Digital Program

Home Grown

A New Music Chamber Concert

Saturday, September 13, 2025, 7:00pm

Jones Chapel, Meredith College

A big thanks to our sponsors and in-kind partners, who help make our programs possible:

Sponsors:

Raleigh Symphony Orchestra, Inc. is supported by the United Arts Council of Raleigh and Wake County as well as the N.C. Arts Council, a division of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

Community Partners:

Meredith College Department of Music | Ruggero Piano | Cultural Voice of North Carolina | Raleigh Music Collective

Learn how to purchase program ads, become a sponsor or join us as a community partner! If you are interested in in-kind publicity exchanges or other community partnerships, contact Executive Director Andrea Luke at manager@raleighsymphony.org or (919) 546-9755.

...but YOU Matter Even More!

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Concert Program: Home Grown

Waking Up at the Bottom of the Sea | Alejandro Rutty

Sara Maria Blanton, Jean Bynum, and Alisyn Rogerson violins;

Ri-Shea Schlitter, viola; Julia Malone, cello; David Prodoehl, bass

Reciprocal of e | Jim Williams

Jim Williams and Janice Lipson, clarinets

Jean Bynum, viola; Julia Malone, cello

Counting Tomatoes for solo viola | Sabrina Clarke

Ri-Shea Schlitter, viola

Blue Afternoon for Clarinet and Piano | Robert Nosow

Jim Williams, clarinet

Monet Jowers, piano

Final Flight | Lanette Lind

Jean Bynum and Alisyn Rogerson, violins

Ri-Shea Schlitter, viola; Julia Malone, cello

 Diurnes for solo piano (2021) | Steve Landis

I. Sól

II. Glimmerings

i. morning shore on North Topsail

ii. it’s just this far on the map (Regent’s Park)

iii. pouring through the trees on 8th ave.

III. August

Monet Jowers, piano

Reverie for String Quartet | Anthony Philpott

Sara Maria Blanton and Alisyn Rogerson, violins

Ri-Shea Schlitter, viola; Julia Malone, cello

KSS | Mark Engebretson

Sara Maria Blanton and Alisyn Rogerson, violins

Jean Bynum, viola; Jula Malone, cello

Andrew Munger, drum set

Fire and Honey | John Caldwell

I. Bee Tree Woods I

II. The Moth

III. Moth and Banda

IV. Bee Tree Woods II

Jim Williams, Clarinet; Jean Bynum, Violin

Ri-Shea Schlitter, Viola; Julia Malone, Cello

David Prodoehl, Contrabass; Monet Jowers, Piano

Composer Bios & Program Notes

Listed in order of performance

Waking Up at the Bottom of the Sea – Alejandro Rutty

Composer and bassist Alejandro Rutty is best-known for his distinctive mix of South American styles, lyrical melodies, meticulous rhythmic detail, and textures suggested by modern recording processing techniques. Rutty’s recent production includes music composed for the electric bass and music based in oral histories, such as The Other Side of My Heart - based on interviews with Latina immigrants - and Down Home: The Cantata; Jewish Life in the American South - based on audio recordings of the Jewish Heritage Foundation of North Carolina.

Rutty’s compositions and arrangements have been played by the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra of Argentina, National Symphony Orchestra of Brazil, Montevideo Philharmonic Orchestra, Porto Alegre Symphony Orchestra, American Modern Ensemble, the New York New Music Ensemble, the Red Clay Saxophone Quartet, the Cassatt String Quartet, Beo String Quartet and Carlos Chávez String Quartet among other groups. Recordings of his music have been released by Navona Records, Capstone Records, Albany Records, Arizona University Recordings, and ERM Media. 

Boston Globe wrote about The Conscious Sleepwalker Loops “…the result is a blaring, multi-channel, gleefully vernacular carnival. It made a terrific curtain-raiser." The New York Times wrote: "Alejandro Rutty’s amusing “Conscious Sleepwalker Loops” offered an immediate test of the ensemble’s mettle…”.   The Cultural Voice of North Carolina wrote about Rutty's recent Down Home: The Cantata "Rutty's creative music made the stories live with humor, with determination and with dignity”.  Concertonet.com (about Black Box Bossa) “I was knocked sideways, couldn’t quite get my aural balance in sync, and found it delightful”. 

Alejandro Rutty (Ph.D SUNY Buffalo) is Professor of Music Composition at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. More about Rutty can be found at: www.alejandrorutty.com

Reciprocal of e  –  Jim Williams

Jim received his Bachelor of Music from the University of Florida and his Masters in Clarinet Performance from New England Conservatory. He was a programmer/analyst in the HealthCare industry. He is currently principal clarinetist with Raleigh Symphony and Tar River Orchestra.

