Morris Hayes was bandleader and keyboardist with the iconic artist Prince. Morris will lead a performance workshop and jam session featuring students from Maryville’s Music Therapy Program. After intermission, Morris and Kip will perform a set together.
Concerts will not be live-streamed, and no recordings will be available, so please consider enjoying these performances in person.
Feel free to share this information with anyone you know who may be interested!
For a list of all Maryville Music Therapy Program concerts (including student performances), please click here.
Music at Maryville 2024-25, Concert 4 of 4 — Scott Lyle, Guitarist & Composer
Scott Lyle, guitarist & composer
Sunday, April 13, 2025 • 3:00 p.m. • Maryville University Auditorium
Scott Lyle is the Director of the Music Program and Assistant Professor of Music at Maryville University in St. Louis. He teaches courses in music theory, aural training, audio engineering, and private lessons, offering students a comprehensive education in both traditional and modern musical disciplines. Scott earned his BM in Music Performance (classical guitar) summa cum laude from the University of Missouri–St. Louis and his MA in Composition from Washington University in Saint Louis. Passionate about academic scholarship and research, he also actively performs music from various eras, with a special affinity for avant garde and post-tonal contemporary works.
For this performance, Scott Lyle will be joined by guest performers Lisa Lillie, soprano, Alannah Coady, soprano, and Peter Henderson, piano.
Musical Program
To include these guitar works and arrangements, along with the world premiere of three songs by Scott Lyle:
John Dowland (1563-1626): “Come, Heavy Sleep,” from The Firste Booke of Songes (1597)
Francesca Caccini (1598-1640): “Per la più vaga e bella,” from La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina (1625)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791): “Ach, ich fühl’s,” from Die Zauberflöte, K. 620 (1791) & “Porgi, amor, qualche ristoro,” from Le nozze di Figaro, K. 492 (1786)
Robert Schumann (1810-1856): “Ich grolle nicht,” from Dichterliebe, op. 48 (1840)
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976): Nocturnal, after John Dowland, op. 70 (1964)
Swedish Folk Ballad (Anonymous): “Herr Mannelig”
Past 2024-2025 Concerts (listed in chronological order)
Music at Maryville Series 2024-2025 Concert 1 of 4 — Early Music Missouri presents Adoption, Adaption & Appropriation: Invasive Species in Mediterranean Musical Culture
Nocturne No. 13 in B minor, op. 119 (1921) (ca. 7 minutes)
Brief Program Note
To observe the centenary of Gabriel Fauré’s death, Peter Henderson will perform a Maryville University Faculty Recital exploring works spanning the great French composer’s career. Renowned for his harmonic explorations and freedom, Fauré was also an inspired melodist, spinning long, flowing phrases set in a florid texture. His elegant, gorgeous piano music is poised between vigor and languor, raw emotion and restraint. This program features some of his most famous and extroverted early piano works, including the witty Valse-caprice No. 1 and two scintillating Impromptus, and ends with a few of Fauré’s sorrowful yet consolatory late pieces, including his intensely moving Nocturne No. 13.
Music at Maryville Concert Series 2024-25, Concert 2 of 4 — Musicians of the SLSO perform Gabriel Fauré’s Two Piano Quintets & Leo Marcus’s Three Schumann Stars
Sunday, October 20, 2024 • 3:00 p.m. • Maryville University Auditorium • Directions
Robert Schumann (1810-1856): [Untitled piece] No. 30 from Album for the Young, op. 68 (ca. 4 minutes)
Leo Marcus (b. 1945): Three Schumann Stars (Piano Quintet No. 3) (Missouri Premiere) (ca. 14 minutes)
Intermission (ca. 10 minutes)
Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924): Piano Quintet No. 2 in C minor, op. 115 (1919-21) (ca. 32 minutes)
Brief Program Note
This program concludes Maryville University’s two-concert mini-series observing the centenary of Gabriel Fauré’s death. Fauré completed two quintets for piano and string quartet. A slow, painstaking composer, Fauré labored eighteen years on Piano Quintet No. 1, which was eventually premiered in 1906. One of his favorite works, its first two movements have an enchanting, ethereal, timeless quality. Fauré’s earthier Piano Quintet No. 2 was composed relatively quickly, across several months in 1920-21. Deemed a masterpiece since its premiere, the second quintet demonstrates “A deep and magnificent serenity of a great poet, wise and lyrical” (Louis Vuillemin). Between these two monumental late works of Fauré, we’ll present the Midwest premiere of Three Schumann Stars by Leo Marcus, an American composer and pianist, who here explores the ambiguity and sensitive beauty of a small piano piece from Robert Schumann’s Album for the Young, op. 68.
