THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY College of Music presents the
22nd Biennial Festival of New Music
Matinee Concert (b)
featuring works by
Findley • Fleisher • Koh • Lee • Logunov
Friday, January 30, 2026 11:15 a.m. | Opperman Music Hall
PROGRAM
Evasive Maneuvers (2021) Scott Lee
Steven Higbee, clarinet
Logan Florence, guitar
Minims for Max (2023)
I. Silhouette
II. What’s in a Name?
III. Approach and Retreat
IV. Sessions with Roger
V. A is for Anton
VI. North/South Consonance
VII. Maxed Out
to till the ground (2024)
unheard (2022)
Study of Snowflakes (2025)
Dain Lee, piano
Carlos Guevara, guitar
Charlotte MacDonald, bass clarinet
Zachary Matthews, baritone saxophone
Dawson Huynh, clarinet; Anthony Zamora, piano
Bárbara Santiago, violin; Turner Sperry, cello
Robert Fleisher
Dylan Findley
Emily Koh
Alexey Logunov
To Ensure An Enjoyable Concert Experience For All…
Please refrain from talking, entering, or exiting during performances. Food and drink are prohibited in all concert halls. Recording or broadcasting of the concert by any means, including the use of digital cameras, cell phones, or other devices is expressly forbidden. Please deactivate all portable electronic devices including watches, cell phones, pagers, hand-held gaming devices or other electronic equipment that may distract the audience or performers.
Recording Notice: This performance may be recorded. Please note that members of the audience may at times be included in this process. By attending this performance you consent to have your image or likeness appear in any live or recorded video or other transmission or reproduction made in conjunction to the performance.
Florida State University provides accommodations for persons with disabilities. Please notify the College of Music at (850) 644-3424 at least five working days prior to a musical event to request accommodation for disability or alternative program format.
Lee: Evasive Maneuvers
Written for Silviu Ciulei and Jeffrey Brooks, Evasive Maneuvers features slinking clarinet tunes and syncopated guitar grooves that weave around each other in different streams of rhythmic activity, sometimes seemingly at odds, and sometimes coming together. Knowing Silviu’s extensive background in flamenco, I incorporated a number of noisy and virtuosic flamenco guitar techniques into the piece, such as the rasgueado, which involves the rapid strumming of a note or chord with each finger in quick succession. The clarinet complements the guitar with trilling and rapid flourishes, also serving to introduce much of the melodic material throughout the piece.
Praised as “colorful” and “engaging” (The Philadelphia Inquirer), Scott Lee’s music often takes inspiration from popular genres, exploring odd-meter grooves and interlocking hockets while featuring pointillistic orchestration and extended performance techniques. Lee served as the Bozeman Symphony’s first-ever Composer-in-Residence from 2021–2024, and has worked with leading orchestras including the Baltimore, North Carolina, and Portland Symphony Orchestras, and chamber groups such as the JACK Quartet, yMusic, the Da Capo Chamber Players, and pop artist Ben Folds. Recent commissioners include the Barlow Endowment, Tanglewood Music Center, Aspen Music Festival, and Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra. Notable honors include a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, and winner of the Symphony in C Young Composer’s Competition. Lee is currently an Assistant Professor of Composition at the University of Florida.
Fleisher: Minims for Max
The Minims for Max (2023) were written at the request of Max Lifchitz, after his NYC premiere of my Six Little Piano Pieces. Each Minim is linked to Max: “Silhouette” is based on the first of his five Piano Silhouettes. “What’s in a Name?” translates each letter of “Max Lifchitz” into music. “Approach” and “Retreat” recalls the chordal parallelism in Max’s “Me acerco y me retiro” for mezzo-soprano, contralto, and piano, while exploring a subtle link between that work and another by Arnold Schoenberg. “Sessions with Roger” is based on a flute-clarinet duo Max wrote in 1968 for a Juilliard class led by Roger Sessions. “A is for Anton” uses the 12-tone row (also starting with A) on which Schoenberg’s pupil, Anton Webern, based his Klavierstück. “North/South Consonance” musically encodes its own title, honoring Max’s more than four decades promoting new music. “Maxed Out” is derived from the second movement of Max Reger’s Clarinet Quintet and the opening of Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei for cello and orchestra.
