Sofia Kamayianni

for piano quartet (violin, viola, cello, and piano)

The piece, written in 2004, is built from three parts with bridge passages between each part in the form of solo piano sections. The mystery refers to my esoteric world at that time as well as to several abstract senses that I could not explain to myself. The ostinato of the third part is based on a Greek word meaning 'unsolved', with the mystery ending up in this way.

The linked video recording was performed by Airi Yoshioka (violin), Maria Lambros (viola), Gita Ladd (cello), and Audrey Andrist (piano).

Click here to view the score.

Click here to view the performance.

Sofia Kamayianni

for piano, cello, and small percussion

ca. 7'15"

Click here to view the score and listen to a recording.

Annea Lockwood

for solo piano

ca. 4'15"

RCSC was commissioned by Sarah Cahill as one of a set of seven short pieces by women composers in honor of Ruth Crawford Seeger. The title is a near palindrome of their names and for its pitch content the piece draws on a ten note row from the Final movement of Crawford Seeger’s second string quartet.

Video recording was performed by Ricardo Descalzo.

Click here to view the score.

Click here to watch a performance (YouTube).

Annea Lockwood

for baritone voice, flute, trumpet, viola, cello, piano, percussion, and speaking voice

Luminescence was commissioned by Thomas Buckner, and is based on poems from Etel Adnan's SEA, which evoke the Lebanese coast of the Mediterranean, her birthplace. The Pacific Ocean is also a strong presence in her life as in Thomas Buckner's and mine, and so the piece celebrates our three-way friendship and our shared love of that ocean, which influenced the first song: here, the phrase lengths match the timing of long Pacific waves which I recorded in New Zealand, some years ago.

Click here to view the score.

Click here to listen on Annea Lockwood's website.

Annea Lockwood

for music-box piano, and 20 helium balloons

Gone! was commissioned by pianist Jennifer Hymer.

Click here to view the score.

Annea Lockwood

for prepared piano and amplification

Ear-Walking Woman for prepared piano and exploring pianist, uses the classic piano preparations: coins (to detune the strings), screws, wiring insulation sheathing, plus bubble wrap, a rubber ball and small wooden balls, two round stones, a bowl gong, mallets, and a water glass. The piece was commissioned by Lois Svard, to whom it is dedicated and who has given many superb performances of it.

When I started experimenting with these objects on my own piano, I found that even slight changes in the method of producing a sound evoked striking variants in sonic detail, for example: rocking a stone gently between two sets of strings brings out several pitches and their overtones, iterating in unpredictable rhythms. Getting the stone to rock really hard adds higher pitches and at times the stone will turn over, setting off a new set of strings and pitches, which gradually fade away as the stone comes to rest.

The work is set up as an open-ended exploration, in which I have determined which ‘tools’ are to be used in each section, and the pianist is asked to listen closely to the sounds created by each action, and to explore further the variants which arise when s/he uses a little more pressure and change of speed, a slightly different wrist position, a different make of piano. I think of this experience as “ear-walking,” like a hiker exploring a landscape.

Click here to view the score.

Click here to listen to the recording.

Ruth Lomon

for flute, TAB flute, B-flat clarinet, piano, violoncello, and vibraphone

1. Mizmaze

2. Warp and Weft

3. Navajo: Weaving the Yei

4. Penelope’s Web

Mizmaze is an intricate network of pathways enclosed by hedges or plantations. Warp and Weft has two textures running through the movement to create a musical ‘warp and weft’. The pizzicato of the cello throughout the movement is intertwined with the melodic lines of the other instruments. Navajo: Weaving the Yei refers to the Navajo rugs that have the figures of the Yei, Navajo deities, woven into the rugs. You will hear references to songs of the Navajo and some chants. Penelope’s Web is a proverbial expression for work which is ongoing but never completed. The myth gave me a frame for the changing textures of this movement, building a thick texture with all the instruments and thinning to long solo flute passages accompanied by vibraphone tremolo chords.

Click here to view the score.

Ruth Lomon

for mezzo soprano, piano, and percussion

ca. 15'15"

"Combustion ..." is fiery with a story accompaniment. "Dream Polyps…" is gentle, spectral, and dissolves into the first Choros. This divertissement has some humorous effects between the vocalise of the singer and the antics of a slide whistle. The heightened excitement generated by the second quotation intersects the more introspective mood of the next two verses.

