Quality Over Opinion

Laughing in Her Sleep

Recorded by the Stony Brook Symphony Orchestra on November 9, 2022; conducted by Alan Kay. Staller Center for the Arts, Stony Brook University. Soli Deo Gloria.

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Program Notes:

To plod is "to move or walk heavily or laboriously" or "to work or act perseveringly or monotonously." In any kind of art, it's tempting to wait until inspiration strikes before we get to work, but for most of us, this would mean that we accomplish little at all. Most days, we need to get up, keep our noses to the grindstone, and hope something happens that's worth keeping. This piece is a meditation on the commitment to plod along in whatever work we have in front of us. One step at a time, often a laborious step, is all we can do, but we must persevere in the pursuit of beauty.

Plod — for orchestra (2022)

Harrietlehre for Orchestra (Excerpt)

Some Unused Songs

End of The Night

Disappear Again

Other Pines, IV. The Pines As Refuge (Parco Del Pineto)

nothing

High Five

A Pill in the Sea

Time Machines (2025) Live Performance
Commissioned by the Bowling Green University Wind Symphony

Premiered on April 17, 2025 by the BGSU Wind Symphony
Dr. Kenneth Thompson, Conductor
© 2025 Harriet Steinke

Time Machines (Live April 2025 @ Bowling Green)

For Nancy Schetlick (1954-2015)

Matt Morris - Cello
Ben Morris - Piano

“My, how foolish I am! You know what I've always thought? I've always thought a body would have to be sick and dying before they saw the Lord. And I imagined that when He came it would be like looking at the Baptist window: pretty as colored glass with the sun pouring through, such a shine you don't know it's getting dark. And it's been a comfort: to think of that shine taking away all the spooky feeling. But I'll wager it never happens. I'll wager at the very end a body realizes the Lord has already shown Himself. That things as they are, just what they've always seen, was seeing Him. As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes.

…And when that happens, I know it. A message saying so merely confirms a piece of news some secret vein had already received, severing from me an irreplaceable part of myself, letting it loose like a kite on a broken string. That is why, walking across a school campus on this particular December morning, I keep searching the sky. As if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying towards heaven.”

-Truman Capote

A Lost Pair of Kites

Bergen

Ben Morris is a composer whose music tells unconventional stories and crosses genre boundaries. He is Assistant Professor of Composition at Stephen F. Austin State University.

A Lost Pair of Kites

Ben Morris

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