In terms of form, Obelisk can be thought of as something analogous to a character study or a monologue. In it, a developing melodic line, played on a soprano saxophone, is contrasted to a repeating figure played by a synthesizer patch modeled as a large metalophone. Both parts make motivic use of the interval of a fourth, the first interval heard in each, but are otherwise quite different in character. The absolute steadiness of the prerecorded synthesizer conveys solidity and its four-octave range considerable mass and height. The saxophone line consists mostly of short, energetic bursts using a six-note scale. I think a five-note scale would have been too sing-songy, but seven or more (e.g., using chromatics) would have been too fussy, offering too many choices for the "protagonist," who in this piece would just as soon slice your head off with his sword as look at you. This character also seems to have more disdain than patience for beats and barlines--which led to considerable notational problems, finally solved, after many years, in the score created for this concert.

Voodoo Storm, for Clarinet. In February of this year there was a terrible storm that raged with high winds all night. I had moved my bed next to the front door, and watched the wind whiplash the tall trees close to the house. In the middle of the night I awoke from a too vivid dream: The Earth had opened up and tall jangly skeletons were collecting in my front yard, laughing and dancing. With their music ringing loudly in my head, I was compelled, in the cold and dark, to get up and write it down at the piano. This version, for Clarinet, was written for Rachel Condry.

Verso L’immagine Feroce (Toward the ferocious Image) is a short piece for Chamber Orchestra. The piece depicts a rather complex emotional state. The idea is that of approaching, and then being in the presence of, something so large, and so outside of our experience and comprehension that it is completely beyond our grasp. This object is not only massive and overwhelming, it is ferocious (feroce), in the sense that it so completely oblivious of our presence that, to us, it seems completely beyond compassion. What is it?  The stars in the night sky, the sun at midday, the waves of a far away ocean … a tender piece of grass.

Plasticity, for Sonoglyph and Chamber Orchestra, was written for and features Tom Nunn playing his Sonoglyph. The piece is a concerto movement, with virtuosic passages for soloist, including 2 solo cadenzas and a "duo-denza" for Sonoglyph and percussionist. Traditional keys/scales, modern modes, improvisation, folk-like melodies/variations, alternative playing techniques – all add to the continual pliability and mercurial nature of the piece - plasticity of both time and design. The Sonoglyph, featured tonight, was built in 1992 and is an EPB with a "modern art" format (versus symmetric used in other instruments). Its materials include finishing nails, threaded steel rods, bronze brazing rods, strings, a spring, a comb, a found-object metal disk, and textured surface materials. It is played tonight with fingers/fingernails and with combs which can be used as picks, mallets and scraping/skatching devices, as well as a small bow and knitting needles. Like most of his instruments, the Sonoglyph is amplified using contact microphones.

Eagle Bear Woman flies across the land. Her eyes are sharp and bright, her heart is strong and true. This piece was written for my wife Catherine in 1985, and recently orchestrated for this concert. 

Two Islands This is a Westernized interpretation of Javanese and Balinese Gamelan music. The first half of the piece is in the older, softer Javanese style, the second half in the faster and more complex Balinese style. One major difference between the two is that the Javanese places greater emphasis on the performers improvising while the Balinese music is strictly composed, with very little space for improvisation. The only traditional instruments included are a pair of Indonesian gongs tuned to A flat and B flat, which ultimately determined the key of the piece. 

The genesis of A Baby Sleeps came after my daughter was born and my grandfather told me I need to write her a piece. For a few months I struggled for inspiration, then one night I realized my wife was singing a beautiful lullaby to her every night. I decided to write a "Theme & Variations" on this Taiwanese lullaby, 搖嬰仔歌 (Rocking the baby lullaby). It was written by the famous Taiwanese composer, 呂泉生 (Lu Chuan-sheng). Professor Lu was known as the Father of Taiwan Children’s Choir because he was dedicated to promoting Children’s choir for 50 years as well as writing over 200 compositions. I have found many variations in the translation of this melody's title, "Cradle Song", "Voice for the Formosan Parents – the Lullaby" or simply "the Lullaby".  My wife calls it "Rocking the baby" and my daughter just calls it, "sleep song." 

