Composers Workshop I

Sunday, October 25, 2026 at 7:30p in the Concert Hall

Program

Zhuo Wang, soprano saxophone
Hung Lin, alto saxophone
Nick Scuderi, tenor saxophone
Charles Lane, bass saxophone

Sarah Hachtman, soprano
Henrique Rabelo, piano

Zhuo Wang, tenor saxophone
Alejandro Jiménez Zapata, piano
 

Lucy Shirley, soprano
Kyle Quarles, bass
 

Sam Shaner, steel pan
Jenna Zimmerman, djembe
Andrew Hansen, marimba
Featuring students from The University of Iowa Dance Department
 

fixed media

---Intermission--

Alexandre Augusto da Silva Negrao, violin
Andrea Allen, viola
Chris Mendez, violoncello 

Canlin Qiu, piano

Chris Mendez, violoncello

Kyle Soliz, soprano saxophone

John Thomas Morris, piano

Henrique Rabelo, piano

PROGRAM NOTES

Arch
INNOCENT OKECHUKWU
     There is a particular kind of courage required not to throw broken things away — but to pick up the pieces, hold them to the light, and find a way to put them back together. ARCH begins there. This work for saxophone quartet is, at its core, a meditation on healing: on childhood wounds that were never asked for, on pain left behind by others, on memories that resurface without warning and insist on being felt. The title is not simply architectural. An arch is the oldest structural solution to weight and pressure — it holds by distributing the burden across its entire span, each stone depending on the next. To build one from broken pieces is an act of faith that wholeness is still possible.

Reflex
INNOCENT OKECHUKWU
     I didn’t start Reflex with a big idea. It came from noticing how quickly sound turns back on itself—how one gesture immediately creates another, sometimes intentionally, sometimes almost by accident. Writing for tenor saxophone and piano made that especially clear to me. The saxophone can bend, push, and stretch a sound in a very physical way, while the piano answers in something more fixed, more grounded. That tension became the piece.

Lonely Perseverance on Mars
SOHEIL ZARRINPOUR
     Lonely Perseverance on Mars is a quadraphonic piece. It tells the story of Perseverance, the rover NASA sent to Mars in 2020 to look for life. Far from home, it moves slowly across a silent, empty land. The music surrounds the listener and invites them into this quiet world, to feel the loneliness of a rover that wanders on, searching, with no one beside it.

Sense
LUCY SHIRLEY
     Sense, written for Canlin Qiu, is a series of variations on the idea of diagnostic methods in Traditional Chinese Medicine. The phrase "Wang Wen Wen Qie," loosely translated as "Looking, Listening, Asking, Palpating," is the method by which practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine first identify a patient's needs. Each variation in the piece represents, in order, the unique physical sensations of the respective diagnostic method. The variations, instead of being based on a specific theme, are based upon a single collection: a series of nine pitches (heard in full in the opening measures) that contains a major, minor, and pentatonic scale, mirroring piece's fusion of musical and cultural spheres.

Spasmatic Butterfly
KYLE SOLIZ
     The first in a future series of solo pieces for every major woodwind instrument family, Spasmatic Butterfly represents the unpredictable and lightning fast movements a butterfly is capable of when flying.