Today’s Program

May 22, 2024

Midtown Arts & Theater Center Houston (MATCH) - Matchbox #2

Click on the links to learn more about each artist!

Ben Morris - Longleaf (2024, Loop38 Commission)

GRASS STAGE:

I. Ninety Million Acres

II. What East Texas Used to Sound Like

III. Lightning Burn

IV. Regrowth

V. Ten Thousand Years of Manmade Fire

ROCKET STAGE:

VI. Turpentine Blues

VII. The Sawmills

VIII. Clear Cut

IX. The Terrible, Empty Sky

X. Old Field

MATURE STAGE:

XI. Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires

XII. Pine Plantations

XIII. Prescribed Fire

XIV. Dawn Chorus

XV. Trees as Old as Earth

A note from the composer

The longleaf pine forest is an ecosystem that was once spread throughout ninety million miles of the American Southeast including rural East Texas. Now, only under three million acres remain, with under fifty thousand in Texas. It is a delicate ecosystem that must be maintained with frequent fires that clear out other species and create an open, majestic savannah habitat home to endangered species including the red cockaded woodpecker. This piece tells the story of this unparalleled tree: its flourishing through natural and indigenous manmade fires, its use to make turpentine during the early settlement days, its widespread destruction at the hands of the lumber barons and sawmills of the early 20th century, and its rebirth with the advent of responsible forestry and prescribed fires. The piece weaves together a tapestry of virtuosic brass features, ambisonic field recordings captured in longleaf forests, videos of longleaf habitats, found sounds, and historical photographs and videos from the East Texas Digital Archive, the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, and The National Archives.

About the composer

Ben Morris is a composer and jazz pianist whose music tells unconventional stories and crosses genre boundaries. His music has been described as "witty" (Wall Street Journal), “heart-touching” (OperaGene), "fresh" (All About Jazz), and "wonderfully inventive" (Tom Cipullo).

Ben’s creative work is inspired by his Norwegian heritage. He lived in Oslo, Norway on a Fulbright Grant and received an American-Scandinavian Foundation Grant to research the influence of folk music on Norwegian jazz. Ben's debut album, Pocket Guides, released in June 2022 on Origin/OA2 records and takes elements from Norwegian folk music, jazz, and contemporary chamber music. The music on the album garnered Ben two Downbeat Awards, two ASCAP Herb Alpert Jazz Composer Awards, a big band commission from New York Youth Symphony’s First Music Program, and an invitation to perform an original set with his quintet at the Newport Jazz Festival in 2019.

Also a versatile film, theatre, and opera composer, Ben is a frequent collaborator of librettist Laura Fuentes. His projects with Laura include Las Auténticas for the Washington National Opera American Opera Initiative, The Fall of Man and Other Tales, a multimedia work for the ATLAS B2 Black Box, Colorado Sky, a shadow puppet opera in collaboration with Sohap Ensemble, and The Rip Van Winkles, a youth opera commissioned by The Glimmerglass Festival. Ben scored the documentary films American River, which premiered at Montclair Film in 2021, and Saving the Great Swamp: The Battle to Defeat the Jetport, which won best documentary at the 2017 New Jersey Film Festival. He has worked as a music assistant, orchestrator, and copyist for documentary film composer and songwriter Michael Bacon in New York City.

Ben writes for unique ensembles that blur established genre expectations. He has worked with the American Composers Orchestra, Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, Jazz at Lincoln Center trombonist Vincent Gardner, unassisted fold, NOW Ensemble, Imani Winds, ~Nois, The Living Earth Show, Playground Ensemble, and the NDR Big Band. He has been a composer fellow at music festivals and workshops including the Aspen Music Festival, the American Composers Orchestra Jazz Composers Institute, Red Note Festival, Sibelius Academy Creative Dialogue, New Music on the Point, the International Gugak Workshop in South Korea, highScore, Source Song Festival, and the Imani Winds Chamber Music Festival, and his concert music has received accolades including an ASCAP Morton Gould Award and the International Society of Bassists Composition Contest Grand Prize.

Ben is an Assistant Professor of Composition at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas. He earned a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in composition at the University of Colorado Boulder as an ATLAS Fellow studying with Carter Pann and Michael Theodore, received a Master of Music degree from the Rice University Shepherd School of Music, where he was a Brown Fellow studying with Karim Al-Zand and Anthony Brandt, and graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Music from the University of Miami Frost School of Music, where he studied with Lansing McLoskey, Gary Lindsay, and Martin Bejerano. Outside of composing and teaching, Ben enjoys traveling, hiking, reading history books, and exploring art museums.

Tonight’s Performers

Alexander Ramazanov, trumpet // Brian Mangrum, horn // Cameron Kerl, trombone // Caitlin Mehrtens, harp // Graeme Francis, percussion // Jacob Schafer, violin // Astrid Nakamura, violin // Sergein Yap, viola // Chris Ellis, cello // Max Winningham, double bass // Craig Hauschildt, conductor

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Special thanks to Shawn Benedict, the Roy E. Larsen Sandyland Sanctuary, the Nature Conservancy, SFA College of Fine Arts Dean Gary Wertz for the Cole Faculty Excellence Grant, and Jenny Sanders with the Texas Longleaf Team!

This project is generously funded by Mid-America Arts Alliance, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the state arts agencies of Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas.

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