This composition adds two traditional Chinese instruments to the orchestra, the 笙 (shēng) and 古箏 (gŭzhēng). The sheng is a 3000-year-old Chinese free-reed bamboo mouth organ. In the Ming and Qing dynasty (1368-1911) it was used extensively both in folk instrumental ensembles and in the accompaniment to local theaters and popular narratives. It reached Europe around 1777 with Pere Amiot, and its influence was so strong that it resulted in the invention of the reed organ, concertina, harmonica and accordion. The guzheng is ancient plucked string instrument that is part of the zither family. It is built with a special wooden sound body with strings arched across movable bridges along the length of the instrument for the purpose of tuning.

King David Suite (The Young and The Restless), Op. 174 (2009) consists of three newly-instrumentalized sections from King David, Op. 70, for the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra's May 2009 Dreams of the Restless concert.  The work is troped on Arthur Honegger's Le Roi David -- in multi-metric, minimalist, and modal distortions -- and highlights three stages of youth and restlessness: the young David's fleeing before a jealous King Saul (O for the Wings of a Dove / Psalm 55), the old king and his son Jonathan's angst-ridden consultation with a medium and the dead Prophet Samuel (Incantation / The Witch of Endor), and King David's son's rebellion and hair-raising impaling (Song in the Forest of Endor / The Death of Absalom).

In the Stomachs of Fleas
We, that is, fognozzle and Erling Wold, present for you a tale of fear, horror, xenophobia, political posturing and denial, all contained within a musical program piece of sorts, a savage delight for the senses and an allegory for today, this and that and the other thrown into the pot of narrative and boiled up into the scenario as follows: The Australia steamed into San Francisco in 1899, carrying corpses and rats infected with the plague. Between 1900 and 1904, one hundred twenty-six people contracted the disease in San Francisco and environs. One hundred twenty-two of them died while the governor denied the very existence of the plague and the press blamed the Chinese for spreading it. The plague was brought under control in 1904, only to resurface in 1906 as the great earthquake displaced the human and rat population. The response to this second outbreak was dealt with more efficiently as the causes were better understood, but one hundred eighty people died of the plague in San Francisco between 1906 and 1909. Fortunately, Xenopsylla cheopis (the Oriental rat flea) never secured a foothold in San Francisco, and our dominant flea remained Ceratophyllus fasciatus, which lacked the deep stomach required for effective plague transmission. Many more people would have died if the reverse had been true. Unfortunately, the rat-eradication efforts during the San Francisco plague outbreaks did not extend to the squirrels of the East Bay. Through them, the bubonic plague established a permanent foothold in the Pacific Northwest, where it lives on today - in the stomachs of fleas.

fognozzle is an obscure entity from the bowels of the San Francisco experimental music world. Last year saw the release of Keep on Whispering, a CDr on a label from Bosnia-Herzegovina that was only available in trade for a personal publication or recording. In July, fognozzle will be releasing Temple Woods, a noise autobiography detailing the experience of growing up in Greenfield, Massachusetts - the recording of which began in 1986. It will be available only on cassette. Future plans include a performance in an alley off of San Jose Street, and a recording of erotic dancing.

Rachel Condry, clarinet/bass clarinet, is an advocate of new music who has commissioned and premiered many new works by both established and emerging composers. In 2007 she was featured in Lisa Scola Prosek's Opera Belfagor based on the story by Machiavelli, in which the bass clarinet portrays the character of the devil. In 2005 she made her Carnegie Hall debut as a member of The Matt Small Chamber Ensemble, a group that seamlessly blends jazz, improvised music and classical genres. As a performing member of the San Francisco Composer's Chamber Orchestra Rachel has been featured as soloist with the orchestra in works by Erling Wold, Lisa Prosek and Thomas Goss. Rachel continues to independently produce concerts comprised of recent and newly commissioned work for clarinet and bass clarinet by Bay Area composers such as Earl Zindars, Erling Wold, Mitch Marcus Andrew Shapiro, Lisa Prosek, Janis Mercer, Jono Kornfeld, Melissa Hui, Alexis Alrich and others. Rachel received a Bachelor of Music degree from Oberlin Conservatory where she was a finalist of the Oberlin Concerto Competition and was a soloist with the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble.

