2020 was a painful year for everyone. As I began to compose this piece, I felt the need to create something calming and serene, a feeling that I and the rest of the world had been missing that year. And so "Everlasting Sky" was born. This piece evokes the feeling of laying on the grass and looking up at the sky, with the clouds forever flowing peacefully above us.

It was premiered on October 21st, 2021 at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Everlasting Sky

Kevin Day - Ecstatic Samba

Stephen Caplan, oboe
Ellen Hummel, English horn
Kincaid Rabb, narrator
Lucas Martins, violin
Chengyu Ren, violin
Andrew Vasquez, viola
Jeayoung Jo, cello

Three Aviaries for Oboe, English Horn, Narrator, and String Quartet is a chamber monodrama that explores the disorientating, ecstatic, and lonely world of being neurodivergent. A seamless integration of storytelling and music, Three Aviaries asks its audience one question: are you like its author, or are you like most people?

Three Aviaries for Oboe, English Horn, Narrator, and String Quartet

Unquiet Waters (Saxophone Concerto)
Premiered at the 2023 NASA Biennial Conference in Hattiesburg, MS
University of Southern Miss Wind Ensemble
Nicki Roman, soloist
Catherine Rand, conductor

Unquiet Waters - Nicki Roman, USM Wind Ensemble, Catherine Rand

Strobe Light
For pierrot ensemble plus percussion
Recorded by the Alias Chamber Ensemble

Strobe Light - Alias Chamber Ensemble

Day Deep Blue

Etude, 19 tuba -Kevin Day (performed by Ken Heinlein)

Blue Nova Fanfare-Kevin Day

[Visuals are an important component of this piece and a video of this performance can be viewed here: m.youtube.com/watch?v=5Df4NONJUrY# ]

A percussion quartet concerto celebrating renewable energy. 
OO:00 I. Water
O4:14 II. Wind
10:04 III. Solar

Sandbox Percussion with the Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra
Live performance in Santa Monica on February 11, 2018
Recording mixed by Nathan Alef

This piece was commissioned by GE Renewable Energy and the Albany Symphony, David Alan Miller, artistic director, for the 2017 American Music Festival.

Re(new)al - sinfonietta version

Performed by Lindsey Eastham

Notes: 
“Tinctures” is a reference to term used by William Yeats an Irish poet. Yeats along with his wife’s help Georgiana Hyde-Lees created A Vision, this substantial volume of written texts was the result of his experimentation with ‘automatic writing’, where the and the pen were used as unconscious instruments that the realm of spirits would use to convey information. Through this exercise Yeats made an intricate symbolic system, which also had geometrical, astrological, psychological, metaphysical and historical components, which to him was a model of the entire universe. Yeats determined certain patterns, which he called, gyres, existed: covered cones that represent the combinations of opposites within a personal and historical nature. This allowed Yeats to craft his character’s humanity/ personality through this system. 

These cones are represented by Concordia, unity; the other by Discordia, desire. Within this symbolism, the cone of Discordia (which he also refers to as the ‘antithetical tincture’) is our imaginative side, which is incessant; it separates one individual from the next (which can also be understood on subjective terms, those of beauty). In turn, the cone of Concordia (also known as the ‘primal tincture’) is our detached, intellectual side, that which leads us where we belong or to what can be understood on terms of objectivity or truth to ourselves). Musically, I was at first inspired by spiral movement of the gyre. Yeats’ conceptual reduction of character traits as a tincture was a fascinating idea to use compositionally. Pairing this relationship of Concordia and Discordia with the image of two spinning gyres gave me the explosive foundation to embody what I feel is transformative.

Tinctures

Above the Fray (2020)
for multitrack string quartet

Performed by the JACK Quartet:
Christopher Otto (violin), Austin Wulliman (violin), John Pickfold Richards (viola), and Jay Campbell (cello)

Program note:

From today’s orchestras to the Titanic, classical musicians respond to catastrophe in the most peculiar way – play some Bach tunes. As intensely, beautifully, devotedly, and ignorantly as possible. Because Bach must be our universal healer, our vaccine, our band-aid, our paycheck.

Above the Fray pokes fun at this phenomenon by warping and distorting Bach’s famous “Prelude” from Cello Suite no. 1, unraveling its passages into threads that transform, detune, and degrade at different rates for different performers over the course of the piece. Unlike Western art tradition which believes that classical music is a one-size-fits-all solution, this piece dares to ask what if we all are not the same? What if we each have infinitely unique identities that morph differently under different circumstances? What if our responses to a piece of art wildly differ from each other and change over the course of our lives? And what if art itself is not a static monolith, but rather something dynamic that we allow to breathe, reshape, decompose, and reincarnate into new lifeforms over time?

Many thanks to the JACK Quartet and National Sawdust for commissioning this piece.

Above the Fray

Kevin Day (b. 1996) is an internationally acclaimed composer, conductor, and jazz pianist based in San Diego, California. Known for his exuberant, introspective, and groove-oriented composition style, Mr Day’s music fuses genres such as jazz, contemporary classical, R&B, Soul, and more. He has been performed by some of the world’s top instrumental soloists, wind bands, chamber ensembles, and symphony orchestras. He has composed over 250 works, nine concerti, and has had performances throughout the United States, Canada, Austria, Taiwan, South Africa, Australia, Japan, and more.

Mr. Day is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship for Music Composition, a winner of the BMI Composer Award, the TCU Alumni Outstanding Young Professional Award, a three-time ASCAP Morton Gould Finalist, a finalist for the ABA Sousa-Oswald Award, and a finalist for the NBA Revelli Award. His most recent works include his acclaimed Concerto for Wind Ensemble, as well as a double concerto for trombone and piano entitled Departures, which will be premiered later this year by the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra.

Cincinnati Opera recently announced the launch of The Black Opera Project, a ground-breaking three-opera commissioning initiative that engages Black creators to develop new works celebrating Black stories. Mr. Day’s original opera, LALOVAVI: An Afro-Futurist opera in Three Acts, will be the first work to be featured.  

A native of Arlington, Texas, Mr. Day holds degrees from Texas Christian University (TCU), the University of Georgia, and is ABD completing his doctorate in composition from the University of Miami Frost School of Music. He has studied composition with Dorothy Hindman, Charles Norman Mason, Peter Van Zandt Lane, Emily Koh, Gabriela Lena Frank, and Neil Anderson-Himmelspach.

Unquiet Waters - Nicki Roman, USM Wind Ensemble, Catherine Rand

Kevin Day

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