For no reason I find myself here, today, of all days. I spoke to my lifelong friend today, who served in Vietnam as an ARMY chopper door gunner. A horrible job for this kind loving soul, a friend I call GRIFF. I was on an aircraft carrier in the TONKIN GULF while my friend was in country. We share a bond no one can understand. Yet a young lady with a beautiful smile somehow has transformed my feelings into notes that float to my ears as if carried by the soft breeze an angels wings make. You are a gift to me, bringing small tears to my eyes as I recall the names of so many who never came home, lost for ever. They live on in my heart. Please allow this old man to say thank you, Dear Lady.

Music for piano, woodwinds, recorder, brass (euphonium/horns), strings, celesta and harp.

Vision

Blue Fountain Waltz

For full program notes, see: http://www.rockfordsymphony.com/heitzeg-scurria-we-are-met-at-gettysburg/

I. Honor and Sacrifice (Amy Scurria)
This movement is dedicated to the composer's father, a Vietnam War veteran. Its focus is the people--the soldiers, their families, those who lived near and in Gettysburg and who unexpectedly found their peaceful agricultural community the center point of an enormous battle attempting to solve long-standing painful issues in American history. The composer notes that the woodwinds in this movement symbolize a mother waving goodbye to her soldier son.

II. Wounded Fields (Steven Heitzeg)
An adagio for strings alone, dedicated to the victims of war and genocide, the movement revolves largely around the pitch G, sounding as a continuous ground bass, to build images of Gettysburg and its sacred, hallowed ground.  Conceived as a plea for peace and anti-war in its reverential lyricism, the movement honors the dead by responding with peaceful and healing music.

III. The Last Full Measure (Scurria/Heitzeg)

Lincoln's address draws attention to the devotion of the soldiers at Gettysburg, especially those interred in the national military cemetery, which was the occasion of his great address: they who gave "the last full measure of devotion." The movement is dedicated to the late U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone, who had died in a plane crash in October 2002. Throughout his career in the Senate, he had fought non-militaristically and non-violently for peace, social justice, and the rights of all. The movement is cast in seven sections laid out to evoke the era and to convey progress toward freedom and equality, with the children's choir entering at the ending in a clarion call to conscience and the common good.

We Are Met at Gettysburg was performed some ten times by the two commissioning orchestras soon after its composition. Individual movements were also performed by other ensembles in the intervening years. This performance by the Rockford Symphony Orchestra is the first complete hearing since 2003.

(excerpted from program notes by Steve Ledbetter)

Amy Scurria

We Are Met At Gettysburg

Phase Locked Loop and Modulo Games contains stories. Little, poem-sized short  stories filled with puzzles and riddles. These prose-poems with sewn-together  unfoldings and refoldings of ideas are always in transition, ever changing and stuck in a  perpetual state of becoming. As the story progresses the boundaries between the stories erodes the many into a single continuous utterance. (Note: In the above descriptive image  ‘story’ is intended to mean a musical narrative and ‘game’ or ‘riddle’ means a pitched, rhythmic  or metric device used to develop the principle theme.) 

In more technical terms, the notes of this moto perpetuo are treated using a  modulus. A form of division of whole numbers, a modulus emphasizes the remainder  rather than the quotient. A 14-note musical idea is transformed thusly while other materials use similar patterned processes of rhythmic accumulation, acceleration and  deceleration. The piece moves from these stricter processes into a pastiche of stylistic  and melodic music that expands smaller motives into larger song-like phrases. (Note: A  reoccurring palindrome is the central device to this particular musical process.) 

In other words, Phase Locked Loop and Modulo Games uses evolving loops to move  into several lightly contrasting grooves that themselves are locked in a steady state of transition; ever changing, and always becoming. 

Phase Locked Loop And Modulo Games - LIVE @ Baldwin Auditorium, 10/25/2015

Mordus Angels

from my album, Beyond a Lullaby, released March 23, 2016

Beyond a Lullaby

Heart of the Earth

Go to Sleep, My Little Baby

Arietta

"More Things in Heaven and Earth," for voice, electronics, and organ, was commissioned by soprano P. Lucy McVeigh in summer 2017.  This simple piece sets a brief quotation from Shakespeare--"there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy"--in a fragmented, disordered fashion, and seeks to explore what it means when we confront something we can neither control nor understand. The first section of the piece populates a looping patch in Max, creating dense vocal polyphony around a simple synthesizer loop. The second section is what I call the “mirror version,” in which all of the audio that has been gathered in the first section is presented “in reverse,” and begins to refigure itself using a series of non-predictable computer algorithms. It is my hope that this section--more of an installation than a performance, in which our live players are suddenly no longer needed--will play with listeners’ senses of time, and acknowledge the secret inner lives of musical performances--what they might secretly become once they are complete and fading into memory.

More Things in Heaven and Earth (2017)

This is a new version of All Stars Are Love I made specifically for Hila Plitmann to sing with the World Youth Wind Orchestra Project as part of Mid Europe 2017 in Schladming, Austria. Hila performed the original version, a song written as a surprise gift for my wife, at our wedding. I later made an instrumental version for wind ensemble, and this is a recomposed combination of the two, scored for soprano voice and winds & percussion.

All Stars Are Love (Hila Plitmann, WYWOP 2017)

BLAK New  Blues Duo plays Oliver Nelson's  "There's a Yearnin'"
Nicholas A.  Lewis, Clarinet
Anthony M. Kelley, Piano

BLAK NEW BLUES  DUO plays Nelson's  "Theres A Yearnin'" 6.14.2010

Music by Amy Scurria.  Securing her first commission by age 19 and her first orchestral premiere by 24, Amy Scurria quickly became one of the premiere up and coming composers of her time.  Her accomplishments include performances and commissions by the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Minnesota Orchestra, the LongLeaf Opera Company, Sigma Alpha Iota and Fort Wayne Philharmonic, the Vermont Youth Orchestra, Youth Pro Musica, the Shepherd College Concert Choir, and many others.  She has had performances throughout the U.S., England, Brazil, Spain, Portugal, France, and Japan.  Her studies include a bachelors in music composition from the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, a masters in music composition from the Peabody Conservatory, composition studies at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, NJ as a young teenager, and further study at La Schola Cantorum (currently named the EAMA) in Paris, France.  After working for ten years as an independent composer, Amy has returned to school to earn her PhD in music composition at Duke University where she has recently become an ABD PhD candidate.  Amy was invited to collaborate with conductor Sara Jobin and famed feminist author Carol Gilligan and son, Jonathan Gilligan on a new opera, Pearl, based on Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and is currently working on this project as part of her dissertation.

She believes that “Music is a powerful and unusual language that, when spoken well, can reach the deepest part of the human spirit.”

We Are Met At Gettysburg

Amy Scurria

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