(inspired by Alice Coltrane’s Lord of Lords; arr. Curtis Stewart)
Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda was an American jazz pianist, organist, harpist, singer, composer, swamini, and wife of John Coltrane. Turiyasangitananda translates as “the Transcendental Lord’s highest song of bliss.” Born in Detroit in 1937, her interest in music blossomed in early childhood. In the early 1960s, she began playing jazz in Detroit with her own trio and as a duo with vibraphonist Terry Pollard. She went on to collaborate and perform with Kenny Clarke, Kenny Burrell, Ornette Coleman, Pharoah Sanders, Charlie Haden, Roy Haynes, Jack DeJohnette, and Carlos Santana. Many are unaware that she replaced McCoy Tyner as pianist with the John Coltrane Quartet, and continued to play and record with the band until John’s death in 1967. Her interest in gospel, classical, and jazz music led to the creation of her own innovative style.
“Going Home” is considered by many to be one of America’s greatest Negro spirituals, despite being sourced from the beautiful slow movement of Czech composer Antonín Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony and set to text by one of his New Englander students William Arms Fisher in the late 1800s. It was championed by Paul Robeson and recorded by Alice Coltrane on her album Lord of Lords (which also has a reworking of Stravinsky’s The Firebird Suite). The spiritual is arranged for strings, keyboards, harp and percussion, with the highly ornamented keyboard and strings creating an almost raga-like atmosphere around the original harmonies and melody. These orchestral interludes are a fantasy on all of the above—a musical thought reflected on a thought between a thought from a thought. Paired with the traditional drumming of Harlem Samba, this original orchestral work questions the nature of where “home” is and to where it refers, depending on who is framing the iteration of cultural memory.
Cuban-born American composer, conductor, and educator Tania León is one of the most acclaimed and influential musicians of any generation. She was the first Latin American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2021; the following year, she was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor for lifetime artistic achievements. In 2023, she received the Michael Ludwig Nemmers Prize in Music Composition from Northwestern University and became the first woman to be honored with the highest composition prize conferred by Spain, the XIX Premio SGAE for Iberian American Music Tomás Luis de Victoria. As a composer, she has been commissioned by leading orchestras around the world, held the Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall for its 2023–2024 season, and currently serves as composer-in-residence with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. As a conductor, she studied under Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa. León has served as an advisor to the New York Philharmonic and American Composers Orchestra, and in 2010 she founded Composers Now with the mission of empowering living composers.
Her groundbreaking activities include being a founding member and first music director of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, founding the Brooklyn Philharmonic’s Community Concert Series, co-founding the American Composers Orchestra’s Sonidos de las Américas festivals, being a new music advisor to the New York Philharmonic, and founding and serving as artistic director of Composers Now, a presenting, commissioning, and advocacy organization for living composers.
Composed in 2008, Ácana was inspired by the Cuban Laureate Nicolás Guillén’s poem of the same name, dedicated to the ácana tree. Sprawling to a height of 90 feet and a width of three feet, the ácana is revered for its strength and wide-spreading roots, and is essential to Cuban life and society. Its wood is described in Guillén’s poem as being the pitchfork that helps to build homes, a staff to lead people safely home, and finally the table that will hold their coffins. León’s love for her native Cuba can be heard throughout the piece in the vibrant dance rhythms found in the percussion and upper woodwinds.
Tomàs Peire Serrate is a Barcelona-born composer based in Los Angeles whose music resonates on a global stage. His works have been performed across Europe, America, and Asia at renowned festivals and venues. Serrate has earned accolades from the International Antonín Dvořák Composition Competition and Krzysztof Penderecki International Composers’ Competition ARBORETUM. Recent honors include grand prize at the 2020 iSING! Festival Composition Competition, first prize at the 2021 Mieczysław Karłowicz International Composers’ Competition for his orchestral work Borealis, and winner of the 2022 Left Coast Composition Contest for his song cycle Five Haiku.
Serrate is currently composing commissioned solo and chamber works for performances across Italy, France, and the US. He is also developing an ambitious opera commissioned by the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. His formal training began with piano studies at the Sant Cugat Conservatory and composition at the Escuela Superior de Música de Cataluña in Barcelona. He further honed his craft at the Sibelius Academy in Finland, earning advanced credentials before pursuing a master’s in film scoring at New York University and a PhD in composition at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.
Wayfarer was commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra (ACO) after I received the Audience Commission Award at the ACO Underwood Readings in New York in 2018. Although I was excited by the prospect of a new orchestral premiere, the global pandemic delayed its realization until now.