“Reciprocal of e” is the third movement of my Suite of Mathematical Constants originally for Clarinet Quartet. This version is for 2 clarinets, viola, and cello. All movements use the decimal digits of the beginning of the constant mapped to piano white keys (i.e. 6=a, 7=b, 8= c, 0=b (low octave), 9=d (high octave). In addition, the first 12 digits are used to construct a 12 tone row, with accidentals to freely adjust for duplicate digits or to complete the row. The row is used melodically and harmonically in 4 three note groups. I chose the reciprocal of e rather than e itself because e had lots of 1's and 8's that made for a boring tune. The other two movements are “Twenty-Two Sevenths” (PI) and “Twelfth Root of Two” (factor used to calculate a half-step in equal temperament tuning).

Counting Tomatoes – Sabrina Clarke

Sabrina Clarke is a composer based in Raleigh, NC, where she is an Assistant Professor of Music and Composition at Meredith College. Her music has been performed across the United States and abroad, and at events including the Penn State New Music Festival; the International Music by Women Festival; the Common Tone Music Festival; the Geelvinck Fortepiano Festival in Amsterdam; the International Trombone Festival; the University of Louisville New Music Festival; and the Society of Composers Region III Festival. Notable works include Love Songs for Ada, commissioned by the East Passyunk Opera Project (ePOP) and recipient of a Finalist Honorable Mention for the American Prize in Composition; Wissahickon Idyll, written for flute-clarinet duo Synergy 78; and Still ist’s im Wald for soprano and chamber orchestra. Sabrina earned her Ph.D. in Music Composition from the Boyer College of Music, Temple University (Philadelphia, PA) in 2016, where she received the Presser Graduate Music Award. She is also an alumnus of the European American Musical Alliance Summer Composition Institute (Paris, France) and the Splice Institute for Electroacoustic Music. She has served on the faculty of the Wildflower Composers Festival and has adjudicated calls for scores for various organizations including the Society of Composers, Inc. and the College Music Society. For more information, please visit: www.sabrinaclarkemusic.com.

Counting Tomatoes draws from one of my earliest childhood memories, of gathering cherry tomatoes from the family garden with my father when I was about three years old. I can recall picking the ripe, red fruits from the vines, placing them in a wicker basket, and then, inside the kitchen, stretching my arms up as far as they could go to place the basket on a counter that seemed impossibly tall. Although the memory itself has become fuzzy and worn out by time, the feelings associated with it remain strong. This recollection is depicted musically through the fragmentation of ideas and gradual materialization of connections. Like the fragments of memory, these musical ideas exist in flux: they develop, branch out, and are embedded in past, present, and future.

Blue Afternoon for Clarinet and Piano  -  Robert Nosow

Believing that new music should be in service to the community, Robert Nosow has created works for local musicians, school orchestras, and their  audiences. He composed Spokes of Light on commission for the Triangle Youth Orchestra, Two Movements for String Orchestra for the Triangle Youth Symphonia, and Ghost Birds (2024) for the Raleigh Symphony Chamber Players. Other recent chamber works include Noon Descending for cello quartet, Lines from Merwin for mezzo-soprano and trio, and Bitter Waters for cello and piano. In addition to his career as a freelance cellist, Nosow has an international reputation as a music historian.

Blue Afternoon presents a theme with six variations. The melody is modal and there are no accidentals anywhere. The patterned alternation between 5/4 and 3/4 continues with each variation, but at half the values in Variation V. Variation IV alludes to a theme from Daphnis et Chloe Suite no. 2 by Maurice Ravel, an idea that returns in Variation VI. Blue Afternoon is dedicated to Donald Oehler, longtime clarinet professor at UNC, and I had his powerful but elegant sound in mind when writing the music. The title comes from an early landscape poem of mine, set in late summer or early fall in the rolling plains of North Texas.

Final Flight  -  Lanette Lind

Ms. Lind has composed symphonic, choral and chamber music as well as music for theater, dance, documentary and animated films. Her symphonic works have been performed by major symphony orchestras including the St. Louis Symphony, Syracuse Symphony, and the Rochester Philharmonic. Her musical theater works have been performed at the Longstreet Theatre in Columbia, SC; Theatre in the Park in Raleigh, NC; at the American Music Festival in Philadelphia; the Douglas Fairbanks Theater and Lincoln Center in New York. 

