Living Composers Played Live in Seattle

By Leilani Polk and Esteban Meneses 
 
Works by living composers span the entirety of the 2024/2025 season, from Angelica Negrón’s Fractal Isles in the Opening Night Concert to the world premiere of the Flute Rhapsody, a Seattle Symphony co-commission by Allison Loggins-Hull in the season-closing Ravel Boléro program. Read more about four of these composers below, along with a breakdown of the rest coming up later. More coverage of these vital contributors to the modern canon will be featured throughout the season.  

MAJEL CONNERY 
 
New York City-based composer, vocalist, musician and musicologist Majel Connery combines classical influences with electronic techniques. She’s also an educator who has taught and mounted productions on campuses ranging from Stanford to UC Berkeley to Princeton. She plays rock clubs in her art-punk duo Sky Creature with baritone guitarist Matt Walsh, while in composer-collective Oracle Hysterical (described as “part band, part book club”), she and her groupmates source text from great literary works (ranging from Greek tragedies to Grimms’ Fairy Tales to the words of Robert Falcon Scott and James Audubon), distill them through a unique contemporary lens and perform the results at venues ranging from the steps of Brooklyn’s Central Library to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.   

Connery also appears regularly as a solo artist making “supernatural music about the environment” among other projects; her song cycle Rivers are our Brothers (2021) focuses on ecological responsibility told from the first-person point of view of the land, with the songs ascribing human qualities and feelings to elements of the landscape: water, trees, mountains, rivers and the like. The title of the cycle is based on a quote from Native American leader Chief Seattle, who believed we must relate to our environment the way we relate to our closest kin. According to Connery, the goal was “to give nature a voice — to allow these vibrant things to speak on their own behalf.”  

Her new song cycle Elderflora (meaning “old trees”) continues with the Indigenous idea of treating our environment as kin. Like the anthropomorphic-style narrative of Rivers, it’s told from the perspective of the tree itself, touching on significant moments in its life and spanning the tree’s passage from seedling to mighty megaflora to decaying nurse log — from birth to death.  

Demos of Elderflora find Connery’s sublime vocals raised in surreal, echoing melodies, often multi-tracked to create otherworldly harmonies and disembodied choruses that glide over layered synthesizers. These technicolor soundscapes range from bright and dazzling to dark and sparse. Connery has said she seeks to harness the human capacity to personify the world, helping us see humanity in a tree. “Trees are a lot like people, and this is their superpower … They have skin. They can bruise and bleed. They’re also giants among us doing supernatural stuff. I want us to see trees for what they are — both familiar and utterly out of this world.”  

Connery gives the world premiere of Elderflora in Seattle joined by cellist Felix Fan. The performance will be accompanied by breathtaking images from American photographer Noah Kalina’s “Lumberland” series, which focus on a single black walnut tree and were taken across multiple seasons.  

(The Elderflora program is presented twice on September 27, in Octave 9: Raisbeck Music Center)  

ABEL SELAOCOE 
 
South African cellist and composer Abel Selaocoe originally hails from a township of South Africa called Sebokeng, is currently based in Manchester, England, and has been a force of music since well before he earned his International Artist Diploma at the Royal Northern College of Music in 2018. Alongside his numerous awards and recognition for his technique on cello — which he was originally drawn to because it could be both melodic and percussive — he’s been flexing his muscles as a composer who merges classical influences with his African heritage and collaborates with other musicians and composers (such as Giovanni Sollima, Famoudou Don Moye and Gwilym Simcock), in addition to giving concerto performances and solo classical recitals around the world. His Chesaba trio was formed in 2016, specializing in music from the African continent (including his compositions). He also has a close partnership with Manchester Collective, with which he devised three successful programs in 2018, 2019 and 2024.  

During his time at Royal Northern College, he began to explore improvisation and composition; improvisation is now an important part of Selaocoe’s creative process. In an interview with The Guardian, he said that every day he has “a few minutes of improvisational flow where I do not stop or impose judgment. It often starts with the voice, and if I don’t like it, I just carry on until I find the flow … I love improvisation because we can always have a fresh conversation. And I love composition because it’s everywhere. It’s waiting for you to take it. It’s about being conscious of what could be.”   

