Program Notes, September 25, 2025
Oliver Knussen (1952-2018)
Born in 1952, Oliver Knussen studied composition with John Lambert in London and Gunther Schuller at Tanglewood. He was just fifteen when he wrote his First Symphony (later conducting its premiere with the London Symphony Orchestra) whilst his Third Symphony (1973-9), dedicated to Michael Tilson Thomas, is now widely regarded as a twentieth-century classic. A number of dazzling ensemble works, including Ophelia Dances (a Koussevitzky centennial commission, 1975) and Coursing (1979), cemented Knussen’s position at the forefront of contemporary British music.
In the 1980s, Knussen collaborated with Maurice Sendak on an operatic double-bill – Where the Wild Things Are (1979-83) and Higgelty Pigglety Pop! (1984-5, rev. 1999). Originally produced by Glyndebourne Festival Opera, these works have been performed extensively in both Europe and the USA and have been recorded on CD and video.
Knussen’s ebullient concert opener Flourish with Fireworks (1988) quickly entered standard orchestral repertoire, as did his concertos for horn and violin. The latter, written in 2002 for Pinchas Zukerman and the Pittsburgh Symphony, has received close to 100 performances worldwide under conductors including Barenboim, Dudamel, Eschenbach and Salonen. Recent works include Ophelia’s Last Dance (2010) for piano, Reflection (2016) for violin and piano and O Hototogisu! for soprano, flute and ensemble. Knussen’s music was the subject of a BBC Symphony Orchestra ‘Total Immersion’ festival at the Barbican in 2012 – one of many events organised to celebrate his 60th birthday.
As one of the foremost composer-conductors in the world, Knussen was renowned for his unfailing advocacy across a wide range of contemporary music. He recorded prolifically and presided over numerous premieres, including important works by Carter, Henze and Anderson. Recipient of the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Conductor Award in 2009, he was Artist in Association with the BBC Symphony Orchestra (2009-2014), Music Director of the London Sinfonietta (1998-2002), Head of Contemporary Music at the Tanglewood Music Center (1986-93) and Artist in Association with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. He was Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival from 1983 to 1998, and in 1992 established the Britten-Pears Programme’s Contemporary Composition and Performance Courses in collaboration with Colin Matthews.
Knussen lived in Snape, Suffolk, and was appointed a CBE in 1994. In 2014 he became the inaugural Richard Rodney Bennett Professor of Music at the Royal Academy of Music, London. Other accolades included the Ivor Novello Award for Classical Music, the ISM Distinguished Musician Award, and the 2015 Queen’s Medal for Music.
Two Organa (1995)
These two short pieces approach the same idea in quite different ways. The 12th century organa of the Notre Dame School (e.g. Perotin) employ plainchant tones as the slow foundation for rapid, ecstatic, dance-like melismata. In June 1994 I used this technique to write a very short piece for a Dutch “music box” project in which thirty-two composers wrote for a two-octave musical box using only white notes. I dedicated the resulting Notre Dame des Jouets to Sir Peter Maxwell Davies on his 60th birthday and orchestrated it in February this year. The second Organum, dedicated to Reinbert de Leeuw, brings the same technique into a less “innocent” world employing the total chromatic in elaborate polyrhythmic layers. It should be listened to with half and ear on the foreground activity (which is partly defined by specific musical identities) and the other half on the extremely slow cantus firmus which defines its scale and resonances. The second Organum was first performed by the Schonberg Ensemble under Reinbert de Leeuw at its 20th anniversary concert in Utrecht in September last year.
— Oliver Knussen
Peter Lieberson (1946-2011)
Peter Lieberson was an influential American composer known for his innovative contributions to contemporary classical music. Born in New York City, he was the son of Goddard Lieberson, a prominent figure in the music industry. After earning a degree in English literature from New York University, Lieberson pursued his passion for music by studying composition informally with renowned composer Milton Babbitt and later at Columbia University, where he received his Master’s degree.
Lieberson’s career was marked by a series of significant achievements, including the performance of his Variations for solo by the Group for Contemporary Music in 1972, which led to numerous commissions and performances. His works, such as the Piano Concerto and Symphony, Darla, often reflect his deep interest in Tibetan Buddhism, infusing his compositions with spiritual and philosophical themes. Throughout his career, he collaborated with various esteemed musicians and ensembles, establishing himself as a vital voice in the contemporary music scene.