In the intervening years, I composed and premiered other works, including orchestral pieces, each shaped by new perspectives and my evolving creative process. Over time, I came to realize that, for me, composing feels less like creating something from nothing and more like uncovering something that already exists, waiting to be revealed.
The title, Wayfarer, reflects this idea: a journey of discovery, both personal and artistic. The orchestra’s vast palette of timbres and expressive possibilities sharpens this sense of exploration, bringing forth challenging passages, excitement, and unexpected moments of beauty and surprise. At its core, Wayfarer is a musical reflection on the inner journey—a meditation on navigating life’s unfolding experiences and the transformative discoveries they bring.
—Tomàs Peire Serrate
A powerful communicator renowned for her musical scope and versatility, Brazilian American Clarice Assad is a significant artistic voice in the classical, world music, pop, and jazz genres. She is acclaimed for her evocative colors, rich textures, and diverse stylistic range. A prolific Grammy-nominated composer with more than 70 works to her credit, she has been commissioned by internationally renowned organizations, festivals, and artists. An in-demand performer, Assad is a celebrated pianist and inventive vocalist who inspires and encourages audiences’ imaginations to break free of often self-imposed constraints. She has released seven solo albums and appeared on or had her works featured on another 34. Her innovative, accessible, and award-winning VOXploration series on music education, creation, songwriting, and improvisation has been presented around the world. Sought-after by artists and organizations worldwide, the multi-talented musician continues to attract new audiences both on stage and off.
The Evolution of AI is a contemporary performance art / musical composition that explores the intersection of scientific inquiry and artistic expression. Now in its fourth iteration, the work has morphed alongside our rapidly changing understanding of artificial intelligence and its implications for society. The piece follows a computer scientist’s ambitious experiment to create an AI system capable of understanding, processing, and ultimately generating music—but beneath this scientific endeavor lies a deeper commentary on the concentration of technological power. Set for chamber orchestra and a performer embodying the scientist, the work unfolds in four continuous movements that chronicle an investigation into how machine learning works, and the unsettling consolidation of human knowledge and creativity into digital systems controlled by an elite few. As the scientist collects and processes musical data, they become both creator and gatekeeper, raising many concerns and questions, among them, “Who owns the future?”
—Clarice Assad
Since arriving in the United States in 1994, Colombian-born Edmar Castañeda has made a name for himself as the preeminent jazz harp virtuoso. He brings forth a brilliance that beautifully merges the jazz tradition with a diverse set of styles and genres. Singlehandedly, Castañeda has cemented the harp’s place in jazz with innovative technique and heartfelt creativity from a wealth of formidable collaborations with music titans such as Wynton Marsalis, Béla Fleck, John Scofield, Rickie Lee Jones, Hiromi, Pedrito Martinez, Marcus Miller, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Ivan Lins, the Yellowjackets, Paco de Lucía, and Paquito D’Rivera.
Castañeda follows up seven acclaimed albums with his latest recording project, Viento Sur, that features a nine-person ensemble of acclaimed global musicians from Switzerland, Brazil, Cuba, Israel, Chile, the US, Argentina, and Colombia. An array of compositions on Viento Sur are commissioned by Chamber Music America’s New Jazz Works grant.
Castañeda’s renowned albums as a bandleader are interchanged with awe-inspiring symphonic and big-band works. He was ushered into the jazz community by Paquito D’Rivera, who recognized Castañeda’s passion and took the young harpist under his wing. D’Rivera has called him “an enormous talent ... [with] the versatility and the enchanting charisma of a musician who has taken his harp out of the shadow to become one of the most original musicians from the Big Apple.”
Bordones is a work that innovatively fuses the llanera harp with a string orchestra, celebrating the rhythmic and harmonic richness of traditional Llanos music, a genre originating from the Llanos regions of Colombia and Venezuela. The piece pays tribute to the traditions of joropo and other characteristic styles from this region, while introducing a contemporary vision that emphasizes the fundamental role of rhythm—a central pillar of Llanos musical identity.
The llanera harp, in its leading role, employs the technique of bordones—repeated low-register chords on the harp’s bass strings—that not only provide a solid harmonic foundation, but also become an element of rhythm and percussion, evoking the pulse of the Llanos dance. These bordones transform into an orchestral language, intertwining with the string orchestra and generating a vibrant rhythmic energy that creates a sense of continuous movement, as if the work itself were a dance unfolding throughout its execution.
By incorporating the complex bordones technique, the piece highlights the technical skills of the harpist, who must use great dexterity and control to produce a resonant sound full of nuances characteristic of Llanos music. Bordones is ultimately a tribute to the traditions of the Colombian and Venezuelan Llanos, taken into the orchestral realm to explore new dimensions of rhythm, texture, and expression.
—Edmar Castañeda