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INTERIORS

Ordway • Jani • Kernis • Wickman • Gómez

Tuesday, November 10, 2026 | 7:30 pm
Pre-concert talk | 7:00 pm
Ruth Taylor Recital Hall, Trinity University
San Antonio, Texas

Feature Focus: Scott Ordway

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About Tonight

Interiors is an evening of music that looks outward from inside. At its center are Scott Ordway’s three Interiors, which move from a quiet room to a window filled with birdsong. Every other work on the program opens a window of its own: Ethan Wickman’s music of the borderland, Rolando Gómez’s love song without words, Sophia Jani’s look back at a charmed Riviera generation, and Aaron Jay Kernis’s long, unbroken hymn.

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Program

The Two Clocks was commissioned by the Cross-Country Chamber Consortium: Atlanta Chamber Players, Ensemble New SRQ, Musiqa, Picosa, and SOLI Chamber Ensemble.

SOLI Chamber Ensemble

• Stephanie Key, clarinet
• Ertan Torgul, violin
• David Mollenauer, cello
• Carolyn True, piano

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Program Notes

Ethan Wickman

Relics from the Borderland (2017/2019), I. Of Borders, Badlands, and Banderas

Relics from the Borderland is the suite Wickman drew for SOLI from Ballads of the Borderland, the secular cantata on migration and memory that SOLI premiered here in February 2017. That work set texts by San Antonio poets, John Phillip Santos and Carmen Tafolla among them, around a subject Wickman stated plainly: “Every family has a story to tell. These stories are given depth and meaning across generations as families migrate.” The opening movement names a border’s three constituents: the line, the hard ground on either side, and the flags planted to settle the question. It is the widest landscape on a program otherwise made of interiors. Wickman teaches composition at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Scott Ordway

Interior No. 1, “we are all made of time” (2020)

Ordway’s Interiors were, in his framing, made inside and alone, performed inside and alone, and listened to inside and alone. The first was written for a series called Gone in 60 Seconds and given a digital premiere in May 2020, filmed separately in Frankfurt and Philadelphia and assembled afterward, there being no alternative that spring. Its original scoring is soprano, violin, and piano, and the soprano has a single line of text to deliver. What survives the removal of the voice is the contour the sentence leaves behind.

Listen: the clarinet takes the line Ordway wrote for soprano, a single sentence, “we are all made of time,” over the original violin and piano parts.

Interior No. 2, “the water drawn from wells” (2020)

Ordway describes his work as exploring “the relationship between slowness, stillness, and emotional intensity,” privileging “duration and resonance over virtuosity or display.” Interior No. 2 is an unusually pure demonstration. The title image repays attention: water drawn from a well was already there, underground, and is reached only through patience and repetition. The music behaves in kind. It does not develop so much as accumulate, and its events register as arrivals rather than as consequences. Ordway was raised in Northern California and cites the light and silence of the American West as a continuous source.

Interior No. 3, “after us, the birds will sing” (2020)

Where the first two Interiors concern enclosure, the third opens a window. Its title asserts continuity at a moment when continuity was not obvious: the world proceeds, and it proceeds without requiring us. Whether that reads as desolation or as consolation is left genuinely open, and Ordway declines to arbitrate. What he does instead is assign the proposition to the violin. Taken as a set, the three Interiors move from three players to two to two, and from a stated thought to a wordless and considerably wider one.

Rolando Gómez

The Two Clocks (2026)

The Two Clocks comes to SOLI through the Cross-Country Chamber Consortium, which commissions new work from emerging Black, Latinx, and Indigenous composers and gives it a performance by each of five ensembles. What that buys a composer at the start of a career is not a first hearing but a second, third, and fourth.

Gómez calls the work “a love song without words.” Its source is Félix González-Torres’s “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) of 1991: two identical battery-powered clocks set to the same time, which drift apart and eventually stop. González-Torres left the meaning open. Gómez found in it “the beauty and tragedy of love and loss,” and, as a teenager coming to terms with his own homosexuality, an affirmation that “homosexual love can be true, pure, and worth fighting for.” Because the batteries can be replaced and the clocks resynchronized every time the work is exhibited, he hears it as cyclical rather than final: “a story of love persisting in the face of both prejudice and death.”