"Golden eyebrow auras…" is accompanied by a fragment of Bach's Easter Cantata and closes into the second Choros which is reminiscent of the opening preamble, and features a play between a strummed C major chord inside the piano and a  D major chord played on a mouth organ. The last declamatory interjection builds from a simple two-note ostinato into a majestic close.

The last two verses are closest in mood, having a quiet modal quality in the voice, accompanied by plucked strings and inside-the-piano strummed chords. Symbiosis is dedicated to Eileen Davis and Rosemary Platt.

 The performers in the recording are Eileen Davis, mezzo soprano, and Rosemary Platt, piano, and both performers also play percussion instruments.

Click here to view the score and listen to the recording.

Ruth Lomon

for bass clarinet, harp, vibraphone/marimba, harpsichord, and piano

ca. 14'45"

Iatiku was composed in New Mexico during the summer of 1983. The word "iatiku" means "bringing to life" in the dialect of the Acoma Indians. It is also the name given to CHANGING WOMAN, the god personifying the earth and the changing seasons. Iatiku is composed for bass clarinet, marimba, vibraphone, harp, harpsichord, and piano, a blend of instruments which fascinates me. The composition opens with the indication ''Mysterious.'' The timbres produced by the unusual combination of instruments heightens the quality of mystery. You will hear the bass clarinet, harp, and vibraphone in passages of bent tones. These tones have quarter tone fluctuations which color the notes dramatically. There are "inside the piano" passages, thrumming sounds produced with a mallet on the lower strings, some banshee, eerie sounds, plucked and strummed strings which interplay with the harp. The listener may note a section called "the elements" which starts with the mounting tension of a catastrophic storm, and leads to a tightly-organized rhythmic accelerando. In the closing section of the piece there is a duet between bass clarinet and vibraphone called "rituals'' inspired by an Indian ritual dance, which has an intricate rhythmic pattern coupled with a melodic recurrence of the tritone.

Iatiku was the MMTA Commissioned work for 1983-84. (Massachusetts Music Teachers Association, affiliated with the Music Teachers National Association, Inc.) Commissioning funds were made possible in part by a grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts. (Meet the Composer Grant)

Click here to view the score and listen to a recording.

Ruth Lomon

for clarinet/bass clarinet, cello, vibraphone/tomtoms, and piano

Weaving(s):

1. Mizmaze

2. Warp and Weft

3. Navajo: Weaving the Yei

4. Penelope's Web

Mizmaze is an intricate network of pathways enclosed by hedges or plantations. "He hath walked the whole labyrinth and mizmaze of his life." (Beza) Warp and Weft has two textures running through this movement to create a musical "warp and weft." The pizzicato of the cello throughout the movement is intertwined with the melodic lines of the other instruments. Navajo: Weaving the Yei refers to the Navajo rugs that have the figures of the Yei, Navajo deities, woven into the rugs. You will hear references to some songs of the

Navajo. Penelope's Web is a proverbial expression for anything which is perpetually doing and never done. While Ulysses was off fighting the wars Penelope wove her tapestry every day and undid the work every evening to keep her suitors at bay. She held off their proposals by saying that she would not make a commitment to any of them until she had finished weaving the funereal robe for Laertes, her father-in-law.

The myth gave me a frame for the changing textures of this movement, building a thick texture with the four instruments, and thinning to long solo passages with tremolo chordal treatments in the vibraphone and piano solos.

Click here to view the score.

Ruth Lomon

for piano and percussion

Imprints returns to Ms. Lomon's interest in Native American Ceremonials. As a participant in a peyote ceremony she was inspired by the vocal extemporizing of each participant, the intensity of declamation and rhythms of gourd and water drums accompanying each singer. The ceremony acted as a catalyst for the areas of feeling she wished to express. The declamatory role of the piano in "House of Storms" is an aspect of this, as are the propelling percussion rhythms. "Song to Pull Down the Clouds" opens with a prayer addressed to the thunderbird of pollen and carried into the wind-swollen sky. Ruth Lomon, composer and resident scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center, Brandeis University, has created a body of work which reflects her long-standing love of the Southwest.

