Holly Roadfeldt - Piano

Hommage a Eddie Van Halen (1955-2020) – Eddie Van Halen, guitarist of the band Van Halen, was, simply put, the person that inspired me to become a musician.  I remember the moment vividly.  It was 1984—I was 11 years old—sitting in my dad’s recliner, listening to Van Halen’s album 1984 on his Walkman.  The beginning of side B (of the cassette) starts with the song Hot for Teacher, and features this blazing explosion of finger tapping from Eddie.  I heard that, and right then and there, I decided I was going to learn to play the guitar.  Much of the piece uses the tapping pattern that Eddie used in Hot for Teacher, as well as nods to moments from Jump and Eruption.

Hommage à Eddie Van Halen (Official Album Version)

Glimmer was commissioned in 2016 by the music honor society, Pi Kappa Lambda. The title was inspired by a backpacking adventure during the time that I was composing the piece. I spent a couple of days at a very remote high mountain lake in Colorado. Afternoon thunderstorms are a near-daily occurrence in the high Rockies in summer, but both of these days featured particularly violent storms. But there was also an incredible state of calm before and after the storms, with light glimmering off the glassy lake surface. The second day’s storm added a thick coating of hail to all of the surfaces around the lake, upping the ante on all of the shimmering and glimmering. It was a spectacular (if daunting) scene.

This reminded me of many of the textures and harmonies in the piece. Particularly, there are multiple takes on the idea of “reflection” in the music, with particularly the clarinet and cello reflecting one another’s music in various ways throughout the piece. (The piece was mostly composed at this point—titles typically come after the fact for me.)

Glimmer is, in many ways, a fairly conventional trio: the piano provides a glimmering harmonic foundation much of the time, and the clarinet and cello are together as a team throughout much of the piece, thus setting up a sort of natural division of the ensemble into piano and non-piano instruments, as is often found in classical and romantic trios. And the virtuouso passage work in the piano found throughout much of the piece is a bit reminiscent of a Haydn trio. Many of my pieces use a kaleidoscopic variety of textures and timbres, so this was a bit of a departure for me.

This piece, like most of my music these days, makes use of a non-standard type of scale that does not repeat itself at the octave as conventional western scales do. This makes it possible for the music to be highly chromatic (at times) in the manner of non-tonal music, but also to clearly modulate to different “keys” as tonal music does. The scale system in Glimmer is very whole-tone-scale-ish: it consists of four consecutive whole-steps and then a half-step, so it repeats itself every nine semitones. (The conventional whole-tone scale lends itself beautifully to shimmery glimmery harmonies, but is also terminally boring, musically speaking.)

Glimmer

Holly Roadfeldt - Piano

Hommage a Neil Peart (1952-2020) - One of my earliest true musical influences was the Canadian prog-rock band Rush. Considered by many to be one of the greatest rock drummers in the history of the genre, Neil Peart introduced me to many advanced musical concepts long before I stepped into the halls of a music school. These concepts included odd time signatures, mixed meters, metric modulations, thoroughly composed rhythms, and intense but metered virtuosity. I have always been captivated by his drum solo from their 1988 live tour release A Show of Hands. Neil plays a masterfully composed and executed drum solo in the middle of their legendary instrumental YYZ. In it, Neil created a simple melody on the glockenspiel in opposition and contrast to the thundering drum rhythms of the rest of the solo. It's this melody, the rhythms from the drums, and the YYZ Morse Code rhythm that I focused on in this Hommage.

Hommage à Neil Peart (Official Album Version)

Holly Roadfeldt - Piano and Looper Pedal

Hommage a Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) – Living life as a synesthete, Pollock’s work has always fascinated me.  Looking at these huge canvases, for me, is like setting off an explosion of sound in my head.  For this work, I wanted to try to represent that aurally.  Using his painting Convergence as a model, I assigned the various colors present in that work to different musical sonorities.  Then, I literally traced a path through the painting, and translated the painting into music.  The material on the looper represents the white/gray background, with the played material representing everything else sitting on top of it.