Tom Nunn, B.Mus., M.A., has designed, built and performed with instruments of his own invention for over 30 years. As a composer-turned-improviser, Tom has designed his instrumentsspecifically for improvisation, with elements of complexity, randomness and unpredictability to stimulate the improviser. He has made over 100 instruments, including space plates, various electroacoustic percussion boards (EPBs) , T-rodimbas, Mothics, Zitherods, and Skatchboxes. Tom greatly appreciates this rare opportunity to hear the Sonoglyph in concert with an orchestra of traditional instruments.

Steve Adams is active both as a composer and as a performer on saxophones, flutes and electronics. Steve is best known as a member of the Rova Saxophone Quartet, with whom he has played for twenty years and released over twenty-five recordings. Rova has been called "one of the most daring ensembles of any instrumentation to emerge in recent years" by Downbeat magazine. He has been a member of Composers in Red Sneakers, a Boston composer's collective, and the bands Birdsongs of the Mesozoic and Your Neighborhood Saxophone Quartet. He has performed with Anthony Braxton, Sam Rivers, Dave Holland, Cecil Taylor, Roscoe Mitchell, John Zorn, Steve Lacy, Mark Dresser, Joan Jeanrenaud, Fred Frith, Tin Hat Trio, Willie "Loco" Alexander, Yo! Miles with Henry Kaiser and Wadada Leo Smith, Donald Byrd, Jaki Byard and Ted Nugent as well as many other jazz, rock, dance and theater groups. Steve has appeared on more than fifty recordings, and has five recordings as leader or co-leader on the 9 Winds and Clean Feed labels, the latest of them being Surface Tension. Steve has performed the premieres of numerous classical compositions, including Prisoner of Love by Robert Aldridge, Thomas Oboe Lee's Saxxologie... A Sextet, and Passing Time by Jon Nelson. He performed Edmund Campion?s Corail with the Berkeley Symphony and at the Ojai Music Festival, and was a member of the 25th Anniversary performance of Terry Riley's In C, which was released on New Albion. Steve has written more than fifty compositions for saxophone quartet, as well as many others for varied instrumentations. His piece Cage (for John Cage) was performed at the 1993 Bang on a Can festival, and his piece The Gene Pool was commissioned by Meet the Composer and performed at their festival "The Works" in Minneapolis in 2002. He received a California Arts Council Fellowship in 2000 and a Meet the Composer grant in 1993, and teaches at Mills College. Steve is a graduate of the School of Contemporary Music in Brookline, MA and studied composition with Alan Crossman, Christopher Yavelov and Thomas Oboe Lee, saxophone with David Birkin and Indian music with Peter Row and Steve Gorn.

Gangqin Zhao, Chinese multi-instrumentalist, studied Yangqin under her father in her childhood. She began her stage career at the age of 8. She had learned Guzheng and other Chinese percussion instruments from several well-known music educators in China. After attending the Music Department of Nanjing Normal University in her Bachelor?s Degree, she has been active in performing, educating and publishing. Her music activities have been throughout California since she came to U.S. She has performed at Cal Performances(UC Berkeley), the Music Center of L.A. County, Yerba Buena Center for the Performing Arts ( San Francisco), San Jose Center for the Performing Arts, Flint Center (Cupertino), UC, Sacramento, CSU, Chico, and Petalume Summer Festival, Sonomo Folk Fesitival, Asian American Jazz Festival etc.