Her many symphonic and chamber works for children and family concerts have delighted audiences across the country. And, her choral works have had numerous performances including the National Museum of Women in the Arts. She has received commissions and awards from the National Music Theater Network, Alabama Orchestral Association, ASCAP, North Carolina Arts Council, Cornell University, Raleigh Symphony Orchestra and many others.

Diurnes  -  Steve Landis

Steve Landis is Part-time Lecturer at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro where he teaches Making Music with Computers as well as applied lessons in composition and double bass. He also teaches double bass and composition at the Music Academy of North Carolina. Steve is the double bassist for the eclectic new music ensemble Winnfield Quartet, a section member of The Raleigh Symphony Orchestra, and electric bassist for the rock band, The Nonprofits. As a composer, Steve works with many mediums including solo instrumental, mixed chamber groups, large ensembles, digital and mixed media, as well as film and theater.  As a double bassist, Steve performs in solo, chamber, and orchestral settings. Steve earned his DMA in Composition at The University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory, an MM in Composition from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and an MM in Double Bass Performance and a BM in Composition from The University of Florida. Steve is a recipient of the Millay Colony, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Wildacres Artist Retreat. https://slandismusic.com

This collection of brief works seeks to rectify the lack of character pieces in the piano repertoire that pay homage to the day. The idea for this work came about while discussing nineteenth century character pieces during a daily walk with my wife. At the time, I was in the midst of composing a song cycle of nocturnes and I asked Amy why there was a grand tradition for pieces inspired by the night, but not the day, and what would you call such a piece? After several minutes of laughter we settled on the name, diurnes. I composed a set of piano nocturnes for Amy for our first Christmas together in 2004. The set reflected our shared memories of experiences at the time. This set of diurnes continues that sentiment. To maintain the surprise of these pieces, I only worked on them when Amy would go for her morning run. Hurrying to the piano as soon as the door shut behind her and scurrying away as soon as I heard her feet hit the porch. 

“Sól” is the Norse goddess of the Sun. She rides her chariot across the sky marking the days and dividing them from the night. “Glimmerings” is a collection of three brief vignettes based on a few shared adventures. “August” (especially North Central Florida)…is it going to rain? Is it going to be sunny? Both? Hurricanes, mosquitos, smothering humidity, football season, the anticipation of fall. These things clash and clamor and through it all the sun shines down.

Reverie for String Quartet  -  Anthony Philpott

Anthony E. Philpott (b.1983, St. Thomas, USVI) is a multifaceted musician whose work encompasses performance, composition, research, and performing arts administration. As a baritone soloist, he has performed in opera, musical theater, oratorio, and in concert. As a chorister, he has performed with numerous ensembles, including five seasons with the Spiritual Renaissance Singers of Greensboro (NC). His growing body of compositions include vocal, choral, chamber, and orchestral works. His setting of Claude McKay’s “America” was among the 2021 winners of the Art Song and Vocal Chamber Music Call for Scores by Calliope's Call. His research focuses on topics surrounding pioneering Black classical musicians - their lives, careers, contributions, and compositions. To that end, he has presented at New York’s Town Hall, and the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Museum, formerly the historic Palmer Memorial Institute in Sedalia, NC. Forthcoming is his book, A Hall for All: Black Classical Musicians at the Town Hall, which traces the rise to prominence of Black classical musicians, as revealed through their performances at this historic New York venue. He has also contributed to projects such as the 2022 PBS American Masters documentary, Marian Anderson: The Whole World in Her Hands, and the 2023 Parnassus Records reissue of the 1950’s Schubert lieder recordings of pioneering Black mezzo-soprano, Inez Matthews. For over a decade, he has been affiliated with the National Association of Negro Musicians, Inc. helping to promote and preserve the music created and performed by Black musicians. He is past President and current Vice President of the Carol Brice Music Association of North Carolina (a branch of NANM, Inc.), Vice President of the Executive Board of the Raleigh Symphony Orchestra, and Board Member of the Houston Ebony Opera Guild.

Reverie for String Quartet is an arrangement of the very first piece I composed - a piano work written over two decades ago. A couple years ago, I found a copy of the sheet music among some old files. As my first composition, it was understandably simple in structure and harmony. Yet, it held a certain nostalgia and was a sincere reflection of a much simpler time in life. In arranging the piece for string quartet, I sought to uncover new dimensions of its character - expanding its harmonic warmth and deepening its expressiveness. The piece remains a quiet meditation of a simpler time, now with the added richness and complexities of experience, growth, and reflection.

