Acclaimed faculty composer Martin Kennedy to present original chamber works April 9

Martin Kennedy, assistant professor of theory & composition in Washington University’s Department of Music in Arts & Sciences, will present a concert of original chamber music at 8 p.m. Sunday, April 9, in Steinberg Auditorium.

The concert is free and open to the public. Steinberg Auditorium is located in the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum’s Steinberg Hall, near the intersection of Skinker and Forsyth boulevards. For more information, call (314) 935-4841 or email staylor@wustl.edu.

Kennedy was born in England in 1978 and moved to America as a child. He earned bachelor of music degrees in both piano performance and composition from the Indiana University School of Music, as well as a master of music degree in composition. Kennedy went on to earn a doctorate from the Juilliard School in 2005 and joined Washington University’s music department last fall.

The program will open with These Parting Gifts (1997), a composition for two violins (Nicolae Bica and Shawn Weil, both of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra) and piano (Kennedy) written during the composer’s freshman year at Indiana.

“The work is in four movements,” Kennedy explains. “Each one depicts an episode in the life of two people who now are left with only memories – consolation prizes, perhaps – of one another.”

The program continues with Distraction (2003), a short piece for guitar (undergraduate Rosaline Moussa), violin (Bica) and viola (Mike Chen of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra), which was originally commissioned by the group Duo46. Next is The Touch of Dreams (2000), a song-cycle for piano (Kennedy), tenor and clarinet (the music department’s James Harr and Paul Garritson, respectively) based on five poems from Carl Sandburg’s Fogs and Fires.

“Touch of Dreams is cyclical in design, with motifs recurring throughout the work,” Kennedy notes. “Most notably, a lullaby theme that is heard in the first song, ‘I Sang,’ returns frequently throughout the piece to reinforce the ‘nighttime story’ theme of the poems.”

The program will conclude with Kennedy performing his Piano Sonata (2004), originally written for pianist Soheil Nasseri’s 2003-04 concert season at Lincoln Center in New York.

Kennedy has received several prestigious composition honors, including five ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards. His work has been performed by the American Composers Orchestra, the Bloomington Camerata Orchestra, the Polish National Chamber Orchestra of Slupsk, the Haddonfield Symphony and the Shenandoah Symphony Orchestra, among others.

Kennedy’s music is published by Theodore Presser Company, the oldest — and among the most distinguished — music publishers in the United States. Kennedy also remains active as a pianist, performing both as a soloist and in collaboration with such distinguished artists as violinist Lara St. John and flutist Thomas Robertello, recording a CD with the latter, Souvenir: Works by Fauré and Kennedy (1999).

For more information about Kennedy, visit www.martinkennedy.com