In addition to his artistic accomplishments, Lieberson received several prestigious awards, including the Rapoport Prize and the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship. He was married to mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, with whom he shared a profound artistic partnership. Peter Lieberson’s legacy continues to inspire musicians and composers, as his works remain celebrated for their emotional depth and innovative spirit.
Free and Easy Wanderer (1998)
I like to have the title of a piece in hand before I start to compose. A friend light-heartedly suggested “Free and Easy Wanderer.” This term is a loose translation of a Chinese herbal supplement I was taking at the time. I thought, “Why not?” and in fact began composing in the spirit of those words. Free and Easy Wanderer is a short piece based on the simplest of ideas: an opening chord in the piano and bells that provides that intervallic and harmonic stuff of the piece, and a motif in the clarinet which generates rhythmic impetus. Phrases and sections of the music arise and dissolve with transformations of the chord and motif. “Free” and “easy” suggested to me the qualities of water: water will flow in the most casual, sparkling way in a brook, or it can swiftly rage forward in rapids, quickly coming to rest again in the next section of river. Water “wanders” as a river winds through the countryside, yet it carves its way through the landscape in a definitive pattern. I dedicated this new piece for the London Sinfonietta to my friend of many years, Oliver Knussen.
— Peter Lieberson
Deqing Wen (b. 1958)
Deqing Wen is a Chinese-Swiss composer, a professor of Composition at Shanghai Conservatory of Music, and a member of the Societé Suisse pour les Droits des Auteurs d’Oeuvres. He is the artistic director of Shanghai Conservatory’s New Music Week, and features in Who’s Who in the World of Music, produced by Cambridge Biographic Centre. Wen studied at Fujian Normal University with Guo Zu-Rong; the China Conservatory of Music with Shi Wan-Chun and Luo Zhong-Rong; the Conservatoire de Musique de Genève with Jean Balisaat; and the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Lyon with Gilbert Amy. He was also a visiting scholar at Columbia University.
Wen’s works have won him international acclaim, and combine an original musical approach with the influences of Chinese traditional arts and philosophy. His vivid, emotive and accessible style has been praised by critics in China and Europe. Zhou Haihong of the Central Conservatory of Music (Beijing) has described it as striking ‘a balance between complexity and clarity, between mystery and rationality, between shock and subtlety, between fantasy and rigour, and between exactness and profundity’. The Salzburger Nachrichten, reporting on a performance in 1999, remarked that ‘Wen’s music is so fresh, like morning dew; as exciting as a detective story and as enjoyable as an evening with the best of friends.’
His works have been performed at a variety of venues including the Festival Archipel, Festival Amadeus and the Davos Festival in Switzerland; Vienna Modern; ISCM World Contemporary Music Festival; Darmstadt Summer Course and Wittener Tage fur neue Kammermusik in Germany; Savolinna Opera Festival in Finland; the Asian Composers League Festival in Japan and Australia; the Hong Kong Arts Festival; and festivals in Taipei, Beijing and Shanghai. Wen has been honoured with concerts and masterclasses dedicated to his compositions in China, Switzerland, France, Denmark, Germany, Israel and the USA. His music has been published by Swiss Musical Edition, Barenreiter Verlag, the Shanghai Conservatory of Music Press and the Beijing People’s Music Publishing House, and albums of his compositions have been released on a wide variety of labels.
Wen has been awarded the Prize of the State of Geneva 1993, the Prix du Festival of the 3rd Festival de Musique des Chateaux Neuchatelois, the Prix Cultura 1999 of the Foundation Kiwanis and the Composer Prize 2001 of the Foundation Leenaards of Switzerland.
Village Sauvage (2022)
Now, however, I convert chicken crows into music in this piece. It uses the three multiphonics sounds of each saxophone as the main musical material, the decorative long contour seems to be the proud morning call of a rooster, and the rhythmic counterpoint can be imagined as the triumphant squawk that a hen makes after laying an egg.
