“I can hardly write a piece without stones in it,” the composer Steve Heitzeg said, laughing. Seated in a rehearsal room in the basement of Orchestra Hall, Heitzeg was explaining his use of stones in the opening measures of his new cello concerto, which the Minnesota Orchestra will premiere in concerts Friday and Saturday.
In the score he asks that the stones be “randomly” rubbed and tapped together by a percussionist, the effect of which, if it can be heard at all, would be subtle. And, presumably, just about any collection of stones would suffice.
Heitzeg, it should be noted, doesn’t intend his stone-rubbing to be a joke. He incorporates “natural” instruments — fallen tree branches, whale bones, sea glass shards, along with found objects such as plowshares — into many of the 150 or so compositions he has created over the past 40 years, among them works for orchestra, chorus, solo voices and chamber music, all growing out of his lifelong reverence for nature, ecology and the interconnectedness of humans and the Earth.
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“Actually,” Heitzeg points out, “all the instruments of the orchestra come from nature. They’ve just been more refined than those that are still, let us say, in their wild state.”
As an extension of those ideas, Heitzeg, who grew up surrounded by nature on a dairy farm near Albert Lea, Minn., has titled his new concerto “EcoSaga (Concerto in Three Landscapes).” The work is dedicated to the orchestra’s principal cello, Anthony Ross, who will be the soloist in these upcoming performances. As Heitzeg describes it, each of the three movements has its own landscape. The cellist acts like a witness, sometimes protesting, other times celebrating the beauty of nature.
Heitzeg’s musical voice is unique, Ross said. “I love Steve’s melodic writing,” he said, “especially for the cello, and his use of harmony is so interesting. He seems to embody the best of American composers. I hear in his music a lot of Bernstein, and I hear [Samuel] Barber and [Aaron] Copland, that open feeling you get so often from Copland, but it’s still very original. There’s no BS. It’s super honest music, and it’s very deep as well.”
If there was a time 60 or 70 years ago when serious composers of the modernist type disparaged the writing of melodies — “mere melody,” as some spoke of it — those days appear to be over. If melody writing is a gift, Heitzeg has that gift in abundance. He writes a rich melody for the soloist in the first movement of his cello concerto and identifies it in the score as a tribute to the late — and revered — cellist Pablo Casals. He names the passage “And the birds sing for peace,” an allusion to Casals’ famous “Song of the Birds,” though the melody is Heitzeg’s own creation.
“Steve’s messages are serious and his music is beautiful in a way that a lot of composers are still afraid of writing, and yet it’s not sentimental,” said soprano Maria Jette, who has sung a number of Heitzeg’s songs. “There’s never a feeling of show-y-ness. You hear it and you think, ‘Wow, that’s really cool.”
“It’s the kind of melody that’s recognizable,” said conductor Philip Brunelle, who has commissioned several of Heitzeg’s choral works. “You can learn it and remember it.”
Heitzeg and Ross have been friends for years. Ross has played a number of Heitzeg’s chamber pieces, and the two talked often about commissioning a concerto. “Then a lot happened,” said Ross, “like George Floyd, and we put it off.”
Among the things that happened was Heitzeg’s score for “How Many Breaths?” a multimedia work for solo violin and spoken word inspired by the demonstrations and art created in protest against Floyd’s murder. Ariana Kim performed the solo violin part and devised the video premiered in September 2020 by the Chamber Music Society of Minnesota.
How a partnership formed
In fall 2024, Ross and Heitzeg resumed talking — seriously — about a concerto. Ross secured a commission from the Minnesota Orchestra, and Linda Lovas Hoeschler and her husband Peter Blyberg agreed to underwrite the project.
Hoeschler had known Heitzeg since the early 1990s, when she was director of the American Composers Forum and he was on the Forum’s board. In 1993 she commissioned a piece from him, for her sister and family, titled “Pipestone Peace Pipe.” Hoeschler said, “My just-under-80-year-old mother fell in love with Steve. His modesty, sensitivity, environmental concerns and shared farm backgrounds made for a great bond. He subsequently composed pieces for both her 80th and 90th birthdays.
“Steve gave each piece the dignity and respect we had hoped for,” Hoeschler said. “Steve is a solid composer sensitive to the text and the text’s creators. He is always true to his values, especially his love of nature and life. He is a craftsman of the highest order and one of the jewels of our composing community.”
