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The Mizzou New Music Ensemble will present a concert featuring the world premiere of Dr. John Orfe’s Four Ozark Fable Sketches at 7:30 p.m. December 7, in the Sinquefield Music Center’s Sheryl Crow Hall.
Written expressly for the MNME, the piece’s four movements – Monarch’s Theme, Monster the First: MoMo, Monster the Second: Spooklights, and Monster the Third: Ozark Howler – are part of an original story in the manner of a folk tale whose characters hail from Missouri folk legends and jazz history.
The program includes a second piece by Dr. Orfe, titled Leviathan, as well as Near Distance by Chen Yi, Piezas Caracteristicas by Roberto Sierra, and Anchor by Henry Rusten.
Dr. Orfe has fulfilled commissions from acclaimed choirs, orchestras, and chamber ensembles across North Americaincluding Alarm Will Sound, and the American Guild of Organists, among many others. His music has been performed by major ensembles such as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Spokane Symphony Orchestra, and the Bergamot Quartet.
As pianist, Dr. Orfe has earned critical acclaim for his interpretations of five centuries of keyboard repertoire ranging from the canonic to the arcane. He has recorded on over thirty albums on the Cantaloupe, Nonesuch, Kairos, Parma, and Albany Records labels. He serves as Organist at First United Methodist Church in downtown Peoria, IL, where he was appointed the Peoria Symphony Orchestra’s first Composer-in-Residence. In addition, he began an appointment in 2025 as Music Director of the McDonough Choral Society in Macomb, IL.
Born in Guangzhou, China, Dr. Chen Yi transcends musical and cultural boundaries in her blending of Chinese and Western traditions. She holds a BA and an MA in Composition from the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and a DMA from Columbia University, and has studied composition with Wu Zuqiang, Chou Wen-chung and Mario Davidovsky. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005 and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2019. She has taught at the Peabody Conservatory and currently holds a professorship at the University of Missouri Kansas City, where she has been on faculty since 1998.
Dr. Chen’s music has been performed and commissioned by the world’s leading musicians and ensembles, including Yehudi Menuhin, Yo-Yo Ma, Evelyn Glennie, the Cleveland Orchestra, the BBC and Singapore Symphony Orchestras, the Seattle, Pacific, and Kansas City Symphonies, the Brooklyn, NY, and LA Philharmonics, Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. Her music has also been recorded on many labels based in the US, Europe, and Asia, including Naxos, Albany, Teldec, and the China Record Company, among others. Near Distance is a sextet subtitled “lost in thought about ancient culture and modern civilization,” expressing Chen Yi’s thinking about the parallels and contrasts between the East and the West.
Roberto Sierra’s studies included training at the Royal College of Music in London and at the Institute of Sonology in Utrecht, as well as advanced work in composition at the Hochschule fur Musik in Hamburg under György Ligeti. Sierra is currently professor of composition at Cornell University.
Piezas Caracteristicas, which brings together bongos and congas with bass clarinet, trumpet, percussion, piano, violin, and cello, is among Sierra’s most distinctive chamber work.
Mizzou New Music Initiative student Henry Rusten is a junior undergraduate double majoring in music composition and statistics.
The MNME, under the direction of faculty composer and Alarm Will Sound member Stefan Freund, collaborates with MU’s faculty and student composers, performs frequently on and off campus, and works with some of the world’s leading composers and interpreters of new music.
The Mizzou New Music Initiative is a diverse array of programs that position the University of Missouri School of Music as a leading center for the composition and performance of new music. The initiative is supported by the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation, led by Dr. Jeanne and Rex Sinquefield. Their vision is to create an incubator for the composition and performance of new music and to showcase Missouri as a center for the music of tomorrow.
The December 7 concert is free and open to the public.
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