The UW Composition program presents "Simple Pleasures," a program of works by student composers Yongwoo Lee, Amelia Matsumoto, Eddie Mospan, and Oliver Schooner.
Program
Pendulum for clarinet and piano (2024)
Yongwoo Lee
A Post Card (2025) for recorded voice
Amelia Matsumoto
To those who stand untroubled at the doorway (2025) for solo contrabass
Eddie Mospan
Simple Pleasures (2024) for piano, windchimes, electric fan, tea kettle, fixed media and one performer
Oliver Schoonover
Program Notes
Pendulum for clarinet and piano (2024): Yongwoo Lee
The pendulum’s powerful, vortex-like motion bursts out in many directions, its movement evoking a strong force. One feels that force.
Then the hanging pendulum strikes the limits of its power through physical finiteness.
As the pendulum comes to a stop and converges toward an infinite zero, a faint tremor remains from a microscopic perspective.
A Post Card (2025) for recorded voice: Composed by Amelia Matsumoto; Produced by Hazel Michael Salvaggio
Here is a post card. Send it to at least five people. Maybe it’s five people you love, maybe it’s ten
people you hate. Your feelings for them will be sincerely felt when they sing this post card piece.
To those who stand untroubled at the doorway (2025) for solo contrabass: Eddie Mospan
To those who shimmer,
To those who find themselves translucent,
To those who linger in the atmosphere:
To those whose laughter scintillates
To those who do not cool and settle, but bask in the glow of their amorphous incandescence,
To those whose clicking eyelids capture moments and turn them into places:
I recognize you, I see you, I know you.
I hear you.
I remember you.
I am you.
I too have lived in the interstices.
I write to those who do not wait, but stand untroubled at the doorway.
Simple Pleasures for piano, windchimes, electric fan, tea kettle, fixed media and one performer
(2024) : Oliver Schoonove
Simple Pleasures is dedicated to Doogan Townsend, who gave me hexatonic windchimes
for my 22nd birthday. The piece is a celebration of the beautiful ringing of the windchimes, the
hexatonic collection, everyday noises such as water pouring and an electric fan, the drama of a
teapot slowly boiling, and the many sounds of electronic music. The piano writing is non-virtuosic and invites the performer to savor every interval, immersing themselves in the hexatonic sound and enjoying moments it breaks from the collection. I’ve never had more fun while writing a piece and I hope this comes across.
Director Biographies
William Dougherty is an American composer, sound artist, educator, and writer who joined the University of Washington faculty in January 2025. Dougherty's works have been performed internationally by ensembles including BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (Glasgow), The Sun Ra Arkestra (Philadelphia), Yarn/Wire (New York), Ensemble Phoenix (Basel), TILT Brass (New York), Ensemble for New Music Tallinn (Estonia), JACK Quartet (New York), and Talea Ensemble (New York). His music has been featured in festivals such as Tectonics Glasgow (2023), IRCAM's ManiFeste (2019), musikprotokoll (2018), Donaueschingen Musiktage (2017), New Music Miami (2017), Tectonics Festival New York (2015), the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (2015), the 47th Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt (2014), the New York Philharmonic Biennale (2014), and broadcast on BBC Radio 3.
Dougherty was the recipient of the Luciano Berio Rome Prize in Music Composition from the American Academy in Rome. He has received additional recognitions, awards, and fellowships from Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Columbia University's Institute for Ideas & Imagination, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, the Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik (IGNM/ISCM), the Aaron Copland House, SEAMUS/ASCAP, BMI, PARMA Recordings, the PRS for Music Society, the American Composers Forum, the Philadelphia Orchestra Association, the Institute for European Studies, and the UK Foreign Aid and Commonwealth Office.
Dougherty earned his Doctorate of Musical Arts (DMA) degree at Columbia University in New York City, where he taught and assisted undergraduate courses in composition, music technology, and music theory at Columbia University. He previously served on the composition faculty at Temple University.
Dougherty graduated with a Bachelor’s in Music Composition from Temple University’s Boyer College of Music and Dance in Philadelphia where he studied with Maurice Wright, Richard Brodhead, and Jan Krzywicki. As a Marshall Scholar, Dougherty earned his Master’s from the Royal College of Music in London studying with Kenneth Hesketh and Mark-Anthony Turnage after which he completed supplementary studies (Ergänzungsstudium) under the guidance of Georg Friedrich Haas at the Hochschule für Musik Basel in Switzerland. In 2018-19, William completed the Cursus Programme in composition and computer music at IRCAM in Paris while in residence at Cité Internationale des Arts.
Huck Hodge is professor and chair of the composition program in the school of music. A composer of “harmonically fresh work", "full of both sparkle and thunder” (New York Times), his music has been praised for its “immediate impact” (Chicago Tribune), its "clever, attractive, streamlined" qualities (NRC Handelsblad, Amsterdam), and its ability to "conjure up worlds of musical magic” with “power and charisma" (Gramophone Magazine, London). There is a dramatic interplay of color, light, and darkness in his music, which emerges from an uncanny blending of pure and dissonant harmonies, widely spaced orchestrations and vast, diffuse timbres.
Hodge is the recipient of many prestigious awards and distinctions. Among these is the Charles Ives Living, the largest music award conferred by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His other major awards include the Rome Prize (Luciano Berio Fellowship), the Gaudeamus Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation in the Library of Congress, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, the American Composers Forum (JFund), the Barlow Endowment, Music at the Anthology (MATA), the American Academy in Rome, Muziek Centrum Nederland, Musik der Jahrhunderte, and the National Theater and Concert Hall of Taiwan, in addition to multiple grants and awards from ASCAP, the Bogliasco Foundation, Copland House, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), MacDowell, New Music USA, the Siemens Musikstiftung, and Yaddo.
His music has been performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and at numerous major festivals — the New York Philharmonic Biennial, Berliner Festspiele, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, Shanghai New Music Week (上海当代音乐周), ISCM World Music Days, and many others in over twenty countries on six continents. Other performances include those by members of the Berlin Philharmonic and Ensemble Modern, the ASKO / Schönberg Ensemble, the Seattle Symphony, and the Orchestra of the League of Composers. His chamber music has been premiered, performed and recorded by a long list of soloists and ensembles such as the Daedalus, JACK, Mivos, and Pacifica string quartets, the Adapter, Aleph, Argento, Dal Niente, Divertimento, Insomnio, SurPlus, and Talea ensembles, and his colleagues David Gordon, Donna Shin, Cristina Valdés, Cuong Vu, and Bonnie Whiting. His published music is distributed by Alexander Street Press (US) and Babel Scores (France). Recordings of his music appear on the New World and Albany record labels and have been featured in numerous national and international broadcasts.
Before joining the University of Washington, Hodge taught composition at Columbia University, where he earned his M.A. and D.M.A. studying with Fred Lerdahl, George Lewis, and Tristan Murail. Prior to this, he studied composition, theory, and new media at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Stuttgart, Germany, with Marco Stroppa and Georg Wötzer as well as music, German literature and philosophy at the University of Oregon and the Universität Stuttgart. He has been a visiting professor/invited lecturer on music and aesthetics at a variety of institutions including the University of Chicago, CNMAT/UC Berkeley, UCSD, Columbia University, Eastman School of Music, Manhattan School of Music, NYU, and the Universität der Künste in Berlin, and he served for three years as the director of the Merriman Family Young Composers Workshop at the Seattle Symphony.