In 2022, he released his debut album, Where Is Home (Hae Ke Kae), which featured original material reflecting his traditional South African and Tanzanian music influences alongside works by J.S. Bach and Italian baroque composer Giovanni Platti, which he delivers with some non-traditional instrumentation. He’s described his musical journey partly as a merging of his dual identities as a classical musician and African man: “I’ve had to learn to allow classical music and my culture to live in one space rather than separate them.”  

In his most recent concerts with the Seattle Symphony, he gave three stunning performances of his Symphony co-commission, Four Spirits (arranged by Benjamin Woodgates). He’ll perform three of his original compositions upon his return. 

Two of those, Qhawe (Hero) and Lerato (Love), are from Where Is Home, while Kea Morata (I Love Them So) was written in 2022 for The Oracle project with Manchester Collective. Qhawe and Kea Morata are upbeat, fast-paced numbers that feature a form of South African overtone singing called umngqokolo, a style of deep guttural utterances that join more melodic singing and chanting in the Sesotho language of his home township, beatboxing, growling and various other vocalizations. In Lerato, Selaocoe’s intones are quiet, sweet and sublime ascensions that he’s described as reflecting the sound world of the South African hymn singing with which he is familiar. All are set against an adept and varied style of cello playing — plucking, strumming, slapping and bowing of the strings — as well as percussive taps and thumps on his instrument’s body. He’ll also be performing a work by Giovanni Sollima: Selections from When We Were Trees. Seeing Selaocoe perform all of these works adapted for full orchestra, joined by percussionist John Hadfield, will be a rare and exquisite treat, especially with conductor Giancarlo Guerrero at the podium.  

(Presented in the Tchaikovsky & Selaocoe program February 6 & 8, in the S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium) 

RAYMOND YIU 
 
London-based composer Raymond Yiu takes inspiration from culture, history and poetry. His orchestral, chamber and choral works straddle East and West, adding strands of tension and drama along with a touch of jazz (he is also a jazz pianist). Born in Hong Kong in 1973, Yiu started piano lessons at age 4, eventually moving to England in 1990, around the same time he started teaching himself to compose. He ultimately ended up studying engineering but in 2009, after working in information technology for about 13 years and composing on the side, Yiu abandoned his day job to pursue a doctorate in composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama under the guidance of Julian Anderson. Early in Yiu’s musical career, the composer Lukas Foss took an interest in Yiu’s music and conducted the premiere of his chamber piece, Distance of the Moon, at the Bridgehampton Music Festival in 2001.  

Fast forward to 2010, when Yiu won a BASCA British Composer Award for Northwest Wind. But his profile as an important composer was really solidified in 2013 when conductor Long Yu, a major force in China’s classical music scene, gave the world premiere of his work, The London Citizen Exceedingly Injured with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. That was followed by the 2015 BBC Proms premiere of his Symphony with countertenor Andrew Watts, conductor Edward Gardner and the BBC Symphony Orchestra; the work sets to music the poetry of Walt Whitman and Constantine P. Cavafy, among others. Later, his chamber piece commemorating the Chinese Labour Corps of World War I, Corner of a Foreign Field, was shortlisted for a 2020 Royal Philharmonic Society Music Award.  

Yiu’s Violin Concerto — a co-commission between the Seattle Symphony, BBC Radio 3 and Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra — is a soulful reflection on exile and nostalgia. According to the composer, it meditates “on the turbulent history of China in the 20th century, and the place of Chinese musicians in the realm of western classical music.”  He took inspiration from the life and works of Ma Sicong (1912–1987), a Chinese violinist and composer who, in 1967, escaped torture by Mao’s Cultural Revolution, found his way to the U.S. and never returned to China. The political and social unrest in Hong Kong in recent years prompted Yiu’s family to relocate to the U.K., adding a personal poignancy to the work. 

The 37-minute-long violin concerto, his first, is cast in four movements: Larghetto, volubile (an introduction); Vivo con brio–Andantino grazioso (a scherzo in the style of shidaiqu, a type of Chinese popular music); Andante desolato (a soliloquy cast as a cadenza); and Mesto, a finale that draws on sounds from Nostalgia from Sicong’s Inner Mongolia Suite (1937). 