– Sunday, February 9, 2025 • 2:00 p.m. • Maryville University Auditorium – This recital will be our 2024-2025 Johannes Wich-Schwarz Chamber Music Concert. Please enjoy our pregame musical performance before this evening’s Super Bowl! – Program to include: Carl Frühling & Johannes Brahms’s Trios for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano
Nicolas del Grazia is Professor of Clarinet at Arkansas Tech University, and has appeared as soloist, chamber and orchestral musician throughout the United States and Europe. As an advocate for contemporary music, he has performed with a number of leading new music ensembles, including Chicago Pocket Opera Players, and Aguava New Music Studio, heralded as “brilliant” by the Washington Post and as “easily one of the most impressive new music ensembles in America today” by the International Record Review. He has worked with a number of the country’s leading composers, including David Felder, Evan Chambers, Kristin Kuster, and MacArthur Genius prize winner John Eaton. As a scholar, Nicolas del Grazia has twice been the recipient of awards from The International Clarinet Association for his research, and he has published work on the hitherto unknown Pastorale & Rondo by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and the unfinished Quartet for Clarinet and Strings by Alexander Zemlinsky. He also enjoys composing, especially for the clarinet. The “pixelated humor” (AllMusic.com) of his Tarantella for clarinet and piano can be heard on Italian Vintages, on the Centaur label.
Spring 2025 Maryville University Faculty Recitals
Guest / Faculty Recital — Mark Sparks, flute • Peter Henderson, piano
Wick won’t be able to join us in class on Monday, October 20, but I will be there. Remember, Wednesday, October 22, is Maryville’s “Wellness Day,” when all classes are canceled. Below is the plan for tomorrow morning’s class.
See you soon,
Peter
P.S. I found a free iOS / iPadOS app (“English Poetry Collection”) featuring many poems in English. Here’s its App Store page.
Edgar Lee Masters — Spoon River Anthology, continued (at Wick’s Request)
Notes from Wick’s Spoon River class session during April 2021
Work was a runaway sensation, helped to propel free verse to the forefront
Moving from formal poetry into more experimental things
Everybody in a small town knows everyone’s business
Masters presumes that people in small towns know everything about everyone, recreates Lewistown into Spoon River
Decedents in a cemetery stand up and give a comment on their lives in turn
He works into the poems interactions between people
He made up names (first names from one cemetery and second from another)
People from Lewistown recognized who Masters was referring to — from Wikipedia:
Meanwhile, those who lived in the Spoon River region objected to their portrayal in the anthology, particularly as so many of the poems’ characters were based on real people. The book was banned from Lewistown schools and libraries until 1974.3 Even Masters’s mother, who sat on the Lewistown library board, voted for the ban.9 (Masters claimed “My mother disliked the anthology; my father adored it”.)4 Despite this, the anthology remained widely read in Lewistown; local historian Kelvin Sampson notes that “Every family in Lewistown probably had a sheet of paper or a notebook hidden away with their copy of the Anthology, saying who was who in town”.9
Demystification of small town America; the memory gilds everything, people forget the tragedies and betrayals
Small town life is dying
American painter (a Missourian) named Jesse Barnes has made a mint selling idealized images (“light painter”)
Masters talks about the smarminess and cruelty in small town life
222 – Faith Matheny— about a mystical experience, a theophany, the “God-shine” seen in the faces of a friend
Mystics — Marguerite Perrette, St. Theresa of Avila, St. Hildegard of Bingen, St. Catherine of Siena; the great mystics were almost always associated with a monastery
John Dewey — Consummatory experiences
William Wordsworth — Spots of time (in which meaning is revealed)
James Joyce — Epiphanies (famous one in his novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: woman carrying a basket of laundry)
Fabian experiences — epiphanies at sunset
Natural moments can be epiphanic
Seeing the crescent moon cradling Venus in its arms makes you understand why all the Muslim nations have taken that symbol for their flags
187 – Father Malloy — Masters is speaking to Malloy, buried in the Catholic Cemetery (not the City Cemetery, where Masters is visiting gravestones)
He was so remarkable that some of the German Lutherans considered converting to Catholicism
Another of Wick’s favorite poems from the Spoon River Anthology is 207 – Lucinda Matlock
Capitalization of Life in the last line puts the poem into a religious context (Life = God)
(from Cymbeline) Fear no more the heat o’ the sun, Nor the furious winter’s rages; Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages: Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
Fear no more the frown o’ the great; Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke; Care no more to clothe and eat; To thee the reed is as the oak: The scepter, learning, physic, must All follow this, and come to dust.
