Program Notes

In an effort to reduce paper use, program notes for our commissions can be found below.

Alyssa Morris’s A Million Ways (2023) Program Notes

The Bangui Anomaly (2017), Eric P. Mandat

When Josh and Stefanie Gardner – the Égide Duo – asked me to write a duet for clarinet and bass clarinet, they requested a work exploring some social issue. My challenge was to choose a particular issue from the myriad potential topics available, and to compose a work of pure music that avoided cliché, yet honored the importance of the subject I chose to explore.

During the early months of 2017, as I was contemplating my options, I encountered two intriguing terms while watching the national news: “alternative facts” and “moral compass.” Regarding the former, I have observed that in many contexts the same sets of data are used to validate extremely divergent perspectives, so I chose to construct the work using a 10-pitchclass tone row, generating the basic pitch material from both traditional and non-traditional permutations of the row. As a parallel to how alternative facts are utilized in discourse, The Bangui Anomaly is organized formally as a themeless set of variations based on the 10-pitch class row.

The “moral compass” term logically inspired my learning about places on earth where compasses don’t function as expected; the Bermuda Triangle is a well-known region of the world where compasses read differently than in most other places. There are a considerable number of other places on earth where large deposits of iron ore or magnetite near the earth’s surface render compasses nonfunctional. There is however, one place on earth where not only do compasses fail to function correctly, a negative gravity anomaly is also present that causes things to weigh less. This unique unexplained earth oddity is known as the Bangui Magnetic Anomaly, centered in the capital city of the Central African Republic, Bangui.

Bangui is recognized as one of the most dangerous cities on the planet. The Gnostics, a religious group espousing a variety of beliefs emanating from several different religious systems, put out a call to their energy healers in June of 2016 (interesting coincidental timing) to focus their healing energy on this part of the world, which they believe is a “feeding place” for the negative forces that encircle our planet:

“We have learned that distortions of the Earth’s energy field create disharmonious or geopathic zones where sickness is created because the biological forms are disrupted by the incoherence of the field. Negative entities are attracted to these areas and the presence of the Bangui Magnetic Anomaly to the north has created an unsavory neighbor for the Goddess Vortex over the center of the Congo.”[1]

– Eric Mandat

[1] http://prepareforchange.net/healing-the-congo-yaldabaoth-the-bangui-magnetic-anomaly-and-the-goddess-vortex/

This Homeless Way (2018), Jonathan Russell

This composition is inspired by three poems by Jacob Folger, a formerly homeless person who now runs an organization called "Friend to the Homeless" (www.friendtothehomeless.org), whose purpose is "to educate on Homelessness and help people to discover simple things they can do to ease the lives of Homeless People."

The Friend to the Homeless website provides this description of his background:

"I spent my childhood running for cover in a volatile home and drew the line when I was fourteen. I chose Homelessness over coexisting with a violent father. It was an awful choice, but I was intact and very glad for that. The "glad" soon wore off however. Just basic survival was a battle everyday. I nearly starved on more than one occasion and the cold of the winters tore into my very being. I never really got away from the Homelessness until I joined the Army when I was 18 years old. I served as a Paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne. When I had completed my tour of duty in the military, I became a handyman and soon thereafter, I felt a strong urge to work with Homeless People. After having been Homeless myself for so long, I felt a strong compassion for Homeless People and wanted to do something to help them. I began working with a project in Herndon Virginia. It was a home for Homeless People set up much like any typical home any family would have. And I employed people that lived there to work with me in my handyman business. My business supported the household expenses and paid the rent. I found this work with Homeless People to be extremely rewarding. Having a desire to learn more about Homeless People, I picked up and headed for East Harlem in New York City in 1982. That experience was deep into a world I would never experience again. Life was cold there for everyone. And Homeless People could not have had it worse. I took on quite an education there about Homelessness and many of the causes. In 1983, I began my own project, a home for Homeless People. It was very small with no more than 2 guests at a time.  But even then, there were a lot of issues to deal with and without the help of a team of like-minded individuals to help me, I soon became burned out. My personal life began to falter and I took to drinking which was a major downfall for me. My life spiraled out of control and I ended up Homeless again. But still, as a Homeless Person, I continued to reach out to others like me by giving Homeless People care packages of clothing and other necessities. I did get sober and landed on my feet in 2007. And at that time, I launched Friend to the Homeless. At first and still, its purpose is to help those who have never been homeless to connect with those who are through Homeless stories, poetry, images, video and the sharing of my personal experiences as a Homeless Person. All told, I was Homeless for 13 years.​Today, Friend to the Homeless is a venue for anyone who wants to help Homeless People with care package giving through our training, support and mentoring programs. In addition, Friend to the Homeless continues to help educate and connect those who have never been homeless with those who are."