Click here to view the score.

Ruth Lomon

for piano quartet

ca. 13'45"

"Wolves can move very softly. The sound they make is in the manner of Los Angelos Timidos, the shyest angels. First they fall back and shadow the creature they're curious about. Then, all of a sudden, they appear ahead of the creature peeking half-face with one golden eye from behind a tree. Abruptly the wolf turns and vanishes in a blur of white ruff and plumed tail, only to backtrack and pop up behind the stranger again. That is shadowing".

 - from "Women Who Run With Wolves", Clarissa Pinkola Estes, author

Click here to view the score and listen to a recording.

Ruth Lomon

for soprano, mezzo soprano, tenor and baritone accompanied by oboe/english horn and piano

ca. 1 hr 00'45"

Settings of poetry written by Holocaust victims and survivors. Composed in 1996 as a Fellow of the Bunting Institute/Harvard.

Poems in French, German and English. 10 songs.

Click here to view the score.

Click here to listen to a recording.

Ruth Lomon

for cello and piano

ca. 19'00"

1. The Source.  A virtuosic movement for the cello in a spirited dialogue with the piano

2. Emergence.  The cello has a dramatic soliloquy with encouragement from the piano.

3.  Imago.  ‘Tempo di tango’ opens the 3rd movement  leading into a swift, vibrant duo that concludes with a recap of ‘tempo di tango’.

Commissioned for the Carnegie Recital Hall debut of Elizabeth Dolin.

Click here to view the score and listen to a recording.

Anna Rubin

for soprano/mezzo soprano and piano

Night of Nights/Nacht der Nächte (composed in 1998, rev. 2020)

So Many Oceans (composed in 2021)

White Serpent/Weiss Schlange (composed in 2022)

German Jewish poet and Nobel laureate Nelly Sachs created a unique body of work commemorating the Holocaust. She and her mother managed to flee Germany on the last flight allowed out of Germany to Sweden and lived there for the rest of her life.

In Night of Nights/Nacht der Nächte, Sachs manages in a few lines to express an enormous depth of loss and desolation with the hope of eventual redemption. I have made my own translation of the poem and included some German from the poem because of the unique vividness of the poet’s language. The musical language of the piece veers towards and away tonality and exploits many pianistic colors. Julia Fox, soprano, and Sandrine Erdely-Sayo premiered Night of Nights at the Piano on the Rocks Festival, Sedona, in 2021.

White Serpent/Weisse Schlange contains a wild conflation of images – emptiness and the anger of a grenade, fire, and ice along with the strange images of a white snake and ice. All these images roll into the final image of time and eternity on the back of a snail. The relentless quality of that last image governs the pulse that governs the piece, against which brief melodies flare.

Click here to view the score for Night of Nights (English).

Click here to view the score for the Nacht der Nächte (German).

Click here to watch a YouTube video of the performance of Night of Nights.

Click here to view the score for So Many Oceans.

Click here to view the score for White Serpent (English).

Click here to view the score for Weisse Schlange (German).

Click here to download all performance materials.

Anna Rubin

5 instrument version for flute (piccolo), clarinet in Bb (bass clarinet), violin, cello, and piano

6 instrument version for flute (piccolo), clarinet in Bb (bass clarinet), violin, cello, piano, and percussion (vibraphone)

ca. 10'30"

Dreaming Fire, tasting Rain was originally written while I was working on my Ph.D at Princeton University. The Nash Ensemble of London premiered the work at Princeton. The 6 instrument version includes percussion and is intended for performance by the Ruckus Ensemble at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. The images of fire and rain translated into a variety of musical textures – sometimes serene and sometimes jagged and thorny. In the opening, heterophonic or layered melodies surge and then subside. A middle section begins with the lonely sound of the piccolo against spiky cello pizzicati and then builds to a driving pulsed rhythm, intensified with percussion. The music then eases into a lyrical cello melody against a background of rolling piano chords and flute and violin countermelodies.

The 5 instrument version has been performed at Oberlin College Conservatory, the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and the Heidelberg College Festival of Women.

The 6 instrument version of the piece premieres in 2024 at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Click here to view the score and listen to a recording for 5 instruments.

