Convergent - [12’] - 2024
2222.4321.timp.2perc.strings

Commissioned by the Lee County Community Orchestra, Sanford, NC; Vincent L. Povázsay, music director

Many of my favorite stories begin with several supposedly-distinct plot lines that are eventually revealed to be interconnected. Although these separate strands may involve different characters, times, and places, they ultimately converge during a rush of culminating rhetoric that fuses the story together into one cohesive structure. While the settings, actions, and events in Convergent are perhaps more abstract than those in most tales, I wrote this piece primarily to demonstrate my fascination with the form and to explore some ways in which I believe it can be musically applied.

CONTACT THE COMPOSER for score perusal and purchase information

Emergent - [7’30] - 2019
2222.2210.timp.1perc.strings

Also available for String Quartet.

To emerge is to rise up or come into notice from concealment or obscurity.  Given the constant addition of countless new ideas, emotions, and memories to our repertoire of experiences, which parts will we remember?  Which events, theories, or stories will be Emergent at the end of each day?  At the end of each year?  At the end of our lives?

Emergent was originally composed for string quartet in 2016 and was orchestrated in 2019. It begins with a weightless, ethereal chorale in string harmonics and blossoms into a powerful tutti ending.

VIEW THE SCORE
CONTACT THE COMPOSER for parts

Amid the Shades - [16’] - 2019
1111.1110.timp.1perc.hp.pno.strings

Since the 19th century, numerous poets, lyricists, and hymnists have penned texts to be sung to the Welsh folk tune Llwyn Onn, also known as The Ash Grove. The texts explore many different themes, including the beauty of nature, courtship, limerence, the loss of loved ones, spirituality, and various Christian principles. Metaphorically, the melody shared by these diverse texts can be considered the root or seed that links each text-tree together, establishing a grove of perspectives from which the melody itself can be understood. These relationships—where each text-tree is a unique elaboration of an underlying structure—eloquently describe numerous music-compositional practices, such as (and perhaps most noticeably) the theme and variations.

Given this resonant symbolism, it is surprising that a vast majority of Ash Grove arrangements are not variation sets. The small pool of existing sets primarily contains solos and small chamber works, is stylistically dominated by 18th- and 19th-century idioms, and does not overtly engage with extramusical references. In order to develop this dialogue, Amid the Shades offers an interpretive cultivation of The Ash Grove that demonstrates the broader possibilities of writing variations inspired by specific words found in a musical theme’s associated texts.

CONTACT THE COMPOSER for score perusal and purchase information

Starmount Vespers - [15’] - 2016
SATB choir and strings (orchestra or quintet)

Starmount Vespers is an oratorio-style composition for SATB choir and string orchestra on the subjects of cyclicity and self-similarity.  Cyclical phenomena are widespread in the natural world (day and night, sleeping and waking, seasons, tides, etc.) and occur on many structural levels.  Starmount Vespers seeks to exemplify these harmonious relationships in both text and music, drawing influence from other cyclical works (such as Orff's Carmina Burana and Vivaldi's Gloria), the Prouhet-Thue-Morse sequence, and the compositional approaches of Danish composer Per Nørgård.  Nørgård's third symphony, in particular, is a mature representation of his melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic self-similar structures and informed much of Starmount Vespers' composition.

The texts were selected from the poetry of Thomas Hardy, H.P. Nichols, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and were adapted by the composer to better fit the narrative.  The resulting fifteen-minute composition both delivers a textual narrative on self-similarity and, through fractal patterns embedded in the musical parameters, embodies the text.

CONTACT THE COMPOSER for score perusal and purchase information

Over the Wing
string orchestra - [7'30] - 2014

"...Ash Stemke’s Over the Wing soared with such lift and polyphonic beauty that one wanted to hear it again."
-Steven Kruger, New York Arts

"...a very attractive seven-minute essay for strings...that begins with a lot of energy and excitement and manages to sustain both plus considerable listener interest for its duration."
-John W. Lambert, Classical Voice of North Carolina

Commissioned by the UNC Lab Orchestra, Vincent L. Povázsay, conductor as a concert opener for the April 13, 2014 concert in Chapel Hill, NC.

VIEW THE SCORE
CONTACT THE COMPOSER for parts