ACC Music Presents
Find Your Voice
SIGNAL
Voices Along the Corridor
SOLI Chamber Ensemble
Stephanie Key, clarinet/bass clarinet
Ertan Torgal, violin
David Mollenauer, cello
Carolyn True, piano
Friday, September 18, 2026, 7:30 pm
Highland Recital Hall
Building 2000
Ethan Wickman
(b. 1973)
Relics from the Borderland (2017/2019)
I. Of Border, Badlands, and Banderas
II. Something About the Clouds
III. Twilight Echoes
IV. The Metallurgist's Scherzo
Reena Esmail
(b. 1983)
America/Desh (2020)
Pierre Jalbert
(b. 1967)
Endeavor (Variation on America the Beautiful) (2020)
Juri Seo 서주리
(b. 1981)
America the Beautiful, "sotto voce" (2020)
Edna Alejandra Longoria
(b. 1988)
Serenata al más allá (2025)
IV. Camino de cempasúchil (Path of Marigolds)
Jessie Montgomery
(b. 1981)
Peace (2020)
Elliott Miles McKiney
(b. 1969)
Symphony No. 1 for Four Players, Op. 21
SOLI opens its season on the road, carrying seven American works up the I-35 corridor. Each is a signal, and everything depends on who receives it. Some cross great distances: the personal stories in Ethan Wickman's Relics from the Borderland passed through generations before reaching him; and one familiar tune, sent to three composers in turn, returns as hope, as ebullience, and as the resolution only dissonance can offer a country still striving toward a more perfect union. Others travel no further than a single listener. Edna Alejandra Longoria follows the marigold scent that guides her abuelo's spirit home; Jessie Montgomery listens to sadness instead of trying to fix it. Elliott Miles McKinley closes the program, thirty years into his conversation with SOLI's musicians.
Ethan Wickman · Relics from the Borderland (2017/2019)
In February 2017, SOLI joined mezzo-soprano Tynan Davis, the Children's Chorus of San Antonio, and the San Antonio Chamber Choir to premiere Ballads of the Borderland, Wickman's forty-two-minute secular cantata on migration, memory, and assimilation across the South Texas border region. It set texts by San Antonio poets, John Phillip Santos and Carmen Tafolla among them, alongside oral history and interviews with multigenerational residents of the region. "Every family has a story to tell," Wickman wrote of the project. "These stories are given depth and meaning across generations as families migrate: leaving behind one's ancestral home and assimilating into new environs."
Relics from the Borderland is the suite Wickman drew from that material for SOLI. All four movements come from the cantata, three in their original instrumental form: the thunderous prelude "Of Borders, Badlands, and Banderas," the interlude "Twilight Echoes," and "The Metallurgist's Scherzo," built on the San Antonio master jeweler and metallurgist Alejandro Sifuentes.
"Something About the Clouds" is the exception. It began as Carmen Tafolla's poem set for unaccompanied choir, and in Wickman's rescoring, the instruments phrase its cadence, draw its imagery in tonal color, leaving the absence audible. "Twilight Echoes" followed that setting in the cantata and extended its mood without words. The suite keeps the pair in order, so the movement that lost its text is answered by the one that never had any.
something about this place, about this place that pulls me in and billows me along, and sizzles, carves, blooms, breaths, births infinite possibilities under this sky.
Carmen Tafolla, from "Something about the clouds" Wickman descends from Western frontier pioneer musicians and grew up in Southern California between the Pacific and the northern reach of the Sonoran Desert, a formation that accounts for the scale at which he tends to hear landscape. His later study of the oud with Ramy Adly and Yurdal Tokcan in Istanbul, undertaken after he wrote Ballads, has brought a modal and improvisatory dimension to his recent works. The New York Times has described him as "a composer of facility and imagination, the kind to whom performers and audiences respond." He is Professor of Composition and Theory at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Three Variations on America the Beautiful
Three solo piano works on this program come from America/Beautiful, the project pianist Min Kwon began in March 2020 and has been building ever since. Kwon commissioned seventy-six American composers, ranging in age from twenty-one to ninety-six, to respond to a single familiar tune, and released the complete set as a multi-disc recording in 2026. Her model was the Diabelli Variations: one unremarkable theme, distributed widely, revealing the differences among those who received it.
Reena Esmail · America/Desh (2020)
Esmail's variation braids "America the Beautiful" together with a melody in Raag Desh, drawn from Hindustani classical practice. The rationale is embedded in the word. Desh means "country" in Hindi, the root of desi, "of the country," and, as Esmail notes, it "implies a unity that precedes Partition." India's own patriotic hymn, Vande Mataram, is itself set in Raag Desh and likewise celebrates a vast nation's varied landscapes. The two songs share not only a subject but a mode. "For immigrants," Esmail writes, "the love of country is often as much for America as for their country of origin."
Raag Desh also brings with it a problem the piano cannot solve directly. Hindustani melody depends on meend, the continuous slide from one pitch to the next, and a piano has no way to bend a pitch once struck. Esmail writes around the limitation rather than through it, and the workaround is distinctive.
Esmail holds degrees from Juilliard and Yale and works deliberately between the two traditions, co-founding Shastra to make that traffic institutional rather than incidental.
Pierre Jalbert · Endeavor (Variation on America the Beautiful) (2020)
Jalbert describes Endeavor as "scherzo-like, playful, and dramatic." He isolates the falling third that opens "America the Beautiful," treats it as a motivic cell independent of the rest of the melody, and surrounds it with high, skittering figuration while the theme sounds above in long tones. The music then descends. "This eventually builds into more strident and rich chords in the meatier middle and low register, with the theme apparent but transformed." His closing sentence supplies the argument: "The natural landscapes of America will always be beautiful, despite our failings and our struggles to unite, even in times of crisis, as we endeavor to form a more perfect union."
