New Music Ensemble

About the Program

Shelly Washington
A Kind of Lung
Born 1991
Composed 2017
Premiered July 31, 2017; Mass MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts; Bang on a Can Summer Festival
Duration 12 minutes

Shelley Washington writes music to fulfill one calling—to move. With an eclectic palette, Washington tells stories focusing on exploring emotions and intentions by finding their root cause. Using driving, rhythmic riffs paired with indelible melodies, she creates a sound dialogue for the public and personal discourse. Shelley performs regularly as a vocalist and saxophonist, primarily on baritone saxophone, and has performed and recorded throughout the Midwest and East Coast—anything from Baroque to Screamo. She holds degrees from Truman State University; a B.A. in Music focusing on saxophone, and a Masters of Arts in Education. She also holds a Masters of Theory and Composition from NYU Steinhardt, where she studied with Dr. Joseph Church, Dr. Julia Wolfe, and Caroline Shaw. As an educator, she taught for the New York Philharmonic's Very Young Composers program, and was acting Artistic Director for the Noel Pointer Foundation, located in Brooklyn, NY. In the Fall of 2018 she began studies at Princeton University in pursuit of the PhD of Music Composition. Shelley is a founding member of the composer collective, Kinds of Kings. She writes that her 2017 work “A Kind of Lung “was written for a diverse ensemble expressing an experience we all share - breathing together.”

– Shelly Washington

Kevin Charoensri
Where I Came From
Born 2003
Composed 2024
World Premiere
Duration 16 Minutes

In spring of 2024, I came to my professor Yevgeniy Sharlat with an idea to write about being told “go back to where you came from” throughout my life, and the anxiety that comes with avoiding racial profiling in public settings. But, he respectfully challenged me, asking, “Why does this phrase, specifically, hurt so bad?” As we kept talking through that 50-minute lesson, I started to realize the core of the piece wasn’t the offensive phrase. The core of the piece was my upbringing, growing up in Thailand and America, and the beauty and ugliness behind both. As Professor Sharlat and I traded stories of growing up abroad and in America, I started to realize this feeling of being unwelcomed in the U.S, yet also our home country, was the story of many bi-cultural Americans. I wanted this piece to be a brutally honest representation of my experiences in an all-too-common story. With most of my music, I have a firm layout of a story before writing, but with this piece, I knew I needed more than just music; I needed the actual words I heard growing up, both beautiful and offensive. I wanted the dialogue to feel raw, as if I were telling a story to a friend, similar to the sound of modern-day podcasts and audiobooks. Where I Came From is not about the fear of an offensive phrase. It is about finding the beauty of uniqueness, through adversity, every day. 

– Kevin Charoensri

Katherine Balch
all around the sea blazed gold
Born 1991
Composed 2022
Premiered February 7, 2023, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Paolo Bortolameolli, conductor
Duration 13 minutes

All around the sea blazed gold takes its title from the prelude to Virginia Woolf’s experimental novel The Waves. Throughout the novel, six narrators weave their way from childhood to adulthood, their increasingly intertwined dialogues separated by nine interludes depicting a coastal scene from sunrise to sunset. There are many things I love about The Waves that pique my sonic imagination, from its evocative language to a form that seems to fold over itself while also progressing through time, so it has been the source of inspiration for several pieces of mine over the years.  In all around the sea blazed gold, I focused on the imagery of Woolf’s coastal interludes, which begin at dawn, when “the sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it,” and patiently documents the uniformity of near-darkness transforming into an abundance of detail. I wanted to borrow this trajectory for my own piece, which begins with a very open sound world that gradually is saturated with more and more polyphony. While the six narrators in The Waves begin as distinct voices and gradually conglomerate into one, the instruments in my piece begin as a unified sonic body and [then] fragment into soloists.   Since the ocean is a bit of a thematic staple of 20th- and 21st-century music, I also couldn’t resist “text painting” some of Woolf’s descriptions of the sea, so you’ll hear ocean drums and rain sticks and crotales dipped in water in the percussion, rolling breezes in the breath tones of winds and brass players, wave-like surges in the strings, and many other instrumental interpretations of the ocean’s eternal song.