It is a musical representation of the beauty of Nature and the pleasures of living in my rural hometown when I was young and as well as a wave of nostalgia for it.
— Daqing Wen
Laniakea (2025)
Laniakea is a supercluster containing 100,000 galaxies, stretching across 520 million light-years of space. Its Hawaiian name, Laniakea, means “immense heaven.” Within this supercluster, there are spatial waves too subtle for human senses, but scientists can use digital technology to convert them into sounds that approximate the audible spectrum. As a composer, I aim to transform these sounds into music, letting my imagination convey the awe I feel deep within for such vastness. The structure of this piece is inspired by Laniakea itself, which I envision as a radiant golden phoenix. The multi-layered textures of the music reflect the supercluster’s complexity, while the contrapuntal glissandi create a sense of movement within that structure. The pitches drawn from the letters A, A, E, and A in “Laniakea” form the foundation of the musical organization and introduce vocal elements into the frame. The idea of the Supercluster echoes the design of pitch materials as sound clusters, while the Big Bang theory, which proposes that the universe originated from a single point, transforms into the first thunderous note at the beginning of the piece. The continuous growth of the musical sounds and the expansion of the sonic space upward and downward not only suggest the ongoing expansion of the universe, but symbolize how the space on which humanity relies seems increasingly insignificant in the vastness of the cosmos.
— Daqing Wen
David Canfield (b. 1950)
The music of freelance composer David DeBoor Canfield has been heard in about 40 countries on five continents, and has been performed by some of the world’s most accomplished soloists, including saxophonists Claude Delangle, Otis Murphy, Eric Nestler, Stephen Page, Timothy Roberts, Kenneth Tse, and the Zzyzx, Oasis, and Kenari Saxophone Quartets; violinists Andrés Cárdenas, Roger Frisch, and Rachel Patrick; cellists Anthony Elliott, Jerome Jellinek, Robert La Marchina, and Daniel Rothmuller, pianists, David Brunell, John O’Conor and Lin-Yo Wang,; organists Diane Bish, Janette Fishell, Randall Mullen and David Schrader; trombonist Carl Lenthe; euphonium virtuoso Demondrae Thurman, clarinetists Ronald Caravan and Howard Klug; percussionists Joseph Gramley and John Tafoya; conductors Ian Hobson and Laszlo Varga, and ensembles such as the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, “The President’s Own” United States Marine and United States Navy Bands, Orchestre de la Garde Republicaine, Columbus Indiana Philharmonic, Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra, and many others.
Canfield’s music has won numerous accolades and reviews including first place in the Jill Sackler Composition Contest and the Dean’s Prize from Indiana University. His music formed the basis of the three-day Chiefly Canfield Festival given by faculty and students of the University of Central Oklahoma in 2001, and has been featured at the World Saxophone Congresses of 2003, 2006, 2009, 2012 & 2018. In 1982, his vocal cycle Cats was analyzed in a master class given at Indiana University by Leonard Bernstein. Canfield’s Concerto after Khachaturian opened the 4th International Khachaturian Festival in Yerevan, Armenia on October 6, 2016, and in 2017, he was commissioned by the US Navy Band to write his Concerto after Dvořák for Saxophone Quartet and Symphonic Wind Ensemble. He has been invited to give master classes and composition lessons at various universities including University of Iowa, Indiana University, Mercer University, Berklee College of Music, University of Central Oklahoma, and most recently Brigham Young University, Idaho where he was in residence for a week. He is a published author with several books and a host of interviews and reviews for Fanfare Magazine.
Canfield was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on September 23, 1950. Early musical studies were with his father, John Canfield, and graduate studies in composition were undertaken at Indiana University, where Canfield studied primarily with John Eaton, as well as with Frederick Fox and Bernhard Heiden. He received his Master of Music in 1977 and Doctor of Music in 1983. Half of the 200 works in his official catalog have been published to date by Jeanné, Inc., TRN, Evensong Music, Éditions Recherché, JP Publications, and Shanghai Conservatory of Music Press; the majority of them have also been recorded on 24 different record and CD labels from five countries. He is a member of ASCAP and the Christian Fellowship of Art Music Composers. In 2023, he was named Composer-in-Residence with Sinfonia da Camera.