KSS  -  Mark Engbretsen 

Mark Engebretson (b.1964) is Professor of Composition and Electronic Music at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the recipient of a Barlow General Commission (for Bent Frequency Duo), North Carolina Artist Fellowship in Composition (for the Concerto for Soprano Saxophone and Orchestra), a Fulbright Fellowship for studies in France, and has received commissions from Harvard University’s Fromm Music Foundation (Acrylic Waves), the University of Wisconsin-Madison (They Said: sinister resonance), the Thomas S. Kenan Center for the Arts (Deliriade), and the Chicago College for the Performing Arts (Crossfade). He is the founder of New Music Greensboro, and directed the festival and series for seventeen years, and created the Popular Music and Technology degree at UNCG. 

Notable recent composition projects include commissions from Hypercube, the Greensboro Symphony, the Wind Ensemble at the Chicago College of Performing Arts, and the Vandoren Corporation. Performers who have championed his music include the Oasis, Vienna and Red Clay Saxophone Quartets, Due East, saxophonists Susan Fancher, James Romain, Steve Stusek, Jonathan Helton and Paul Bro, violinists Dmitry Sitkovetsky and Marjorie Bagley, trombonist Mark Hetzler, and flutists Tadeu Coelho and Erika Boysen. Other significant performances have been given by the Orquestra Sinfônica da Universidade da São Paulo, the Cleveland Winds, the Wroclaw Philharmonic Orchestra and the five operas commissioned and performed by the Greensboro Opera. Engebretson has had performances of his works at Electroacoustica Beijing, SEAMUS, ICMC, Wien Modern, Third Practice, Festival of New American Music, ISCM, BGSU Festival of NewbMusic and Art, Carnegie Hall, Sala São Paulo, Argentina, Albania, Azerbaijan, Lithuania, Sweden, Norway, China, across America and throughout Europe. Over twenty of his compositions are recorded on the Albany, Innova, Lotus, Parma/Navona and Mark labels. Mark Engebretson taught composition at the University of Florida, music theory at SUNY Fredonia and 20th-century music history at the Eastman School of Music. He studied at the University of Minnesota (graduating summa cum laude), the Conservatoire de Bordeaux as a Fulbright scholar, and Northwestern University, where he received the Doctor of Music degree. At Northwestern he studied with M. William Karlins, Pauline Oliveros, Marta Ptaszynska, Michael Pisaro, Stephen Syverud, Jay Alan Yim, and Frederick Hemke. His teachers in France were Michel Fuste-Lambezat and Jean-Marie Londeix. www.markengebretson.com

My creative work is driven by long-term interests in melody, timbre, virtuosity, digital and electronic media, multiple levels of associations, and a desire for fresh, engaging forms of expression. Lately I have been trying to inject influences that stem from performers, family and friends directly into the fabric of my compositions. I have also developed a number of pieces that incorporate text, most often working with living poets (Maya Angelou, Brian Lampkin, Michael Basinski, Emilia Phillips). In many works, I have unleashed a lifelong passion for pop music that manifests itself most explicitly in works such as Super Glue, RockStar and the Concerto for Soprano Saxophone and Orchestra. Several recent pieces incorporate the use of the audience’s smartphones as sound sources in an interactive environment.

KSS was written for Friction Quartet and premiered in October 2015. The piece continues my efforts to write pop music for classical formations. Here's the way I see it: if music is now absolutely, totally and completely free, what will I do with that freedom, what will I make? I am a university professor, and addressing this question has been difficult, even scary, in the manner of jumping off a cliff. But it's a question I am working on constantly as an artist. Now, a lot of composers have made music that is influenced by pop (or rock, jazz, world, or other styles of music). Here, I'm not trying to make music "influenced" by anything, but rather music that "is" pop music. For string quartet. Whatever that means. I wanted to make some music that was fun, and to do it in a completely serious way (at least from musical, expressive and technical standpoints). So here it is: a pop tune for string quartet with playback track. Catchy, upbeat tunes, electronic drum beats, some special string techniques. And I mean it all, seriously, as a deeply considered, personalized expression of musical art. Enjoy!

Music was born free; and to win freedom is its destiny. 

