edgard Varèse and Maurice Ravel, and it celebrates their imagination, joy, love, vitality, soul, energy, great chords and rich chord progressions, resonant orchestrations, tight big-band-like splash-chords and the sheer beating-heart inner life of their music. I love all of their compositions and to give just two examples among many, Varèse’s percussion writing and Ravel’s gorgeous orchestrations have been longstanding sources of inspiration. 
    The eighteen-minute composition is in three parts played without a pause. The first part, “Reaching Skyward,” unfolds bell-like fanfares—with outgrowths and transformations and lasts five minutes and thirty seconds. The second part, “Solstice Rites,” consists of a series of shorter sections entitled “Drumming Ritual 1,” “Bells Recap,” “Cosmic Clock 1,” “Drumming Ritual 2,” and “Cosmic Clock 2.” These sections last six minutes and thirty seconds. The third and concluding part, “Bell Prayers,” lasts seven minutes. 
    Although my music is meticulously notated in every detail, I like it to sound like it was spontaneously invented—always in the act of becoming. The creative journey—not a predictable or fixed point of arrival—is, for me, essential. I 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 doodles, lighting or animations, and I love virtuosic performances that percolate and spiral with natural musicality. I draw maps of form and never follow them! Rather, I follow the music where it needs to go and then redraw the maps of form over and over and over. 
    Solstice Ritual is dedicated with admiration and gratitude to Jeffrey Milarsky and The Juilliard School. 
 

     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.