FACULTY SELECT SERIES

Timothy McAllister, alto and soprano saxophones

Liz Ames, piano

Sunday, November 15, 2015 at 7:30 p.m.

DePauw University School of Music
Green Center, Thompson Recital Hall

Program Notes

Streetlegal Roshanne Etezady

About her piece, Streetlegal, Roshanne Etezady writes: “The word ‘streetlegal’ comes from the world
of racing cars. To me, it suggests a vehicle of great speed and power tearing around city streets and
highways. It brings to mind something fast, brilliant, shiny, and even a little bit dangerous.

“This piece has, at its core, a deep sense of hyperkinetic energy. Both instruments are required to
perform calisthenic, athletic gestures, all the while maintaining a larger sense of musicality. The piece
is virtuosic on an individual level as well as—if not especially—in terms of ensemble. Aggressive,
angular lines predominate in the melodic language of Streetlegal, and in terms of structure, ‘hard
edges’ are the norm. Each section of the piece seems almost to collide into the next, and when there
are transitions between sections, they are short and abrupt. The overall effect, I hope, is one of barely
containable energy, excitement, and realized momentum.”

As a young musician, Roshanne Etezady studied piano and flute, and developed an interest in many
different styles of music, from the musicals of Steven Sondheim to the 1980s power ballads and
Euro-pop of her teenage years. One fateful evening evening in 1986, she saw Philip Glass and his
ensemble perform as the musical guests on Saturday Night Live. This event marked the beginning of
her interest in contemporary classical music, as well as her interest in being a composer herself.

Since then, Etezady’s works have been commissioned by the Albany Symphony, Dartmouth
Symphony, eighth blackbird, Music at the Anthology, and the PRISM Saxophone Quartet. She has
been a fellow at the Aspen Music Festival, the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival and at the Atlantic
Center for the Arts. Performers and ensembles including Rêlache, Amadinda Percussion Ensemble,
Ensemble De Ereprijs, and the Dogs of Desire have performed Etezady’s music throughout the
United States and Europe. Roshanne Etezady's music has earned recognition from the American
Academy of Arts and Letters, the Korean Society of 21st-Century Music, the Jacob K. Javits
Foundation, Meet the Composer, and ASCAP.
As one of the founding members of the Minimum Security Composers Collective, Etezady has
helped expand the audience for new music. Through collaborative projects with performing
ensembles as well as creative outreach programs, MSCC creates an open dialogue between composers,
performers and audiences.

An active teacher, Etezady has taught at the Interlochen Arts Camp, Yale University, Saint Mary’s
College, the Crane School of Music at SUNY Potsdam, Arizona State University, and Northwestern
University. She has given masterclasses at Holy Cross College, the Juilliard School, and the Norfolk
Chamber Music Festival. Currently, she is on the faculty of the University of Illinois-Chicago.

Etezady holds academic degrees from Northwestern University and Yale University, and she has
worked intensively with numerous composers, including William Bolcom, Martin Bresnick, Michael
Daugherty, and Ned Rorem. She completed her doctorate at the University of Michigan in March
2005.

Conceived of as an homage to the playing of Johnny Hodges, Torch Song takes advantage of the
saxophone’s remarkable ability to emulate the lyrical qualities of the human voice. Hodges’ technique,
so well suited to ballad playing, relies on the expressive use of vibrato, glissandi, and timbre.

