SENIOR COMPOSITION RECITAL
Mary M. Denney
Performers are listed inside the program.
Saturday, April 13, 2024 7:30 pm
Faye Spanos Concert Hall
Cloud Cover (2021)
APRIL 13, 2024, 7:30 PM
Mary M. Denney (b. 2002)
Tristan McMichael, Shazza Lyons, Kyle Saelee, Marcus Rudes, saxophones
Heart Trio (2023)
Bright (2023)
Emma Northcutt, violin
Ealaph Tabbaa, viola
Bailey LaBrie, cello
Tristan McMichael, saxophone
Ealaph Tabbaa, viola
Satellite Radio (2023)
Kamron Qasimi, Yukina Shimokawa, trumpets
Skylar Warren, horn
Bronson Burmfield, trombone
Alejandro Villalobos, tuba
Huntress (2024)
Mary M. Denney, horn
Voice Memories (2024) (World Premiere)
A Great Big Garden
Tearing a Hole Through Space and Time
Katie Pelletier, soprano
Bobby Singh, flute, piccolo
Andrew Seaver, clarinet
Hannah Estelle Estrella, saxophone
Jordan Wier, bassoon
Skylar Warren, horn
Emma Northcutt, violin
Ealaph Tabbaa, viola
Jane Damon, cello
Donald Parker, guitar
Matthew Kulm, percussion
Tristan McMichael, conductor
This recital is presented as a degree requirement for a Bachelor of Music in Music Composition.
Celebrated for her eclectic, vibrant, and sometimes irreverent music, composer Mary M. Denney explores the relationship between sound, music, and memory. She draws inspiration from a wide range of influences—everything from the pop music on the radio to experimental free improvisation. Active in the new music community, Denney’s music has been performed by ensembles such as Splinter Reeds and Chartreuse Trio, and she has attended the Cortona Sessions for New Music as a composition fellow. She is completing her degree in composition at University of the Pacific, currently studying with Hendel Almetus and previously with Andrew Conklin and Eric Wood. She studies horn with Sadie Glass.
Notes by the ComposerCloud Cover
I wrote Cloud Cover in the fall of 2021, my sophomore year, which was the first “real” semester of college I had experienced. After spending the entirety of my freshman year remotely due to the pandemic, I felt as if I was starting college all over again, learning and experiencing new things that I hadn’t really gotten to before. The piece came about after speaking with my friend and tenor saxophonist, Theresa Huynh, who asked me the first time we’d met in person if I’d ever written anything for saxophone. I hadn’t, and seeing that her group, the jRat Saxophone Quartet, was active on campus that semester, I jumped at the chance to write for them.
Cloud Cover, while I didn’t really see it at the time, captures the excitement and anxieties I was feeling of readjusting back to real life. I chose the title because I felt that the converging and diverging voicings of the saxophones represented the movement of the clouds, which is a perfectly fine interpretation, but in retrospect I see a lot of my younger self in this piece: excited, nervous, and eager to explore a beautiful, terrifying world.
Heart Trio
Heart Trio was written for the 2023 Women Composers Festival of Hartford, where I had been selected as a composer to participate in their annual Composers Workshop for young and early-career composers. I had been asked to write a piece for the trio Chartreuse, who were to perform and workshop the piece in front of a live audience. The string trio is slightly more unconventional than its quartet counterpart, so it caused me to reassess my own concepts of what it means to be an ensemble. I found myself inspired by works by composers such as Kaija Saariaho and Sofia Gubadulina, whose approaches to the trio treated the ensemble more as a single, large instrument, rather than three individuals playing together. Through the mentorship of the program’s director, Jessica Rudman, and my current composition teacher, I sought to explore my own version of the concept.
The “heart” in Heart Trio refers to the steady quarter note pulse that is present throughout the piece, set within the range of a normal resting heart rate. Despite its steady pulse, the piece is very rhythmic and explores the intricacies and interconnectedness of each member of the string trio—violin, viola, and cello—and the creation of a composite sound. Each instrument is treated as an individual part of a whole, larger instrument, similar to the chambers of the heart that work together to keep us alive.