The violin and cello are the lovers, courting each other in song, shaped by the boleros of Pablo Milanés. It ends with piano and violin alone: “one clock, one lover.” Gómez, a composer, tresero, and music educator from Miami, asks listeners to supply their own story. The Two Clocks is dedicated to Alexander Colina.

Listen: the pianist’s left and right hands are the two clocks, drifting in and out of sync through a cascading figure Gómez takes from the second of Thomas Adès’s Three Mazurkas, Op. 27.

Sophia Jani

Everybody was so young, Movement I (2018/2026)

Jani takes her title from Amanda Vaill’s biography of Gerald and Sara Murphy, the American expatriates whose Riviera villa drew in Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Picasso. It is a book about money, beauty, and invention, and then about illness and two dead children. The phrase is what people say looking backward at something that did not hold. Jani names what she was after: “this feeling of transience and nostalgia that overcomes you when suddenly you realize that you have once again transitioned into a new version of yourself.” SOLI performs the first of two movements, with violin where the alto flute stood. She was Composer-in-Residence with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra from 2023 to 2026.

Aaron Jay Kernis

Still Movement with Hymn (1993/2000)

Kernis composed Still Movement with Hymn in 1993, in memory of the composer Stephen Albert, who had died suddenly the year before. There was also a war: he has written that much of the work’s emotional temperature came from his reaction to the genocide in Bosnia and Croatia. The music, in his own account, “is in no way programmatic,” but he has said what it suggests: “a Judeo-Christian prayer for the dead, a hymn and Kaddish that also embodies hope for the living.”

What that prayer is made of is a line that will not break. Kernis names medieval and Jewish musical practice among his sources here, and both traditions carry a single span of melody well past the point where a listener expects it to close. Nothing in half an hour moves faster than grief moves.

The work was conceived for piano quartet. In 2000, Kernis reworked the viola part for clarinet for the Eberle Ensemble, and SOLI took that version into its repertoire. The substitution hands those long spans to an instrument that must physically renew itself to sustain them. The line becomes audibly the product of a body, and the seams become part of the expression. For this music, that is not a concession.

Listen: Kernis builds the work in three large sections and makes the last a modified reprise of the first, so the opening returns, changed.

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Scott Ordway

Scott Ordway, SOLI’s 2026–27 Feature Focus composer, is Head of Music Composition at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts. His music has been performed by the Hong Kong Philharmonic and the American Composers Orchestra, recorded on Naxos and Acis, and SOLI has commissioned him since 2019. He is also the headline composer of SOLI’s inaugural Composer Lab, mentoring San Antonio high school Apprentices and national Fellows whose works premiere in January 2027. That month, he co-curates A Clearing and joins SOLI in a premiere written for the ensemble and Public Ceremony, his electronic project.

Read Scott Ordway’s full biography

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About SOLI

Where New Music Comes Alive

SOLI’s mission is to advance contemporary classical music, championing a new model of expression that resonates with the complexities of the 21st-century experience.

SOLI Chamber Ensemble has given voice to 20th- and 21st-century chamber music since 1994, commissioning and premiering more than 100 new works for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano. Through SOLI’s Composer Lab, an annual program launched in the 2026–27 season, San Antonio high school students and early-career composers from across the country write new works that SOLI workshops and premieres. SOLI has received the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming and a National Endowment for the Arts Challenge America grant. The ensemble performs, tours, and records, and has been Trinity University’s Ensemble in Residence since 2008.

Read SOLI’s full biography

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Leadership

• Stephanie Key, Artistic Director
• Carolyn True, Education Director
• Anne L. Schelleng, Managing Director
• Ertan Torgul, Digital Content Manager
• Erin Pake, Marketing Associate

Board of Directors

• W. Clint Kingsbery, President
• Dora Verde, Vice President – Governance
• Gail Jarratt, Vice President – Finance
• Taddy McAllister, Vice President – Development
• David Lopez
• Debra Maltz
• David Mollenauer
• Diana Roberts
• Carolyn True
• Emily Warkentin
• Ethan Wickman

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Thank You

Ensemble Circle Sponsors

Jane Key and Peter O’Brien

• City of San Antonio, Department of Arts and Culture
• Texas Commission on the Arts
• National Endowment for the Arts
• Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University

See all of SOLI’s supporters

Photos: SOLI by Josh Huskin; Scott Ordway by Amanda Greene

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Sources for the Program Notes