“Throughout the concerto you can be transported to different time periods in China, really feeling the history, culture, and hearing the country’s traditional music and instruments as well,” soloist Esther Yoo, for whom Yiu wrote the piece, told The Strad before the world premiere on March 20, 2024, at the Barbican. In his review for The Times of London, Geoff Brown commented that the concerto “endowed this BBC Symphony Orchestra concert with an unusually high quotient of musical substance for ears, heart and mind.” 

Yoo gives the U.S. premiere with the Seattle Symphony; Alexander Shelley conducts.  

(Presented in the Dvořák New World Symphony program April 10–12, in the S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium) 

ALLISON LOGGINS-HULL 

Allison Loggins-Hull is a composer, flutist and producer who has collaborated with acts spanning the spectrum of popular and classical music, from Hans Zimmer to Frank Ocean to Imani Winds. Flutronix, her electro-acoustic duo project with fellow flutist/composer Nathalie Joachim, redefined and modernized the wind instrument well before Lizzo burst onto the scene, though Loggins-Hull has also collaborated with that superstar rapper/singer on several occasions, including leading what she’s described as a “flute army” at Lizzo’s 2023 MET Gala performance. “I believe that being a performer informs me greatly as a composer and vice versa,” she’s said. 

Loggins-Hull’s work as The Cleveland Orchestra’s 11th Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellow — a position that began in the 2022/2023 season and continues for three seasons — is centered around the narratives and history of Cleveland via chamber music performances, composition workshops with students and community concerts, in addition to several TCO commissions, including an expanded arrangement of her composition Can You See? in 2023 (originally commissioned in 2021 for the New Jersey Symphony Chamber Players) and Legacy in 2024. 

Her music reflects contemporary social and political themes, including motherhood, Blackness and cultural identity. “I not only find great satisfaction in creating music that is telling someone’s story or is reflective of an experience, but it helps me in my compositional process, it gives me a shape, an arc, a mood, an idea of sounds,” she said in a short video documentary about her re-arrangement of Can You See?, in which she responded to The Star-Spangled Banner while reflecting on the U.S.’s complicated history. “I found myself really leaning into the statement in the anthem, ‘Land of the Free.’ It’s no secret there are plenty of people here that do not feel like they are living a free life. So, what is our responsibility as citizens, the larger community, to fix that?” 

Loggins-Hull has an impressive catalog of compositions. Among them are Homeland for Solo Flute (2018), commissioned by the Texas Flute Society for the Myrna Brown Competition and composed in response to Hurricane Maria’s destruction in Puerto Rico; 7th Ave. S (2022), a three-movement work for flute, oboe, violin, cello, acoustic guitar and electric guitar inspired by her experiences living and creating in Greenwich Village that was commissioned and premiered in NYC by Cygnus Ensemble; Persist (2022), a National Endowment for the Arts commission for flute, string quartet and electronics, premiered by NYC-based string quartet ETHEL and inspired by her relatives and ancestors while jumping off the concepts of perseverance, motivation and positive outlook; Love Always (2020), a song cycle written with Toshi Reagon for contemporary chamber ensemble Alarm Will Sound, inspired by the African American tradition of elders writing letters to their children; Supply (2023), a Carnegie Hall co-commission inspired by addictive relationships and premiered at the hall by yMusic; and Ban (2023) for flute, piccolo, digital stomp box and string quartet, inspired by censorship in literature and commissioned by the Apollo Chamber Players. 

The West Coast premiere of her Rhapsody for Solo Flute & Orchestra (commissioned by the Seattle Symphony in collaboration with The Knights and Boston Symphony Orchestra) will be performed by Principal Flute Demarre McGill in three concerts that culminate with Ravel’s Boléro and feature the return of Conductor Emeritus Ludovic Morlot. In between, Loggins-Hull herself appears in the last Octave 9 Series program of the season, Remix, performing new versions of her own works (Banned, Homeland Remix and Persist) joined by a Seattle Symphony string quartet. Should make for an extraordinary season closer. 

(Flute Rhapsody is presented in the Ravel Bolero program June 19, 21 & 22, in the S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium; and the Remix program is presented twice on June 20, in Octave 9: Raisbeck Music Center) 

MORE LIVING COMPOSERS IN 2024/2025 
In addition to the four living composers that are spotlighted above, here are some more whose works will be featured in the Seattle Symphony’s 2024/2025 season. 