Robert Fleisher’s music has been heard throughout the United States and in more than a dozen other countries, and has been released on as many record labels. His scores have been exhibited in the United States, France, and the Netherlands. Fleisher’s acoustic music has been called “eloquent” (Ann Arbor News), “lovely and emotional” (Musicworks), “ingenious” (The Strad), and praised for its “astoundingly attractive vertical sonorities” (Perspectives of New Music); his electro-acoustic works have been described as “fascinating” (Fanfare), “endearingly low-tech” and possessing “a rich, tactile texture” (The New York Times). The author of Twenty Israeli Composers (1997), he is also a contributing composer and essayist in Theresa Sauer’s Notations 21 (2008). Awarded multiple artist residencies in the U.S. and abroad, Fleisher’s music has also received support from the Illinois Arts Council and the Ruttenberg Arts Foundation. He is Professor Emeritus at Northern Illinois University.
Findley: to till the ground
The title to till the ground came after the music. The modal musical vocabulary, lulling rhythms, snappy embellishments, and hushed chromatic musings look backward to ancient practices. In a world saturated with information, most of life’s most precious lessons still come from the experience gained by the sweat of one’s brow and in connecting to the earth and its Creator.
With music that “sweeps us away with its energy and liveliness,” (AM:plified Magazin, Germany) Dylan Findley’s music explores and expresses intangible truths through the convergence of heart, mind, spirit, and body without disregarding the power of irony and dry wit. His career has led him to premieres on three continents by top new music performers. As clarinetist, he has performed and improvised music across the US and in Ireland and Colombia. Dylan has received commissions from the City of Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture, the Barlow Endowment, the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts, São Paulo Contemporary Composers Festival Orchestral Commissioning Project, and New American Voices. His works have been performed by the McCormick Percussion Group, Ensemble Mise-En, newEar, Transient Canvas, Galán Trio, members of of the Cleveland Orchestra, Quarteto L’Arianna, Mnemosyne Quartet, Great Noise Ensemble, PULSE Trio, and the Frost Symphony Orchestra. He teaches at the College of Wooster.
Koh: unheard
I have said, screamed and shouted, but it remains unheard, and you have gone.
Emily Koh is a Singaporean composer based in Atlanta, Georgia whose music reimagines everyday experiences by sonically expounding tiny oft-forgotten details, and explores binary states such as extremities/boundaries and activity/ stagnation. She especially enjoys collaborating with creatives of other specializations. Emily is the recipient of awards such as the Copland House Residency Award, Young Artist Award (National Arts Council, Singapore), Yoshiro Irino Memorial Prize (Asian Composers League), ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, Prix D’Ete (Peabody), and others. Described as “beautifully eerie” (New York Times), and “subtly spicy” (Baltimore Sun), Emily’s music has been performed around the world, and is published by Babel Scores (Europe) and Poco Piu Publishing (worldwide). Emily is currently Associate Professor of Music Composition at the University of Georgia, USA.
Logunov: Study of Snowflakes
Study of Snowflakes is written for Unheard-of//Ensemble and is inspired by my reflections on Christmas of 2024. I was thinking about how the holidays can bring a heightened sense of pressure and loneliness for many people. Wilson Bentley’s famous images of snowflakes, with their endless diversity of shapes, reminded me of how unique our life experiences are and how fragile our emotions can be. Their fleeting beauty serves as a reminder to pause and appreciate small moments of happiness — moments that help us endure even the most difficult times.
Alexey Logunov is a composer and pianist from Saint-Petersburg, Russia. He graduated in 2014 from Saint-Petersburg State Conservatory of Rimsky-Korsakov. In 2020, he earned a master’s degree in composition from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. Alexey is now a doctoral student in the Composition Department at the Jacobs School. Logunov’s compositions have been performed at numerous festivals in Russia and internationally, including RED NOTE, Synesthesia Lab, Bang on a Can LOUD Weekend, Performing Media Festival 2024, SEAMUS@40, From Avantgarde to Present Days, Sound Ways, reMusik.org, Midwest Composers Symposium 2019. Alexey is a winner of a 2023 Georgina Joshi Composition Commission Award at Jacobs School of Music and a nominee for a 2024 American Academy of Arts and Letters music award. He was respectively a scholar of and a student of the X and XI International Young Composers Academy in Tchaikovsky-city and a participant of 2023 and 2024 Splice Institute.