Click here to view the score for 6 instruments.

Click here to download all performance materials.

Anna Rubin

for alto saxophone and harp

ca. 8'44"

Silk and Steel was commissioned in 2010 by the duo Pictures on Silence, comprised of Jacqueline Pollauf, harp and Noah Getz, alto saxophone. The opening section is very romantic, featuring melismatic alto sax melodies over intricate harp accompaniment. A more whimsical rhythmic section follows where figures are tossed back and forth between the instruments. This leads into more dramatic material emphasizing extreme ranges between the instruments and a rocking low figure in the harp. Eventually the piece makes its way back to a reprise of the opening material. While exploiting a variety of textures between the two instruments, I explore various quasi-tonal harmonic structures and scales, sliding from suggestions of whole tone collections to Middle Eastern and atonal scales.

Silk and Steel premiered Jan. 19, 2010 at the American University in Washington, DC (Jaqueline Pollauf, harp and Noah Getz, alto sax). It was also performed on at Catholic University in Washington, DC (Nov. 12, 2010), Lilypad, Boston (Apr. 19, 2011), and University of Maryland, Baltimore County (Oct. 26, 2018).

Click here to view the score and listen to a recording.

 A version was composed for flute and piano in 2019, based on the original version written for alto saxophone and harp.

 Click here to view the score.

Silk and Steel for flute and harp (2022) evokes qualities of both the delicacy and power that the flute and harp can project. The piece is also a version of the original work for alto sax and harp.

Click here to view the score.

Click here to download all performance materials.

Anna Rubin

for mezzo soprano and piano

ca. 5'05"

The text of Dudele is attributed to Reb Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev (1740–1809) who was a prominent Chasidic rabbi in what is present- day Ukraine. The Chasidic sect of Judaism emphasizes joy, music, and mystical union with God. Dudeleh is a beloved Yiddish poem. Yiddish is strongly related to medieval German with a great deal of Hebrew, and spoken widely by Eastern European Jews and now in Chasidic communities throughout the world as well as by secular Jews. Du is the familiar form of ‘you’ and Dudele is an affectionate intensification of the pronoun, that would be used with a beloved spouse, child or friend – here it affirms the Reb’s intense connection to God.

I set the poem/prayer with a Klezmer feel. While most of the piece is in 4/4, there are interludes using a rhythm of 3+3+2 which is heard in the doina, a Rumanian dance form with possible Middle Eastern roots, often heard in Klezmer music.

Dudele is part of a larger composition originally scored for SATB choir, harp, organ and percussion called Hallelujah. This version of Dudele was premiered at the Piano on the Rocks Festival, Sedona in 2023, on the same day that Hallelujah premiered in Schermbeck, Germany.

Sonja Bruzauskas, mezzo soprano

Sandrine Erdely-Sayo, piano

Click here to view the score.

Click here to watch a performance of the piece.

Click here to download all performance materials.

Anna Rubin

for solo piano

For the Love of Bees is a six-part suite. It was originally composed for Dr. Margaret Lucia in a solo piano version with four parts in 2010. I expanded the piece in 2019 at the request of the director of the Piano on the Rocks Festival, Sandrine Erdely-Sayo as well as adding a spoken narrative in another version. The idea for the piece was generated by my growing awareness of honeybee hive die-offs because of Colony Collapse Disorder. As I learned more about this problem, including interviewing bee specialists at the US Department of Agriculture, I also learned more about bees’ social behavior, other bee species, and their critical role as pollinators.

For each section, I used some of the striking characteristics of bees as a 'natural' metaphor along with a particular pianistic technical challenge in the tradition of the etude. In turn, each section explores a particular compositional/harmonic issue. In various sections, I was also responding to the piano compositions of Debussy, Chopin, Bartok, Messaien, and the great Cuban jazz pianist, Chucho Valdés.