Mini-Maximalist Music (2025)
Mini-Maximalist Music was largely composed between June 28, 2025 and August 6th of that same year in about 30 composition sessions averaging an hour or so each. The impetus for writing this work was a request by composer-conductor David Dzubay for a piece for his New Music Ensemble to celebrate my upcoming 75th birthday on September 23rd of 2025. I chose the title before I wrote a single note, liking it and believing that it afforded good musical possibilities. It may be interpreted in two different ways. One might assume that it refers to a combination of Minimalism and Maximalism written into the work. However, a better view would be that the work is primarily Maximalist, but not to a great extent, i.e., this is a minimally Maximalist piece. The work is thus cast in two movements, one a tribute to my primary composition teacher at Indiana University who had died 10 years prior. The second movement derives from the fact that the company that produced my music-writing program, announced in 2025 that it will no longer offer tech support, a fact that will lead to its eventual demise.
Thus, the first movement, “Elegy in Memory of John C. Eaton,” memorializes the only person with whom I studied composition that I learned anything substantial. This icon of American music was well-known as a composer of microtonal music and as the co-developer of the Syn-Ket, an electronic instrument that sensitively responds to the touch of its performer. In recognition of Eaton’s renown in the former area, I employed more microtones herein than I have in any other work I’ve written, although my practical side dictated the preponderance of notes be restricted to the 12 tones of the chromatic scale. This movement also employs a scale of my own devising wherein the first seven letters of the alphabet are devoted to the diatonic notes (A through G), the next five to the remaining chromatic pitches and another 12 to microtonal intervals. Thus, I was able to spell out my erstwhile teacher’s full name, John Charles Eaton, with these assigned pitches in solos given to trombone and bassoon towards the end of the movement. The piece also explores several facets of loss, including shock, grief, anger, and resolution, and these lead to a quiet and somber conclusion.
The second movement, entitled “Finale, R. I. P.,” pays tribute to my moribund music-writing program, although here, “R. I. P.” stands for “resides in pieces,” i.e., the myriad pieces written by me and countless other composers using this system that reside (and will continue to) in computers. Since Finale and its complementary playback program, NotePerformer are famous for their meticulously precise playback which, despite the user’s addition of phrasing marks, tempo adjustments, etc., is much more mechanical than would be produced by any human performers, I decided to emphasize this quality in this movement. Accordingly, there is a near-constant (if irregular) walking bass line that permeates the first section, set at a tempo of quarter note = 120. At the midpoint of the movement, the tempo accelerates to mm = 150 at which point the character shifts to a considerably more frenetic one with fusillades of notes hurled this way and that. All the activity leads to a rather rousing conclusion.
As in most works I write for particular people or ensembles, I personalized the piece for the dedicatees. In the closing movement, I have done so through the spelling out of various names in Morse code, a device that I’ve never used previously. Indeed, I know of no other work that has utilized this approach, although there must be some. The opening tutti syncopation therefore spells out the name “Finale,” and shortly afterwards, a solo trumpet (Dzubay’s own instrument) uses the code to delineate “David Dzubay.” Finally, the letters in “New Music Ensemble” will be heard using this technique. All three words are later heard in this syncopated manner a second time. In a faster concluding section, I found another use for Morse code, although the tempo is now too fast to allow human players to perform it accurately. In this section, I’ve written a part taking advantage of the program’s ability to play back sequences of notes flawlessly at any tempo. In one portion of this part, there is an oft-repeated code for S-O-S, one that may be recognized even by those who do not know code since its dit-dit-dit, dah-dah-dah, dit-dit-dit pattern has been employed in many films and other places in our culture. My use here, though, is meant as a joke, although whether it’s the Ensemble or audience who is begging for mercy I’ll leave to the imagination of the listener.
Three of my favorite compositions from the past several decades have particularly inspired this work, all written by friends on the composition faculty of Indiana University. These are David Dzubay’s Snake Alley, Don Freund’s Radical Light, and Claude Baker’s Awaking the Winds. Although my music is very different from theirs, I have sought to capture some of the brilliance and energy of these pieces in the present work.
— David DeBoor Canfield