Steven Mackey Rocks the Wind

By Leilani Polk

In his new saxophone concerto and Seattle Symphony co-commission, Anemology, GRAMMY-winning composer Steven Mackey explores one of his favorite concepts, motion, through the invisible force of wind, including how it moves and the sounds that it can make. 

Mackey has been fascinated with wind since he was a kid growing up in rural Northern California, listening as it blew through the trees and “having deep thoughts for a 10 year old about this ephemeral thing: you can’t see it, you can only see its effect and you wouldn’t be able to hear it, either, if it weren’t for the waving branches and rustling leaves.” There’s a word for this: soughing, which is the moaning, whistling or rushing sound the wind makes in trees or on the sea. “There’s a very lyrical, relaxing, chill quality to it, so the lyrical, relaxing, chill quality of my second movement finally gave me an opportunity to bring that word out and use it in public.” 

Because woodwinds are generally capable of speed, agility, a variety of color and a quality of sound that can be big and ballsy, and because of his ongoing admiration for sax whiz Timothy McAllister’s style of virtuosity, he wrote the concerto with McAllister in mind. They’ve been collaborators for more than two decades — Mackey has written a few works for McAllister’s all-sax Prism Quartet — and as Mackey has pointed out, “His playing howls, grooves, flutters and flows like the wind.” McAllister, he says, is the perfect “frontman” for orchestra and Mackey wanted to write something befitting of McAllister’s talents. “I really just went for it. Tim’s virtuosity allows me the chance to give the orchestra some muscle but not overshadow the hero.”

Due to his background, Mackey is particularly adept at thinking outside the traditional confines of a concert hall. A guitarist who got into classical music at age 19, Mackey’s entire career trajectory changed after hearing a single wild note in Beethoven’s final work, the String Quartet No. 16 in F Major. “As a blues guitar player, I was always in search of the notes that hurt so good. If you listen to someone like Jimi Hendrix, he’s playing like that, he’s using every space in the continuum, from noise to a blues scale to the chromatic scale to … everything. But then hearing this [Beethoven], I was like, wow — that’s the most psychedelic blues note I’d ever encountered, and it just got me interested.”

Mackey started taking a music appreciation course in college, where he was exposed to sounds he never knew existed, from Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring to Mozart piano concertos and Monteverdi madrigals, to Crumb’s Black Angels. His mind was blown. “When I heard that Beethoven and Rite of Spring, I thought, this is what I want to do — I want to create that sense of transcendence.” 

He was majoring in physics at the time and he’d learned to play guitar by ear, so when he approached the head of the music department to discuss changing his major, he was essentially laughed at; not only did he have no formal training, but he couldn’t even read music. Mackey was unfazed. “I was blessed with this blissful naivete that I could actually do it.” He started taking classes in music theory and studying classical guitar, spent years learning about American serialism and modernism and as he puts it, “coming at it with the zeal of a convert.” When he got out of graduate school, he was ready to apply all this knowledge and techniques, but also, “I had a heart and some guts and some viscera that I could work from to make my music different.”  

His compositions are informed by his rock ’n roll roots. “My music has more groove than your average modern composer, and it probably aims at more hooks.” In his Saxophone Concerto, he says the orchestra is an equal partner with the soloist — no need to play soft for McAllister to be heard. But more important to Mackey than the volume is the idea of motion and the magical illusion of movement, “that varying frequencies at varying intervals of time, that rhythm and pitch, can create this sense of movement. So Anemology with Tim at the at the front, is really about motion and the orchestra. They’re gonna be on their toes.” 

Each of the movements are named for a type of wind; the first, Spindrift, is the spray blown from the crests of waves. “On the one hand, you’ve got this forceful, directed movement, which is how it begins, and then it ends up in this kind of mist. So there’s the same effect of the wind’s speed and fluidity in the movement, where, instead of running into some triumphant ‘Ta-da’ moment, it dissipates.”  

The relaxing, lyrical second movement is the sound of Soughing, while the third and final movement is Aeolian Howl, the sound of a howling wind. “One of the things that a saxophone can do really well, and that Tim is really good at it, is playing multiphonics.” Saxophonists usually play a single note at a time but with the right kind of false fingering and embouchure, they can play multiple notes at once. While working on this movement, Mackey asked McAllister to send his best multiphonic, one he could execute well, and used it as a launch point. “The whole movement is kind of based on that sound, which seemed like an alien howl to me.” 

Mackey is looking forward to bringing this concerto to our main stage this November as well as working with the Symphony’s Education and Community Engagement team to mentor young music-making members of the Seattle community in his role as a Seattle Symphony Artist in Focus. A longtime educator who has been on the Princeton University music faculty since 1985, the Curtis Institute of Music composition faculty since 2022, and directed the NJS’s Edward T. Cone Composition Institute since 2014, Mackey will have plenty of wisdom and practical knowledge to share. He’ll also be reuniting with Music Director Xian Zhang when he returns in June to perform RIOT, written for the New Jersey Symphony’s Centennial Celebration, commissioned and conducted by Xian, and brought to the Seattle Symphony to be paired with Beethoven’s Ninth to close Xian’s inaugural season. Stay tuned. 

See Anemology: Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra performed by Timothy McAllister and the Seattle Symphony on November 20 & 22, 2025, in a program that also includes Copland’s Quiet City (featuring Symphony soloists on trumpet and English horn) and John Adams’ Harmonielehre. Read more about the program HERE.

Performances of Steven Mackey’s Anemology: Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra are generously underwritten by the Richard E. Lang and Jane Lang Davis Living Music Program. 

Music Director Xian Zhang is generously sponsored by Dr. and Mrs. Charles and Lisa Simonyi and an anonymous donor.   

Xian Zhang’s position is generously underwritten as the Harriet Overton Stimson Music Director. 

Steven Mackey’s performances are generously sponsored by the James D. and Sherry Raisbeck Foundation. 

Performances of Xian Conducts Beethoven 9 are generously sponsored by the Nesholm Family Foundation.