-Jonathan Russell

Coal Seams (2019), John Steinmetz

I haven’t visited coal country in Appalachia, but readings, songs, and images from the region moved and disturbed me, and led into these musical explorations. This piece enters coal country via imagination, digging around in three seams of impressions and emotions.

“Under Ground” imagines descending into the earth, into the dark.

“The Devourer” starts playfully, then one instrument steals notes from another, and eventually they tussle and crash. The music evokes an imaginary being, endlessly hungry for wealth and power, that leaves devastation in its wake. Yet deep inside itself, the Devourer wails with unfilled need.

“Gone is Gone,” a made-up folk song, mourns what is lost and broken: lives, communities, landscapes. The idea here, and the hope, is that acknowledgement and mourning might help to honor the people, the places, and the need for renewal.

Joshua and Stefanie Gardner commissioned Coal Seams for their duo, Égide, that uses music to confront issues in the world. While discussing possible directions for the piece, I learned that Joshua Gardner grew up in coal country. His arresting photographs of landscapes affected by mining gave the piece its direction.

The music touches only a few of the images, ideas, and feelings that came my way. Some of the things that stuck with me: Miners loving their families and their work. Unsafe, illegal conditions in mines. Insufficient inspections. Black Lung afflicting younger miners. A bankrupt mining company, unable to pay miners’ medical expenses, reappearing under a different name. Forests and rivers buried. Cities hungry for electricity. Coal smoke polluting air and raising temperatures. Industry dominating state politics. Absentee landowners. Wealth extracted and exported. Communities trying to revive.

Up and Away (2014), Alyssa Morris

The Story of a Balloon

Originally for oboe, bassoon, and piano and commissioned by the BYU School of Music for the Sundance Trio. The clarinet adaption was commissioned by Joshua and Stefanie Gardner for Égide Duo in 2019. Up and Away is a musical depiction of the life of a Balloon. Little Balloon is brought to life, with effervescence, lightheartedness, and wonder.

Inhale/Exhale is a depiction of blowing up the balloon, watching it float, letting air out of Balloon and hearing the little squeal and sputter as it flies around the room. This movement also introduces Balloon’s “light” motif (ha ha.) This theme can be heard in bars 4 to 13. Listen for the “light” motif again at bars 34-40, a diminution of the motif at bars 80, 83, and 85, and then in its full form at the end.

Movement 2, Life on a String, is about teenage angst and rebellion. Little Balloon is not so little anymore, and wants to prove that it has a mind and ideas of its own. So many times Balloon has felt that people want it to fit a certain mold. But Balloon just wants to be itself. This angst can be heard as each instrument quotes a passage that has become synonymous with what most people think that instrument is. The oboe plays the snake charmer, the bassoon plays one of its common orchestral excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s 4th Symphony, and the piano plays Fur Elise; but not without some significant changes to prove that they are not a pawn in this game, but an individual! The clarinet adaption quotes popular orchestral excerpts for clarinet and bass clarinet. The “light” motif can once again be heard in bars 33-36, and bars 78-81.

Movement 3, Letting Go, portrays the wisdom that comes with old age. This movement is Balloon’s reflection at a life full of happiness, sorrow, love, learning, and meaning. Letting Go is a quiet resignation, knowing that we are not always in control of what happens in life. However, we are in control of what we choose to do with what we have been given. The “light” motif can be heard once more throughout bars after bar 30. It is my hope that the listener will find some of themselves in the Balloon; in the joy, frustration, lightheartedness, loneliness, wisdom, and hope.