Fear no more the lightning flash, Nor the all-dreaded thunder stone; Fear not slander, censure rash; Thou hast finished joy and moan: All lovers young, all lovers must Consign to thee, and come to dust.
No exorciser harm thee! Nor no witchcraft charm thee! Ghost unlaid forbear thee! Nothing ill come near thee! Quiet consummation have; And renownèd be thy grave!
How would you set Shakespeare’s text to music?
Would you create a strophic setting?
What aspects of THRMFT+ (musical style) would you employ?
Please take two minutes to jot down some thoughts.
If you’d like, please share your ideas with the class.
Nothing is so beautiful as Spring – When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush; Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing; The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy? A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy, Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning, Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy, Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.
Friday, March 7, 2025 • 10:00-11:30 a.m. Steinway Piano Gallery 12031 Dorsett Road Maryland Heights, MO 63043
1. Lecture: Ravel’s Life, Times, and Relationship to the Piano
2. Musical Program (all works by Maurice Ravel, unless indicated), with interpolated remarks
Pavane pour une infante défunte, M. 19 (1899) (ca. 6.5 minutes)
BRIEF EXCERPT — Franz Liszt (1810-1856): from Années de Pélèrinage, Troisième année, op. 82 — 7. Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este (The Fountains of the Villa d’Este) (1877) (ca. 30 seconds)
Jeux d’eau, M. 30 (1901) (ca. 5.5 minutes)
Sonatine, M. 40 (1903) (ca. 11 minutes)
Modéré
Mouvement de menuet
Animé
BRIEF EXCERPT — Robert Schumann (1810-1856): from Waldszenen, op. 82 (1848-9) — 7. Vogel als Prophet (ca. 30 seconds)
from Miroirs, M. 43 (1904-05)
Oiseaux tristes (ca. 4 minutes)
Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn, M. 58 (1909) (ca. 2 minutes)
Guest / Faculty Recital — MarkSparks, flute • Peter Henderson, piano — Saturday, March 29, at 3:00 p.m. — The program will feature music by César Franck, Johannes Brahms, and Ottorino Respighi
The nineteenth-century German composers Felix Mendelssohn and Johannes Brahms were strongly influenced by earlier musical traditions. Despite these creators’ orientation to the past, their works on the first half of this program could not be more fresh and energetic. Mendelssohn’s Second Cello Sonata is ebullient, and features a slow movement reflecting the composer’s fascination with J. S. Bach’s music. Brahms’s Second Cello Sonata is also joyful, but traces a more varied emotional landscape. Brahms’s Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano was one of several late masterpieces inspired by the Meiningen clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld, whose sensitive playing spurred Brahms to end his first retirement from composition. Some years later, Carl Frühling produced a beautiful, lyrical trio showing the influence of Brahms’s autumnal, somber op. 114.
The concerts will not be live-streamed, and no recordings will be available, so please consider enjoying these performances in person. Feel free to share this information with anyone you know who may be interested.