As is the case with most composers, Heitzeg’s fascination with music appeared early. He had guitar lessons at 8 and by high school was giving guitar lessons and playing trombone in a marching band. He began composing piano pieces at 14 and during his senior year wrote a rock opera, “P.S.,” based on the story of the prodigal son. Attending Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, his intent was to become a music teacher.
By then, composing was such a part of him that his goal when he began graduate study at the University of Minnesota was to teach composition. He studied with Dominick Argento and Eric Stokes, who was a great influence in moving Heitzeg in the direction of environmental concerns. There was also a John Cage influence and an interest in animals and Shinto, an Asian religion that emphasizes purity, gratitude and harmony with nature.
“It all kind of swirled together for me in the early ‘90s,” Heitzeg said. “It seemed to me, as a composer, that you want to be part of the cosmic flow of music. We’re all just a small part of a greater music of all species and even the earth. That realization, I guess, came to me in graduate school.
“The main thing for me is to write music that’s respectful of other people and cultures and nature. And if that connects with people, that’s wonderful.”
Heitzeg lives in St. Paul with his wife Gwen, who works for the orchestra, and daughter Zadie, now a junior at Macalester College. He earned his doctorate in musical composition at the University of Minnesota in 1986. His thesis, premiered the following year by the Florida Orchestra, was “Nine Surrealist Studies (After Salvador Dali).” He names “Flower of the Earth,” a four-movement homage to the painter Georgia O’Keeffe written that same year, as the work wherein he discovered his own musical language. Four years later the piece was used as the score for the PBS American Playhouse film “A Marriage: Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz” starring Jane Alexander and Christopher Plummer.
A subsequent score of Heitzeg’s for the PBS documentary “Death of the Dream: Farmhouses in the Heartland,” received an Upper Midwest Emmy Award in 2000 from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. A year later, Heitzeg was named Composer of the Year at the 2001 Minnesota Music Awards.
“I write a kind of programmatic music, and I feel the arts are political,” Heitzeg said. “They celebrate individuality but also the communal. The arts, I think, are about diversity and the celebration of everyone’s voice, and they have a role to make society more positive.”
Music with a message
The slogan “art for art’s sake” arose in the second half of the 19th century, chiefly in England and France (“l’art pour l’art”), offering the idea that art is — or should be — independent of all social values and utilitarian functions. Its only duty is to be beautiful. Heitzeg holds the opposite view, that art can be — and should be — an engine for social change.
“Just think of the civil rights movement in this country,” he said. “‘We Shall Overcome.’ And now we’ve got Live Aid and Farm Aid.”
Heitzeg’s concerns extend to the animal kingdom. In 1990, cellist Laura Sewell premiered his “Endangered (Written in Honor of All Turtles and Tortoises).” The work was prompted when someone pointed out that the shape of a cello and that of a Galapagos tortoise are similar. The piece uses a repeated theme based on the notes E-D-A-G, shorthand for “endangered.”
A work in the same vein, “Voice of the Everglades (A Tribute to Marjory Stoneman Douglas,” was commissioned by the Naples (Florida) Philharmonic in honor of conservationist Stoneman Douglas and premiered in 2000.
“I was really upset about the plight and destruction of the manatees,” Heitzeg recalled. “They’re sea mammals and they were being killed off.” To create the work, Heitzeg spent time in Florida’s Everglades collecting audio recordings along with manatee vocalizations, river stones and manatee bones. The work was recorded a few years later by the Moravian Philharmonic of the Czech Republic.
The Nobel Symphony, Heitzeg’s biggest and longest piece — 75 minutes — honored the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize. Some 400 musicians from the Gustavus Adolphus orchestra and five separate choirs performed the premiere in 2001. Percussionists played plowshares, Tibetan singing bowls, empty soup cans (representing hunger) and hollow prosthetic legs (symbolizing war). The work’s plea for world peace gained added resonance given that the premiere took place just two weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11.
In January of this year, at Westminster Hall in downtown Minneapolis, the Schubert Club presented the premiere of one of Heitzeg’s most unusual and involving works, a song cycle titled “Death Suite for Jackie O.” The work, Heitzeg said, “was inspired by my admiration for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ devotion to art, culture and beauty as well as her resilience and quiet defiance in the face of violence and danger. It was also that haunting photo of Jackie on the plane. It’s still so powerful.