In addition to the technical aspects of Hodges’s playing, Torch Song also makes use of its stylistic
devices, one of the most important of which is the dynamic, endemic to the performance of jazz
standards, between an ideal musical structure and its incompletely realized or expressively embellished
interpretation. The material in Torch Song is underpinned by a simple melodic/harmonic structure
that, through the employment of temporal stretching and expressive nuance, should be brought to the
brink (but not beyond) of imperceptibility. —C. Fisher-Lochhead

Christopher Fisher-Lochhead, born 1984, is a Chicago-based composer, violinist/violist, jazz and

folk musician whose interests include the dynamic between innovation and orthodoxy, composition
and improvisation, experimentalism and craft, and the tension between the specific demands of
material and the generalizing impulse of abstract systems. His music has been performed widely by
groups such as the Spektral Quartet, ensemble dal niente, ICE, Third Coast Percussion, Grant
Wallace Band, among many others. From 2002–2006, he attended The University of Michigan,
where his teachers included William Bolcom and Betsy Jolas for composition, Yizhak Schotten for
viola, and Andrew Mead for theory. In the fall 2010, he began graduate degrees at Northwestern
University, where he has worked with Lee Hyla, Hans Thomalla, and Jay Alan Yim.
Sonata William Albright

William Albright’s Sonata for Alto Saxophone and Piano has become a cornerstone of the saxophone
repertoire—its emotional urgency and remarkable invention mark it as one of the major works for the
instrument. Throughout his career, Albright was a pioneer in streaming together styles and genres
that composers had kept strictly separate during the last days of high modernism; instead of
partitioning his lives as ragtime artist, “classical” composer, and church musician, he combined them
all freely in his work. In doing so, a lot of energy was released, and this music is full of the manic
drive, quirkiness, and rough edges that results from the rubbing together of often starkly contrasting
musical impulses. This piece swings from the unrelenting bare hammering of the first movement to
the unbearably soft ache of the second, from the almost inaudible delicate swirls of the third to the
raucous recitative and (mad) dance of the finale.

It might be said that the heart of the piece is the second movement, dedicated to the memory of
Albright’s friend, composer George Cacioppo, who died unexpectedly in 1984. “Cacioppo and his
music and personality rest at the foundation of my thinking,” writes Albright. He chose an alternate
spelling of the baroque ground-bass variation form, la folia for the title of this altered-chaconne
movement; his use of the modern Italian spelling in “La follia nuova” suggests both a new “la folia” as
well as a “new madness.”

The work was written in 1984 for three saxophone/piano duos (Laura Hunter/Brian Connelly,
Donald Sinta/Ellen Weckler, and Joseph Wytko/Walter Cosand) with a grant from the National
Endowment for the Arts.

****

Biographies

Saxophonist Timothy McAllister has been hailed as “one of the foremost saxophonists of his
generation” (The New York Times) and “a titan of contemporary music and the instrument, in general”
(The Cleveland Plain Dealer), with performances lauded as “astonishing” (The Sydney Morning Herald),
“phenomenal” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch) and "proving brilliantly up to enormous demands" (The Dallas
Morning News). His solo, orchestral, and chamber music recordings appear on the Naxos, Albany,
Summit, Equilibrium, Centaur, OMM, G.I.A. Publications, New Focus, AUR, New Dynamic,
Parma, and Innova labels. Credited with over 200 premieres of new works by eminent and emerging
composers worldwide, his work is highlighted in the recent Deutsche Grammophone DVD release of
the world premiere of John Adams’s City Noir, filmed as part of Gustavo Dudamel’s inaugural
concert as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In 2013, he gave the world premiere of
John Adams’s Saxophone Concerto with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra under the baton of the
composer in the Sydney Opera House, followed by critically acclaimed U.S. premieres with Marin
Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and the St. Louis Symphony, conducted by David
Roberston. Nonesuch Records released the recording of the Adams Concerto with McAllister and St.
Louis Symphony in May 2014, which won the 2015 GRAMMY Award for “Best Orchestral
Performance.” He presented the UK premiere of the Adams Concerto at the BBC Proms with
Maestra Alsop and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and the South American premiere in Brazil with
the Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra.

