Dr. Andrew Martin Smith and Jamie Leigh Sampson.
Jamie Leigh Sampson and Andrew Martin Smith, contingent faculty members of the Fredonia School of Music since 2015, were featured guest composers at a two-day residency at Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Mich., on Monday and Tuesday, April 11 and 12.
The residency included lectures, master classes and a concert given by the Hillsdale College Faculty Woodwind Quintet (Jaimie Wagner, flute; Christopher Wheeler, oboe; Andrew Sprung, clarinet; Al Taplin, horn; Cindy Duda, bassoon) with lyric soprano Kristi Matson. The concert includes tandem premieres of works written by Ms. Sampson and Dr. Smith, commissioned specifically for the ensemble, which will be performed alongside music by Nino Rota (1911–1979) and Giulio Briccialdi (1818–1881).
Sampson’s new woodwind quintet composition, “They Were Verbs,” is based upon a misread passage in a cookbook. When accidentally skipping a few lines of text, the resultant word combination of "they were ... verbs" seemed comical to the composer; yet, it also seemed quite poignant. “Our lives are lived in actions, which are understood through verbs. We are frequently told that we are what we repeatedly do,” Sampson explained.
The commissioned piece for woodwind quintet seemed like the perfect vehicle to explore the contrast between quiet verbs and action verbs, with a hazy opening that evolves into a flourishing run, the uneven dance that twirls into the chord progression at the end, and the pillars of sound that stand guard.
Smith’s work for soprano voice and woodwind quintet, “(dys)lexical trans(fer)mission,” is a quasi-dramatic set of musical variations based upon the composer’s own text, which abstractly describes an artist’s process and the frustrations inherent in managing creative thoughts and impulses. The text is gradually manipulated throughout the composition using literary/poetic techniques embraced by the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (i.e., Oulipo), as the protagonist searches for the “right” words to capture an ephemeral idea.