The piece is comprised of three movements. The first, featuring text from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Memory of Cape Cod,” evokes the Kennedys’ peaceful home life before the assassination. The second, titled “The Pink Suit (‘Let Them See What They Have Done’)”, is named for Jackie Kennedy’s pink dress and her famous remark after the death of her husband. The third movement quotes C.P. Cavafy’s poem “Ithaca,” which was read at Jackie Kennedy’s funeral in 1994.
The middle movement, the emotional heart of the work, carries a series of notations from the composer that convey the music’s essence: “Haunting,” “In deep sorrow,” “defiant” and, finally, “With a tremendous sense of loss.” The music is spare and effective but, as it turned out, devastating in performance. The mezzo-soprano Clara Osowski, with sensitive support from pianist Casey Rafn, gave a dramatic and probing reading of a work that can only be described as breathtaking.
Not surprisingly, Heitzeg wrote this music with Osowski in mind. She had sung the alto part in his choral work “Lament of the Earth” and the composer was impressed. “Steve saw something dramatic in me and how I always want to bring out the character I’m playing,” Osowski said. “He trusted me to do the character because, honestly,” she said, laughing, “I’m the furthest thing from Jackie Onassis, like, I grew up on a farm, and I know nothing about fashion.
“People I spoke to afterward said they were quite moved by the piece,” she said, “especially the middle movement, which has so few words. But Steve is so good at conveying emotion. He transcends words.”
(As it happens, Heitzeg also transcends computers. He composes not on a computer, as most composers do these days, but uses those old-fashioned tools, pencil and paper. When he’s done, he takes a picture of the manuscript, which he mails to his copyist. After years of self-publishing, Heitzeg’s music is published now by Opus Imprints.)
To return to Heitzeg’s newest piece, the Cello Concerto, it’s not far fetched to suggest that the piece will probably be a hit, given that this composer’s prior concerto, a Concerto for Trumpet that was premiered by the Minnesota Orchestra in 2015, with Charles Lazarus as soloist, was — and continues to be — a hit. It has legs, as they say on Broadway. Lazarus, a veteran of the orchestra, and himself a conductor and arranger, has played the piece a number of times with other orchestras and in recitals using both piano and organ accompaniment. And other trumpeters have played it.
Chatting last week, Lazarus recalled how collaborative the experience of creating the concerto was back in 2015. “Steve always involves the performer in the process,” he said. “What’s fun about him is he’s so free and creative. The brainstorming sessions with him were open and fluid. It was like a hurricane of ideas. He’d be asking — and it was probably the same with Tony — ‘What do you think about this?’ or ‘What about that?’”
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Titled “America Nomad,” Heitzeg describes the piece as “a sonic meditation across the continent, starting in New York City, then moving through the South, the Great Plains, the North and on to California — a series of soundscapes exploring what it means to be an American and, as a result, a nomad, always on the move.” To quote a critic (full confession, this one), “‘American Nomad’ is a rumination on the American spirit: its loneliness, its medley of cultures, its restless ambition and grandiosity.”
Extra instrumentation includes an armature bar from the Statue of Liberty along with New York City subway spikes, a piece of steel from the Golden Gate Bridge and fallen branches from a Joshua Tree. The music is wildly diverse: blues, electric guitar and rock ‘n’ roll in the final section, the visit to the West Coast — surely the funkiest music that Heitzeg has ever committed to paper — even some passages in the style of the revered film composer Ennio Morricone that have the whole orchestra whistling at the end in the manner of the old spaghetti westerns, as they were called.
Referencing the surreal Joshua Tree National Park in California, Heitzeg, who visited the park while writing the music, pays tribute in the score to the late Gram Parsons, a legendary rock musician who died of a drug overdose at 26 and whose body, as Parsons requested, was burned in a funeral pyre in Joshua Tree.
To be sure, stories surrounding the new cello concerto are less sensational, though there is a certain mystique in the history of Ross’s cello, a rare and precious instrument made in 1710 by Matteo Gofriller, the first important cello (and violin) maker of what is called the Venetian school. Heitzeg, it may be recalled, pays tribute to Pablo Casals in the first movement of his concerto. Who made the cello Casals played for most of his life? Gofriller.
“Mine is from 1710, Casals’ from 1711,” Ross said. “They look exactly the same. I think a bank owns that one. I’m lucky to own this one.”
The post Art’s not just for art’s sake when Steve Heitzeg is composing appeared first on MinnPost.
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