Angelica Negrón, Fractal Isles (2021) 
Opening Night Concert, September 14 
 
Bent Sørensen, Trumpet Concerto (2013; U.S. Premiere) 
Symphonic Series: Mozart Jupiter Symphony, October 17 & 19 
 
Arturo Márquez, Danzon No. 2 for Orchestra (1994) 
Gabriela Ortiz, Kauyumari (2021) 
Family Concerts Series: Día de Muertos, October 19 
 
Bora Yoon, ( (( PHONATION )) ) (2007) 
Octave 9 Series: ( (( PHONATION )) ), October 25 
 
John Adams, First Quartet (2008) 
Angelique Poteat, Meditation on Providence (2022) 
Chamber Series: John Adams to César Franck, November 5 
 
Soosan Lolavar, Mâh Didam (I Saw the Moon) (2016)  
Niloufar Nourbakhsh, Veiled (2019)  
Golnaz Shariatzadeh, Fabric of Sorrow (2023) 
Deniz Tafaghodi, New Multimedia/Audiovisual Work (2024; World Premiere) 
Mojgan Misaghi, 3 Miniatures for Solo Violin (2022) 
Aida Shirazi, Selections from Soliloquy for the Unnamed (2021)
Octave 9 Series: Composing Iran, November 22 
 
Howard Blake, The Snowman (1982) 
Quinn Mason, Christmas Eve Festivities (2015–2016) 
Family Concerts Series: The Snowman, December 14 
 
Benjamin Attahir, Concerto for Piano & Harp (2024; Seattle Symphony Co-commission) 
Symphonic Series: Ravel Mother Goose, January 30–February 1 

Jennifer Higdon, blue cathedral (2000) 
Giovanni Sollima, Selections from When We Were Trees (2008)  
Symphonic Series: Selaocoe & Tchaikovsky, February 6 & 8 
 
Bruce Ruddell, The Healing Heart of the First People of this Land (2006) 
Community Concerts Series: The Healing Heart of the First People of This Land, March 7 
 
Brian Raphael Nabors, Upon Daybreak for Orchestra (2022; Seattle Symphony Co-commission) 
Symphonic Series: Stravinsky The Rite of Spring, March 13–15 
 
Wynton Marsalis, At the Octoroon Balls (1995) 
Seth Krimsky, Out of the Woodwork (2024) 
Chamber Series: Chick Corea to Wynton Marsalis, March 18 
 
Jessie Montgomery, Starburst (2012) 
Dai Wei, The Dancing Moonlight (2017) 
Dorothy Chang, Northern Star (2017) 
John Williams, Main Title from Star Wars (1977) 
Family Concerts Series: A Trip to Outer Space, March 22 

Billy Childs, Diaspora Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra (2022) 
Symphonic Series: Holst The Planets: An HD Odyssey, March 27, 29 & 30 

Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR), Redemption Songs & Sonatas (2014) 
Octave 9 Series: Redemption Songs & Sonatas, March 21 

August Baik, New Commission (2024) 
Thomas Adès, Alchymia (2021) 
Chamber Series: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to Thomas Adès, April 22 
 
Gulli Björnsson, Ljósíd (2024–2025; Seattle Symphony Co-commission & World Premiere) 
Octave 9 Series: Ljósíd, May 2 
 
Reena Esmail, Ram Tori Maya (2022) 
Family Concerts Series: Songs and Dances of India, May 3 

Tan Dun, Nu Shu: The Secret Songs of Women (2013) 
Symphonic Series: Tan Dun Conducts Nu Shu: The Secret Songs of Women, May 15 & 16 

Ludovic Morlot’s position is generously underwritten as the Judith Fong Conductor Emeritus.  

Tine Thing Helseth’s performances are generously sponsored by Stephen Rebecca Whyte.  

Abel Selaocoe’s performances are generously sponsored by Stephen Rebecca Whyte.  

Performances of Raymond Yiu’s Violin Concerto are generously underwritten by the Richard E. Lang and Jane Lang Davis Living Music Program. 

The Arakawa Foundation proudly supports the Seattle Symphony’s Community Partnerships for Youth and Education. Additional support is provided by Delta Air Lines.