Come spend time with Yu-Hui Chang, composer and former Artistic Director for Dino Annex, as we anticipate the performance of her piece ALTER EGO performed by dynamic guest cellist Stephen Marotto. The performance is the fourth in a series of concerts dedicated to music by composers from all over the world who've come to America and contribute to the contemporary musical landscape. Hear about Yu-Hui's experiences with the ensemble, her development as a composer, and her experience writing for solo cello. This 50th Season finale concert takes place June 7, 2025, at Watertown's First Parish Church. More information and ticketing at https://www.dinosaurannex.org/event-details/hub-of-the-musiverse-4

Yu-Hui Chang on artistic curation, writing for solo cello, and competition pieces!

Notturno for String Quartet (2025)

performed by Goethe Quartet
Luke Hsu & Laura Rickard, violins
Marthe Husum, viola
Rainer Crosett, cello

Dedicated to Mina Yu, painter
based on aria Non più mesta from La Cenerentola by Gioachino Rossini

Painting by Eric Rannestad

Non più mesta -  96k - 24b

The November 2, 2025 premiere performance by Collage New Music with Tony Arnold, artistic partner. Jeffrey Means conducting. Commissioned by Collage. 

Three Tastes of Home

(Chasalow) Three Tastes of Home - Tony Arnold and Collage New Music - premiere 2025

The wonderful Friction Quartet commissioned this piece from me in 2016. Here they perform it live in its second performance, at the SFFCM Presidio Sessions.

Photo credit to http://sealevel.climatecentral.org

second performance

A Sleeptalker Describes the Rising of the Seas

Alto saxophone and piano (2018)

Premiered by Philipp A Stäudlin and Yoko Hagino

The title, Jindo, is named after an island southwest of the Korean peninsula which gave birth to several important Korean traditional music genres (Pansori, Sanjo, Sinawi). Also, it is near the place where a ferry sank, taking more than three hundred lives, mostly high school students on April 16th 2014. The young students were writing text messages to their parents about whether they would be saved. Not many people were saved from the ferry even though those students and their parents were texting each other for several hours. The Korean folk tune, Jindo Arirang, is used in this piece.

This piece is dedicated to the victims of the ferry tragedy.

Jindo (2018)

Scott Hunter's impeccably constructed texts were conceived with the intention of being read by an online simulated voice that was purposefully archaic in its delivery – glitchy, devoid of tone or context, flat and relentlessly even in the rendering. While the idea of using an outdated technology to realize one's work might seem like a gimmick, it actually imparts a disarming poignancy, effortless in its delivery, yet also enduring in its impact.

The three poems of Hunter's that are set in Three Scented Candles mostly operate in an outdoor environment or inside the ethos of late night. Half-awake awareness of the mundane or specific momentary happenings, with moments of jolting revelation brought about by self-soothing pot smoking, are part of the very common experience of late night rambles through a quiet neighborhood when one gets to be alone with oneself - - their past and their dog, all part of a nocturnal ritual where the present slowly melts away as one readies for slumber. Three Scented Candles is 11 minutes in duration, and sets the following texts.

1 - Midnight Rose Meets Angel Of The Morning
2 - Dumpster Dive
3 - Marijuana Dogwalk (Take 3)

Thank you Charlotte Mundy & Miori Sugiyama - you are amazing!

Three Scented Candles for soprano and piano (2018) on texts of Scott Hunter

Requiem (2019)

I. Requiem aeternam
II. On Immortality (Thomas Hardy)
III. Out of the Deep (Psalm 130)
IV. To One in Paradise (Edgar Allan Poe)
V. I Heard a Voice (Revelation 14)

Commissioned by St. Peter's Church, NYC

Balint Karosi, conducting
Addy Sterrett, soprano
Kannan Vasudevan, tenor

The St. Peter's Choir and Orchestra

IV. To One In Paradise

"credo petrified" is for amplified solo cello. The piece was written at the request of Rhonda Rider in 2016. Here it is performed by Leighton Fong a Left Coast Chamber Ensemble concert April 29, 2023 in the Bayview Opera House. This is the fourth (and final) revised version.

Remembering family childhood trips to the Petrified Forest with my mother (long since dead), seeing stone trees (even longer since dead), makes me consider the unadorned ritual of forgotten deaths, of slow disintegrations, of ancient music created for worshiping ("I believe in one...") that is dying its own gradual death at a glacial pace, becoming sonic dust - casualty of a ritual set in motion by man and nature that eventually will have no one left to observe or participate in.     -KR

credo petrified for amplified solo cello (2016/2018/2020/2023)

Trotsky was killed with an icepick to the skull. It was actually an ice axe.

I recently read a short play, which begins the moment after the hammer strikes and becomes embedded into Trotsky's head, that proceeds to detail the thoughts and sensations, moment by moment he had as he remained conscious and confronted his assassins in order to question them.

Trotsky had to seek treatment at the hospital. He was operated on and died the next day from exsanguination and shock. Exsanguination is an extreme loss of blood.

His last words were "I will not survive this attack. Stalin has finally accomplished the task he attempted unsuccessfully before."

This piece was written in 2018-19 for and is dedicated to Jared Redmond, who is simply the best.

Notturno for String Quartet (2025)

William David Cooper

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