Chamber & Solo
Con Amor (2023)
Con Amor was written to honor the mother of Jorge Rivera for her continual support of him on his musical journey. This piece is meant to highlight the trumpet with hints of the tango and salsa styles, and to hold great emotion. The melody is somber yet soars through phrases to high points and low points. At the beginning and the end are cadenzas, virtuosic solos for the trumpeter, to express through the music his own emotions as a life’s journey is considered.
Fantasy of Scheherezade (2022)
Fantasy of Scheherazade seeks to use and re-make the themes of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s masterpiece, Scheherazade. Listeners familiar with the work will recognize several of its main themes immediately. I aimed to color these themes with new harmonies and within a wind quintet instrumentation. The piece is structured as a progression of vignettes that feature old themes and new melodies to capture the emotions of the original work. I hope this piece brings you on a touching adventure.
Chaconne (2021)
Chaconne is an unaccompanied solo for viola, inspired by Bach's own chaconne from his Partita in D minor for solo violin. It uses a repeated harmonic progression and theme throughout the course of the piece, with slight variation and some modern harmonies. Enjoy the peaks and valleys in range, dynamic, and rhythm as the repeated progression weaves its way around this beautiful instrument.
Many thanks to my friend Azariah Reese, who asked me to write the piece, and who first gave it life.
Azariah Reese performs Chaconne
Genesis (2020)
Genesis was composed to be the prequel to Fall, depicting the origin of the world and mankind prior to its fall. This piece uses slow, open harmonies to represent the cosmos, and the first melody heard represents the voice of God speaking things into existence. Different melodies come in and out as various things are created during the biblical seven-day creation narrative. This piece intends to express the story of the Christian God designing from nothingness a glorious, intricate, unadulterated planet, which at its conception knew nothing but Love.
Raquel Gomez, Giovanni Moquete, Jamie Mager, & Chelsea Piel perform Genesis
Breathe (2020)
This piece depicts my experience contemplating three significant events from March to August 2020, each related to breathing. The primary image in this piece is a metaphorical “breath” taken as my world slowed down when the COVID-19 pandemic began. A whirlwind of life was abruptly put on pause in many ways, giving space to rest and think about the things that matter most. The second event is the death of George Floyd, whose cry “I can’t breathe” became the chant of protesters in America in June. The final consideration is the primary symptom of the coronavirus - shortness of breath, or in the most heartbreaking cases, a total ceasing of breath. This piece is in honor of those who have lost their lives to injustice and COVID-19.
Air-like sounds and the rhythm of a heartbeat can be found throughout the piece, as well as a shift from busyness to contemplativeness. The piece ends without a return to the fast material of the start, as we do not yet know what returning to normalcy from these events will look like. This need not be bleak: I hope the lessons learned through these trials stay with us all in all years to come. I hope that we do not return to the “normal” we left, to identical versions of our former selves, but that we grow stronger, wiser.
Susan Mayo performs Breathe live at the 2020 Great Plains Composer Workshop
Time: Anxiety for String Quartet (2020)
This work was created to be both a standalone piece and something that could be recorded and manipulated in an electronic work. The topic idea came from the dancer whom the electronic work was to be created for, Arianna Alford. Meant to evoke a nervousness about time moving too fast and the anxiety that can so often accompany this, clicking and breathing sounds can be heard throughout, like nervous fingers tapping a desk or a sigh of composing one’s self. Though the piece largely exists in a tempo that is the speed of a clock, there is an acceleration mid-way through to resemble the way we perceive sometimes perceive to be moving faster than it should.
Leo Hernandez, Payton McIntyre, Karen Amorous, Genesis Leal, and William Phi perform Time: Anxiety
Fall (2018)
Meant to depict the fall of Man, "Fall" relies on two themes and two pitch centers. The first theme is for the curious Man, looking around the world into which he has been created. It begins in D Major, but soon plays with mode, a reflection of how Man could not resist exploring his free will. The piece transitions into a pitch center as far from the original as I found possible - down a tritone to G# - and plays with diminished intervals. The style becomes darker and playful, meant to illustrate the Devil and his allure. A conversation between the two develops, until the themes overlap and the darker music takes over, for the evil power has won. In this aspect of Man's story, evil must be victorious, as it has stained the heart of Man.
Live performance at the 2019 Apricity Magazine Showcase event - performance begins at 1:50
Three Songs for Piano (2018)
This short suite of piano shorts is meant to evoke three particular feelings. Influenced by Prokofiev’s Vision Fugitives, each movement is made to express an “image” using one or two compositional techniques. The first movement, Unsure, uses ostinato and shifting pitch centers underneath a repeated melodic fragment that feels incomplete, meant to evoke uncertainty. Insight focuses on parallel motion and chromaticism to color the melody like much impressionist music does, written to portray the emotion of understanding that has been gained. The final movement, Tiptoe, is quick, quirky, and utilizes retrograde, inversion, and fragmentation to paint a picture of “walking on eggshells,” or tiptoeing around a room, figuratively or literally.
Hank Hehmsoth performs Unsure, Insight, & Tiptoe
Carousel (2018)
The instrumentation for this piece was selected based on the HUB New Music ensemble, a unique chamber group that held a residency at Texas State University. It holds a somewhat ABA form, playing on a few themes that occur at the beginning of the piece. Its goal is capture the feeling of being in a rut, seemingly unable to escape a no matter how much one wants to, as well as the eventual "full circle" nature of such situations. The middle section is somewhat free and takes a step back from the moving nature of the introduction, as we sometimes must remove ourselves from a situation to reflect on how we got there and where we desire to go. While the piece begins hovering around E Minor, it ends in E Major, a more hopeful feel, signifying that, while we cannot always change the cycles of life we are a part of, we can mold our perspective to one of hope.