Nocturne No. 13 in B minor, op. 119 (1921) (ca. 7 minutes)
Brief Program Note
To observe the centenary of Gabriel Fauré’s death, Peter Henderson will perform a Maryville University Faculty Recital exploring works spanning the great French composer’s career. Renowned for his harmonic explorations and freedom, Fauré was also an inspired melodist, spinning long, flowing phrases set in a florid texture. His elegant, gorgeous piano music is poised between vigor and languor, raw emotion and restraint. This program features some of his most famous and extroverted early piano works, including the witty Valse-caprice No. 1 and two scintillating Impromptus, and ends with a few of Fauré’s sorrowful yet consolatory late pieces, including his intensely moving Nocturne No. 13.
Robert Schumann (1810-1856): [Untitled piece] No. 30 from Album for the Young, op. 68 (ca. 4 minutes)
Leo Marcus (b. 1945): Three Schumann Stars (Piano Quintet No. 3) (Midwest Premiere) (ca. 14 minutes)
Intermission (ca. 10 minutes)
Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924): Piano Quintet No. 2 in C minor, op. 115 (1919-21) (ca. 32 minutes)
Brief Program Note
Fauré completed two quintets for piano and string quartet. A slow, painstaking composer, Fauré labored eighteen years on Piano Quintet No. 1, which was eventually premiered in 1906. One of his favorite works, its first two movements have an enchanting, ethereal, timeless quality. Fauré’s earthier Piano Quintet No. 2 was composed relatively quickly, across several months in 1920-21. Deemed a masterpiece since its premiere, the second quintet demonstrates “A deep and magnificent serenity of a great poet, wise and lyrical” (Louis Vuillemin). Between these two monumental late works of Fauré, we’ll present the Midwest premiere of Three Schumann Stars by Leo Marcus, an American composer and pianist, who here explores the ambiguity and sensitive beauty of a small piano piece from Robert Schumann’s Album for the Young, op. 68.
Picture Studies is a “21st-century Pictures at an Exhibition” — like Modest Mussorgsky‘s 19th-century piano suite frequently performed in Maurice Ravel‘s splendid orchestration, Adam Schoenberg’s composition was inspired by several works of visual art. Picture Studies was commissioned by the Kansas City Symphony and Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Please find below links to the Nelson-Atkins Museum’s webpages for each of the artworks that provided the impetus for Adam Schoenberg’s musical responses:
1. Intro
Features the piano — a reference to Mussorgsky’s “Promenade” from Pictures at an Exhibition)
Beethoven: String Quartet in C-sharp minor, op. 131 (1826)
Liszt: Piano Sonata in B minor, S. 178 (completed 1853)
Wednesday, March 27, 2024 • 7:00 p.m. Maryville University Auditorium • Directions
Free Admission
The concert will not be live-streamed, and no recording will be available, so please consider enjoying this performance in person. Feel free to share this information with anyone you know who may be interested.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, op.131 (1826) — ca. 45 minutes
Intermission
Franz Liszt (1811-1886): Les cloches de Genève (The Bells of Geneva): Nocturne from Années de pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage), Première année: Suisse (First Year: Switzerland), S.160 (1848-54) — ca. 7 minutes
Franz Liszt: Piano Sonata in B minor, S. 178 (ca. 1842-53) — ca. 30 minutes
Brief Program Note
Performed by artists from the St. Louis Symphony, this recital features two towering masterpieces from the nineteenth century: Ludwig van Beethoven’s epic String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, op. 131, and Franz Liszt’s iconic Piano Sonata in B minor. According to Robert Schumann, Beethoven’s late quartets “stand…on the extreme boundary of all that has hitherto been attained by human art and imagination.” Renowned for his pianistic brilliance and embrace of literary drama in music of harmonic daring, Liszt showed incredible ingenuity in synthesizing his personal idiom with several formal influences — including Beethoven’s — in his staggering, single-movement Piano Sonata in B minor. We hope you’ll join us this evening to enjoy performances of two highly significant instrumental works.
[Untitled piece] No. 30 from Album for the Young, op. 68 (ca. 4 minutes)
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