"Swarms" uses rapidly iterated clusters of 3-7 notes — a sort of ‘megatrill’ — in a variety of textures in a free atonal musical language. "Sting" is based on rapidly executed lines in step-wise motion contrasted with 'stinging' dyads and rapid ostinati; the perfect 4th is the core interval. “Honey Queen” is based on slow 6-9 note sustained chords with combinations of 2nds, 4ths, 7ths, all in a protracted sense of unresolved stasis. “Myth of the Assassin Bees” is a fast-pulsed and syncopated exploration of virtuosic cross-hand technique with jazz-influenced chords. “Solitary” is a romantic and lyrical exercise in chromatic quasi-tonal harmony. "Ode to Bees and Their Keepers" takes the symmetry of the hive as a metaphor for expanding and contracting figures. It begins at the center of the instrument. These figures expand outward, contract and move variously through the range of the keyboard until the entire range of the instrument is sounding. This last section incorporates echoes of earlier sections — the megatrills of "Swarms," lush chords of “Honey Queen” and “Solitary,” and cross-hand technique of “Myth of the Assassin Bees.”

This piece was premiered by Dr. Margaret Lucia in 2010 at both the University of Maryland Baltimore County and Heidelberg College. She has performed this at multiple conferences and festivals including the International Alliance for Women in Music Conference (Flagstaff, 2011); College Music Society Symposium, Cambridge (2013); Pennsylvania Women Composers Festival (2014); Conservatorio Teresa Berganza (part of their Semana Cultural, 2017); Conservatorio Adolfo Salazar, Madrid (2017); Conservatori Superior de Musica de les Illes Balears, Palma Majorca (2017); Universidad de Salamanca, Festival Internacional de Primavera (2017); Centro Cultural de Nicholás Samerón (2017); Sala Manuel De Falla, Conservatorio Real de Madrid (2019); Auditorio de Galicia - Santiago de Compostela (2017); and Wunderkammer - Villa Bernasconi, Cernobbio (2019). Sections of the piece have also been performed in Baltimore at the Baltimore Composers Forum (2018) by Bonghee Lee.

Click here to view the score.

Click here to download all performance materials.

Anna Rubin

for narrator and piano

ca. 21'58"

For the Love of Bees is a six-part suite. It was originally composed for Dr. Margaret Lucia in a solo piano version with four parts in 2010. I expanded the piece in 2019 at the request of the director of the Piano on the Rocks Festival, Sandrine Erdely-Sayo as well as adding a spoken narrative. The idea for the piece was generated by my growing awareness of honeybee hive die-offs because of Colony Collapse Disorder. As I learned more about this problem, including interviewing bee specialists at the US Department of Agriculture, I also learned more about bees’ social behavior, other bee species, and their critical role as pollinators.

For each section, I used some of the striking characteristics of bees as a 'natural' metaphor along with a particular pianistic technical challenge in the tradition of the etude. In turn, each section explores a particular compositional/harmonic issue. In various sections, I was also responding to the piano compositions of Debussy, Chopin, Bartok, Messaien, and the great Cuban jazz pianist, Chucho Valdés.

"Swarms" uses rapidly iterated clusters of 3-7 notes — a sort of ‘megatrill’ — in a variety of textures in a free atonal musical language. "Sting" is based on rapidly executed lines in step-wise motion contrasted with 'stinging' dyads and rapid ostinati; the perfect 4th is the core interval. “Honey Queen” is based on slow 6-9 note sustained chords with combinations of 2nds, 4ths, 7ths, all in a protracted sense of unresolved stasis. “Myth of the Assassin Bees” is a fast-pulsed and syncopated exploration of virtuosic cross-hand technique with jazz-influenced chords. “Solitary” is a romantic and lyrical exercise in chromatic quasi-tonal harmony.  "Ode to Bees and Their Keepers" takes the symmetry of the hive as a metaphor for expanding and contracting figures. It begins at the center of the instrument. These figures expand outward, contract and move variously through the range of the keyboard until the entire range of the instrument is sounding. This last section incorporates echoes of earlier sections — the megatrills of "Swarms," lush chords of “Honey Queen” and “Solitary," and cross-hand technique of “Myth of the Assassin Bees.”

This version of the piece premiered at the Piano on the Rocks Festival in 2019. Other performances of the complete suite have occurred at the University of the Andes (2020) and at the Richmond Library in Philadelphia under the sponsorship of Drexel University and the library, which has an active beehive. Sections of the piece have also been performed in Baltimore (Baltimore Composers Forum) and the Philadelphia Ethical Society.

Click here to view the score and listen to a recording.

Click here to download all performance materials.