Hommage à Jackson Pollock (Official Album Version)

Holly Roadfeldt, Piano

Hommage a Hayao Miyazaki (b. 1941) – Miyazaki’s films have always been an inspiration to me.  Among my favorites are Princess Mononoke (1997), Spirited Away (2001) and Howl’s Moving Castle (2004).  Among his recurring themes of coming of age, war as folly, and having a strong environmental message, I have always felt this impending sense of inevitability in his storytelling.  In many of his films - Spirited Away in particular - the use of the clock as a metaphor is ever-present.  In this Hommage, I represent that feeling of inevitability through the metronome, as I tried to evoke the feeling of his films through the music.

Hommage à Hayao Miyazaki (Official Album Version)

Holly Roadfeldt - Piano

Hommage to a Broken Fairy Tale – This Hommage was like the others – written for a specific person. This author, who is a master of fantasy, whimsy, the fantastical and the morbid, wrote a poem called Instructions (on How to Survive a Fairy Tale) that I love.  In 2012, I set that poem for soprano and chamber orchestra and the music for this Hommage is inspired by that original song. In 2025 (shortly before the album’s release) some very disturbing revelations came out about this author which greatly disturbed and saddened me.  As a result, I decided to disassociate from this author and look at this piece as more of a tribute to those stories that once fascinated my imagination.

Hommage to a Broken Fairy Tale - Official Album Version

Holly Roadfeldt, Piano

Hommage a Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) was my first attempt at writing serial music. I wanted to write something that was not typical of the 12-tone style, and I think I succeeded with this work. The short piece is in homage to the late Japanese filmmaker, Akira Kurosawa. The delicacy, as well as the highly structured nature of the pitch material, reflects how I feel about Kurosawa’s films. The piece is also a mirror of itself – in other words – the second half of the piece is a mirror image of the first half. I felt this tied in with Kurosawa’s storytelling.

Hommage à Akira Kurosawa - Official Album Version

Holly Roadfeldt - Piano

Hommage a Mandy Morris (1980-2002) – Amanda Akers Morris was, put quite simply, my first love. I met her when I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas, and I was fascinated by her from the start. She was a very talented singer, but also an artist and poet. She possessed an insatiable curiosity and felt things deeply. Tragically, in 2002 while auditioning in NY for graduate school, she was struck by a vehicle and lost her life. To say that all of this changed me fundamentally as a person would be an understatement. I was confronted by true loss and true grief for the first time in my life, and it would be years before I really fully recovered from it – well, as “fully” as is possible. 

At Mandy’s funeral, her mother gave me a CD labeled “For our Tony.” It was a series of recordings that Mandy had made of songs that she had written - just her in a practice room playing piano and singing. Some were complete songs, but others were just fragments of ideas. It was one of these unfinished fragments that I latched onto to build this Hommage.


Hommage à Mandy Morris - Official Album Version

Holly Roadfeldt - Piano

Hommage à Kehinde Wiley (b. 1977) - I'll never forget the first time I saw Wiley's work - giant paintings of modern-day African Americans in this Imperialistic European style. The message was incredibly thought-provoking, and it was stark - it stared you in the face, not giving you the slightest chance to misinterpret. And the skill - the skill that went into these huge canvases was just mind-blowing. Several years later, Wiley was commissioned by Interscope Records to paint a new cover for a remastered version of Dr. Dre's 2001 album. He painted Dre in this same context, decked out in golden medieval armor. This Hommage is full of Easter eggs - from West Coast rap, especially Dr. Dre, Domenico Scarlatti, J.S. Bach and Handel, and even Beethoven.

Hommage à Kehinde Wiley - Official Album Version

THREE SONGS FOR THE DAY OF THE DEAD were commissioned by the River Oaks Chamber Orchestra (Houston, TX) for their annual concert to celebrate Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). The first two songs, As She Looked Around (2012) and Death Goes Before Me (2013), were written for bass-baritone Timothy Jones, and the last song, Exultation (2011), was written for soprano Karol Bennett and arranged for bass-baritone for this cycle.

A version of this work scored for baritone, clarinet, violin, and cello is also available.

Three Songs for the Day of the Dead - I. As She Looked Around (text: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

The innovative and highly energetic music of Rob Smith is frequently performed throughout the United States and abroad. He is an Associate Professor of Music Composition and director of the AURA Contemporary Ensemble at the University of Houston’s Moores School of Music.  Boosey & Hawkes, Carl Fischer, Southern Music, C-Alan Publications, and Skitter Music Publications publish his music.

Three Songs for the Day of the Dead - I. As She Looked Around (text: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

Rob Smith, composer