www.danielsonenberg.org

Program note by the composer: This is the fifth piece I've written for Composers Ensemble. I love the challenge posed by the odd mix of instruments. Almost always it involves figure out what to do with some number of plucked strings and extra keyboard instruments. For this short prelude I decided to treat guitar, mandolin, accordion, synthesizer and voice as a kind of sub-ensemble within the group, perhaps inspired by my teacher David Del Tredici's use of "folk ensemble" in some of his early Alice pieces. The joy of writing for Composers Ensemble is that you get to hear the work while it is still be written (since we rehearse drafts in the first part of the semester). Initially I thought the voice part would be a small one, but when I heard the terrific sound of singer Josie Lawrence with the ensemble, I expanded the vocal part accordingly.

Bio: Daniel Sonenberg is a composer, performer and educator living in Portland, Maine. His opera The Summer King, on the life of Negro League baseball great Josh Gibson, received its concert world premiere in 2014 in a performance presented by Portland Ovations and co-sponsored by the University of Southern Maine. The fully-staged World Premiere was presented by Pittsburgh Opera on April 29, 2017, starring baritone Alfred Walker and mezzo soprano Denyce Graves, and received a second production by Michigan Opera Theatre in May 2018. Mr. Sonenberg’s short one act opera Girl in Six Beats, with a libretto by seven high school students, was commissioned by Opera Maine as part of an initiative with The Telling Room and the University of Southern Maine. It had its world premiere at USM in April 2018 and will be premiered in a newly orchestrated version at USM in October 2020. His First Light: A Fanfare for Maine, commissioned in celebration of Maine’s bicentennial, was scheduled to have its world premiere by the Portland Symphony Orchestra on March 15, 2020 (a performance postponed due to the Coronavirus pandemic).

Other recent works include Rope Ladder (2018), commissioned by the Cassatt Quartet for clarinetist Vasko Dukovsky, and Beauty is Not Enough (2019), a song cycle on poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, commissioned by Resinosa Ensemble. Additional performances by Opera America, the Da Capo Chamber Players, American Opera Projects, percussionist Lynn Vartan, Fort Worth Opera, members of the Portland Symphony Orchestra and numerous others. In the past several years he has also been active as a rock musician, releasing a solo album, Peaks Island Ferry, in 2014, and both an E.P. (The Bear (2013)) and full length album (Long Overdue (2015)) with his band Lovers of Fiction. He is Professor of Music at the University of Southern Maine, where he has taught since 2004.