(Ferruccio Busoni,1907)

Fire and Honey  -  John Caldwell

John Caldwell grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he began studying bassoon in middle school. He has lived in North Carolina since 1995 where he plays principal bassoon with the Durham Symphony Orchestra and the Raleigh Symphony Orchestra. During his musical journey, he also learned the Indian harmonium and became enamoured of Javanese gamelan: he currently directs the Gamelan ensemble at UNC Chapel Hill. John studied theory, composition, and ethnomusicology at Harvard and the University of Michigan. In 2021, John completed his Ph.D. in Musicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a dissertation entitled “Songs from the Other Side: Listening to Pakistani Voices in India.” John teaches courses on the music of Asia and Hindi-Urdu language at UNC. As a composer of songs, John has been influenced by German Lieder, Bollywood, Billy Strayhorn, Joni Mitchell, Burt Bacharach, Gordon Lightfoot, and Elvis Costello, among others. John’s other compositions include a String Symphony (premiered by the RSO in 2023), and song cycles based on poems by Langston Hughes and Emily Dickinson.

This set of orchestral songs, along with its sister set Signs and Seasons (Opus 2), were composed for voice and piano during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2022. For the texts, I looked back to my own poems, written over the past forty-some years. The five Opus 3 songs are grouped together because they explore experiences from my childhood and youth in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I grew up exploring the natural world­ - and its metaphysical dimensions. Along with birds and bees, there are a couple of moths to round out the cast of flying characters. The set begins and ends in The Bee Tree Woods, a place that is part memory and part fantasy.

These songs were originally scored for voice and piano, but for this Raleigh Symphony chamber concert, I have arranged them for the following instrumentation: clarinet, piano, violin, viola, cello, and bass. I chose the clarinet to take on the vocal part with my colleague Jim Williams in mind. I have had the honor of sitting next to him in the Raleigh Symphony for many years and can’t wait to hear his interpretations of my songs!

FIRE AND HONEY (Opus 3) by John Shields Caldwell :: Texts

1. Bee Tree Woods I: Apian Alchemy 

It’s April, Sisters, time to gather gold

From purse and pocket, throat and ear and heart,

To pry the pouting petal-lips apart

And loot alike the bashful and the bold;

To rob the Beauties of the Spring beseeching,

And timid Trillium, bloomers bright from bleaching,

And Violet vain, her toothsome dog unleashing,

And Rose, her wild ensnaring arms outreaching,

And Mother Mary, golden rules a-teaching,

And Father Jack up in his Pulpit preaching.

Now back, my Sisters, to our hollow tree

To forge our meadow gold to finer stuff:

The Queen’s transfigured nectar is enough

To make her daughters dance in ecstasy.

2. The Moth

Why does the burning bulb compel the Moth

To beat his helpless wings against its glass,

Until he flutters, lifeless to the grass,

A tattered scrap of thousand-year-old cloth?

Does simple curiosity impel 

Him to destruction? Does he yearn to know,

His Argus-eyes bedazzled by the glow,

What treasure gleams within the crystal shell?

Or does he see a flower and desire

To sip sweet honey from its heart of fire?

Or does he think that after years of flight

Through wood and wold bewildered by the night

He’s found at last the fabled passageway

That leads into the land of endless day?

3. Migration

Sometimes in autumn, birds coat every limb

Of my bare tree with foliage dark and dense,

And chatter like an eager audience

Before the curtain parts, the house lights dim

What do they speak of in their tree of talk?

Of summer sorrow and (of) winter woe

The fledgling last spring taken by the hawk

The old friends who could not outfly the snow

Of boys with BB guns and cats that stalk

And stars that show the way to Mexico.

Then all at once the flock decides to leave

A sudden silence falls, the first birds rise,

And draw a whirring swath across the skies

An endless scarf from a magician’s sleeve.

4. The Moth and Candle

We marvel at the Moth and his mad quest 

To plunge into his lover’s dancing eye, 

To quench his passion and thus drowning, die, 

Pressing her bright inferno to his breast. 

We wonder at the Candle and her yearning 

To flare in furious union, to proclaim 

The expense of spirit in a spurt of flame 

To share the ruthless rapture of her burning. 

The Moth and Candle, paired upon their pyre, 

Their brief embrace to brief to be enjoyed,

No sooner consummated than destroyed. 

But who summons the Moth out of the void? 

Commands the kindling of the Candle’s fire? 

The Night—have you inquired of its desire? 

5. Bee Tree Woods II

As I lie dying, this is what I’ll see:

I’ll dream again of boyhood’s bee-tree woods

Of walking once again those shadowed roads

Down past the forest’s heart, the hollow tree,

Whose veins run red with honey even now,

As busy insects brew their meadow mead.

But ever further on and down I tread,

Until I reach the margin of the slough.

Oh, this time let me cross the final pond

And reach the ridge with oaks along its crest,

And glimpse at last the wide blue sky beyond,

The border of the land of peace and rest

The land of unimaginable awe…

As I lay dying, that is what I saw.

(Spring 2010)