McAllister has been a recent soloist with the Strasbourg Philharmonic, Milwaukee Symphony
Orchestra, Albany Symphony Orchestra, Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, Reno Philharmonic, Texas
Festival Orchestra at Round Top, Detroit Chamber Winds and Strings, Royal Band of the Belgian
Air Force, United States Navy Band, Dallas Wind Symphony, Hong Kong Wind Philharmonia,
Tokyo Wind Symphony, Columbus Symphony, Jacksonville Symphony, Nashville Symphony and
the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, among others. An in-demand orchestral musician, he has
been invited to appear as guest saxophonist in the wind sections of the Chicago Symphony, Bavarian
Radio Symphony Orchestra, Toronto Symphony, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, St. Louis
Symphony, National Symphony Orchestra, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Milwaukee Symphony
Orchestra, Oregon Symphony, Houston Symphony, Phoenix Symphony, Grand Rapids Symphony
Orchestra, New World Symphony and the Colorado Symphony Orchestra.

Since 2001, he has appeared frequently on major chamber music series and international festivals as
soprano saxophonist of the acclaimed PRISM Saxophone Quartet, including repeat performances
each season in venues such as New York City’s Merkin Hall, Whitney Museum of Art, Miller
Theater, (Le) Poisson Rouge, Symphony Space, Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, and Roulette. The
PRISM Quartet regularly conducts ground-breaking residencies each year at the nation’s elite music
institutions, including the Curtis Institute, Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, and Oberlin
Conservatory among others.

A dedicated teacher of his instrument, he serves as Associate Professor of Saxophone at the

University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre and Dance, and previously served as co-director of
the Institute for New Music and Associate Professor at Northwestern University. He has received
invitations for visiting positions and residencies at the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique
of Paris, and Tokyo’s Kunitachi College of Music and Shobi University, among others. Additionally,
he spends his summers as distinguished faculty at the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan,
the American Saxophone Academy and the European University for Saxophone in Gap, France.

He holds the Doctor of Musical Arts and other degrees in music education, conducting and
performance from the University of Michigan School of Music, where he studied saxophone with
Donald Sinta. He is the only saxophonist to ever receive the UM School of Music’s most
distinguished performance award—the Albert A.Stanley Medal—and he has been honored alongside
noted alums David Daniels (countertenor), American tenor Nicholas Phan, Howard Watkins (MET
Opera pianist/vocal coach) and composer Derek Bermel with the Paul C. Boylan Award from the
School of Music Alumni Society for his significant contributions in the field of music.

For more information, visit www.timothymcallister.com and www.prismquartet.com.

Liz Ames is a collaborative pianist who is passionate about performing and working with
instrumentalists, vocalists, and composers.

Her international appearances include performances at the 2015 World Saxophone Congress, 2008
Contemporary Music Festival in Lima, Peru, as a member of the Trio de las Americas (with
her husband, saxophonist Kevin Ames and flutist Penelope Quesada), and at the 2011 International
Double Reed Society Conference where she played for the master classes of Richard Woodhams,
Nicholas Daniel, and John Steinmetz. In March 2012, Liz served as piano coordinator and staff
pianist at the North American Saxophone Alliance Biennial Conference in Tempe, Arizona. In
September 2014, she performed with saxophonist Dr. Chien Kwan-Lin and clarinetist Dr.
Kimberly Cole Luevano at Northern Arizona University’s Single Reed Symposium.

Liz received permission to create piano reductions for four concerti, including Henry Brant’s
Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra, Edison Denisov’s Concerto for Alto Saxophone and
Orchestra, My Assam Dragon by Jan Sandstrom, and John Mackey’s Concerto for Soprano
Saxophone and Orchestra. These four reductions are the beginning of Liz’s life-long project of
making saxophone concertos more accessible to saxophonists. Liz recently performed her
reductions of the Brant Concerto and My Assam Dragon at the 2012 World Saxophone Congress in
St. Andrews, Scotland.

While specializing in saxophone literature, Liz continues to pursue projects with a wide variety of
instrumentalists and vocalists. She was the pianist for a series of concerts during the 2010–2011
season where she performed the entire collection of 114 Songs by Charles Ives with eight different
singers.

Liz completed her doctorate in collaborative piano at Arizona State University and is currently living
near Syracuse, New York.