Bright
Alto saxophone and viola are quite an unusual pairing, so imagine my surprise when I was assigned to compose a new work for this instrumentation, which was for the Boston-based RE:Duo. At first, all I could think about was how different each instrument is from each other—one is a loud, vibrant wind instrument, the other the underdog of the orchestra—so trying to determine how to use them in tandem felt nearly impossible. With little reference and plenty of research into the sounds of the instruments themselves, I realized how many similarities the two instruments possess. This piece is an exploration of those similarities through timbre and playing technique and the unusually “bright” composite texture that’s achieved when the saxophone and viola are perfectly blended.
Satellite Radio
As a brass player, I always jump at the chance to write more brass music, especially when it’s for my friends. Over winter break of this year, I received an email from my friend and fellow horn player Skylar Warren, who was asking composers for any newly written brass quintets his ensemble could
PROGRAM NOTES
perform for local high school students. Out of boredom and post-semester adrenaline, I put this piece together in about two weeks and sent it off.
Upon returning home for the holidays, when I began work on this piece, my parents had bought themselves a new car, which came pre-built with a satellite radio receiver. It instantly reminded me of the first time my parents bought a new car when I was a child, which was a giant minivan that also came equipped with a satellite radio receiver. The concept of satellite radio blew my mind as a child, where digital audio signals are broadcast over long distances via satellites orbiting the Earth and send music back to my mom’s car. The hundreds of channels! No static! No interruptions! It was everything a young music lover like myself could ask for. This piece attempts to capture that feeling, using common popular chord progressions and repetitive motives, similar to the sounds I once heard on my parents’ satellite radio.
Huntress
The current solo horn repertoire consists mostly of music several hundred years old at this point, by dead white men. While there’s certainly nothing wrong with the Mozart and Strauss we horn players have been learning for centuries, there has become a noticeable gap in the canon, lacking works by living, diverse composers from all walks of life. As a composer, I have the ability to help solve this problem, by adding my own contribution to the small but ever-growing collection of new music repertoire.
Huntress is a syncretization of the old and new, combining the intervals of traditional hunting calls with extended technique. Open perfect intervals on the horn are continually modified by new sounds, such as flutter tonguing and stopped glissandos, and a brief Lydian interlude disperses them, culminating in a dramatic finish that revisits the original interval, no longer in the place where it once was. Additionally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the gender dynamics of this piece, as the “huntress” of the piece uses these modern techniques to begin redefining a male-dominated instrument and a male-dominated practice for a new generation.
Voice Memories
A Great Big Garden
In the yard behind your house is a garden. You did not put it there; it’s yours nonetheless. It’s full of roses and petunias and marigolds, and there’s only a few weeks of the year where they all bloom at once and you already know
those will be the best weeks of the year anyways. In this garden is a set of windchimes, strange round metal discs that make the most peculiar sounds when they smash against each other. When you hear those windchimes again you will know that you are home. You will sink your hands into beckoning earth and feel the weight of every generation that came before you, and you will feel alive.
Tearing a Hole Through Space and Time
That time is long gone, long passed, and you still can’t believe it. It was all so much simpler then, and as your memory fades you wish for nothing more to be back there again, back to the time when your brain was the strongest, most elastic organ in your body and you seemed invincible, untouchable. You want so badly to feel alive again like you did back then. Now in your old age you sit and think about the garden and the car and your youthful body and all the generations that have come in between them, and it makes you angry, angry at the unfeeling passage of time. So angry, in fact, that you could tear a hole through the fabric of space and time if your body was strong enough. You would watch that cold, empty void between the stars crack and splinter, revealing a past time before you, and you would crawl through without a second thought, only to realize how much you left behind on the other side once that fissure in space and time begins to close.
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Coming soon .
Apr. 15, 7:30 pm, Recital Hall
Varied Ensembles Concert
Apr. 17, 7:30 pm, Faye Spanos Concert Hall
Pacific Jazz Ensemble
Stefon Harris, vibraphone
Patrick Langham, director
Apr. 18, 7:30 pm, Recital Hall
Faculty Recital
Igor Veligan, violin
Natsuki Fukasawa, piano
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