– Katherine Balch

Erollyn Wallen
Horseplay
Born 1958
Composed 1998
Premiered February 23rd, 1998 by The Royal Ballet, England
Duration 16 minutes

Errollyn Wallen is a multi award-winning Belize-born British composer and performer. Her prolific output includes 22 operas and a large catalog of orchestral, chamber and vocal works which are performed and broadcast throughout the world. She was the first black woman to have a work featured in the Proms and the first woman to receive an Ivor Novello award for Classical Music for her body of work. Errollyn composed for the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games 2012, for the Queen’s Golden and Diamond Jubilees, and currently serves as Master of the King's Music, appointed in 2024 by King Charles III in his first appointment to the post. She is one of the top 20 most performed living composers of classical music in the world. Horseplay was a commission by the Royal Ballet, which featured four male dancers, exploring the idea of the horse as an archetype. Tom Sapsford was the premiering choreographer, who said, “Each movement has its own colour and word or image associated with horses: the first is ‘dark’ and brooding, the second is ‘swift’ and is a winged horse cutting brightly through the sky. The word for the third movement is ‘rocking’ which sways beautifully but uneasily, and the fourth, ‘race’, gallops on to the climactic finishing post.”

– Mark Bilyeu

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About the Artists

Marc Sosnowchik

Dr. Marc Sosnowchik is a conductor, educator, arranger, and clinician based in Austin, Texas. His current duties as Assistant Director of Bands at the University of Texas include conducting the New Music Ensemble and Concert Bands, instructing courses in conducting and wind literature, and teaching the Longhorn Bands. Before his appointment at UT, Dr. Sosnowchik served as Associate Director of Bands at the University of South Florida, Assistant Director of Bands at Oklahoma State University, and Associate Conductor of the Florida Wind Band.  Dr. Sosnowchik maintains an active schedule as a clinician, conductor, and arranger. He conducts ensembles throughout the U.S., and in the summer teaches at the World Youth and Adult Wind Orchestra Projects as part of the Mid-Europe Festival in Schladming, Austria.  Dr. Sosnowchik earned his bachelor’s degree in music education from the University of Alabama, and both his master’s and doctoral degrees in conducting from The University of Texas at Austin.

Mike Lebrias

Dr. Mike Lebrias is a conductor, music educator, & content creator residing in Austin, Texas. He currently serves as an Assistant Director of Bands and Director of Creative Media for the University of Texas Bands department, where he co-teaches the Longhorn Band & Longhorn Pep Band, conducts the Austin Youth Wind Ensemble, and oversees content creation efforts for the department. Dr. Lebrias also maintains his own social media channels - he enjoys making content geared towards providing educational music and conducting content to his viewers, and aims to help bring the Wind Band art form, its composers, and its music into the mainstream.  Dr. Lebrias has been fortunate enough to conduct ensembles at all levels of performance - from middle school honor bands to professional wind bands; he keeps an active schedule as a clinician, music arranger, and a content creator for wind music - creating content for composers & professional wind bands across the country. 

Kevin Charoensri

Kevin Charoensri (b. 2003) is a Thai-American San Diego native who now resides in Austin, studying music composition (B.M.) at The University of Texas at Austin.  Charoensri began writing music at age 12, and he has written works for band, orchestra, choir, chamber music, EDM, big band, jazz combo, and film scores. Charoensri currently studies with Omar Thomas at UT Austin, and has studied with Donald Grantham, along with being heavily involved with other faculty on staff, Yevgeniy Sharlat, Russell Podgorsek, and Januibe Tejera. He is currently a Composition major, as well as a piano principal, taking lessons in both classical and jazz styles, studying with piano professors Gregory Allen, Patti Wolf, and Sean Giddings. He is also the pianist for The University of Texas’ Jazz Ensemble. In June 2018, Charoensri conducted a performance of his Return for Band with 80 musicians at the Sydney Opera House in front of an audience of 2500. The performance received recognition from the San Diego Union Tribune. 

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New Music Ensemble

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