Jalbert has taught at Rice University's Shepherd School since 1996 and co-founded the Houston new-music collective Musiqa. His honors include the Rome Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Juri Seo · America the Beautiful, "sotto voce" (2020)
Seo's variation is, in her account, "inspired by America's tenacious struggle to find elusive unity among its heterogeneous population." The tune arrives in pieces and accumulates toward a single event: an arabesque in B major suspended above the melody in B-flat. The two keys stand a semitone apart, which by any conventional measure is maximal dissonance. Seo hears it otherwise. "Ironically, this bitonal passage marks the most harmonious moment in my variation, imbued with a distinct sense of resolution. It is a metaphor for a complex union in this chromatic nation, where dissonance has become a crucial ingredient." The spacing is what allows her to hear it that way. The arabesque sits well above the tune rather than beside it, so the semitone reaches the ear as two planes at once rather than as a collision.
Born in Korea and now Associate Professor of Music at Princeton, Seo is a Guggenheim Fellow whose music characteristically travels between extremes of tempo and dynamic within a single phrase.
Edna Alejandra Longoria · Serenata al más allá (2025), IV. Camino de cempasúchil
Camino de cempasúchil, "Path of Marigolds," is the fourth of five movements in Serenata al más allá, commissioned by SOLI. The complete work moves through the imagery of Día de Muertos: death crashing a concert, her grandfather's altar, La Catrina's dance, this marigold path, and a closing festival of remembrance. The cempasúchil is the Mexican marigold whose color and scent are held to guide returning spirits from the cemetery to the family altar. Longoria's movement is that walk, and its form is governed by the fact that a procession has a destination.
Longoria was born in McAllen, Texas, and raised in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, a childhood formed on the same border as Wickman's Relics from the Borderland. She was selected for SOLI's 2024 30x30x30 call for scores.
Jessie Montgomery · Peace (2020)
Montgomery composed Peace on a commission from Victoria Robey OBE for violinist Elena Urioste and pianist Tom Poster, who premiered it in May 2020. She has described writing it during a period when she was struggling to identify what actually brought her joy, and was arriving at a kind of accommodation with sadness: observing it, for the first time, not as a negative state but as a necessary dynamic of human experience. The distinction governs how the piece behaves. It is not a consolation but a sustained act of attention.
Montgomery later prepared versions for viola and for clarinet, the latter first performed by Anthony McGill and Gloria Chien.
A violinist as well as a composer, and a founding member of PUBLIQuartet, Montgomery was the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Mead Composer-in-Residence from 2021 to 2024 and Composer-in-Residence at the Curtis Institute of Music for the 2025-26 season. She has been affiliated with the Sphinx Organization since 1999, and describes her work as interweaving classical music with vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness.
Elliott Miles McKinley · Symphony No. 1 (for Four Players), op. 21 (1996)
In 1996, SOLI and the national funding organization Meet the Composer commissioned a young Elliott Miles McKinley to write for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano. He called the result a symphony. Writing about the piece years later, he explained that he meant the word at its root: symphony is Greek for "a sounding together of voices," a concordance, and SOLI in its musical sense names a group sounding as one. The title claims no orchestra. It describes four people. Three of the four playing tonight gave the work its first performance in 1996: clarinetist Stephanie Key, cellist David Mollenauer, and pianist Carolyn True.
The commission began something. McKinley has written for SOLI four times between 1996 and 2024: this work, Three Portraits (2012), Ring of Fire (2017), and Symphony No. 2 for Four Players (2024). He recently retitled the 1996 score as his first symphony for four players, turning a singular gesture into a pair. SOLI records this work, Ring of Fire, and Symphony No. 2 this month.
McKinley is Associate Professor of Music Composition, Theory, and Music Technology at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, and founded and directs the Alba Music Festival Composition Program. He holds a bachelor's degree in jazz studies from New England Conservatory and works as an improviser and producer alongside his composing. His catalog includes eight string quartets, concertos, and a long list of chamber commissions.
In May 2024, SOLI launched the ambitious 30x30x30 Project, celebrating its 30th anniversary by selecting 30 newly written works from early-career composers of diverse backgrounds. Collaborating with professional ensembles and university new music groups nationwide, the ensemble will perform, record, and commercially release these works, broadening the reach and impact of contemporary chamber music.
SOLI’s excellence has been recognized with grants and awards from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, National Endowment for the Arts, Amphion Foundation, Ditson Foundation, Dalkowitz Charitable Trust, New Music USA, Eastman Institute for Music Leadership, Meet the Composer, Russell Hill Rogers Fund for the Arts, Argosy Foundation, Tobin Endowment, Texas Commission on the Arts, and the City of San Antonio’s Department of Arts & Culture, among others.
Beyond performance, SOLI nurtures future generations of musicians and audiences through comprehensive educational programs. As Ensemble-in-Residence at Trinity University (San Antonio, TX) since 2008, SOLI provides performances, open rehearsals, chamber music coaching, and mentorship for student composers. The ensemble also conducts masterclasses, interactive workshops, and lectures at universities across the U.S. and internationally, fostering the next wave of contemporary music creatives.
With a legacy of groundbreaking commissions, transformative collaborations, and inspiring education initiatives, SOLI Chamber Ensemble continues to redefine the possibilities of contemporary chamber music, ensuring its vitality for generations to come.
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