Performed by Toledo Symphony Chamber Musicians on May 17, 2026

American Haiku 
Paul Wiancko (b. 1983) 

Cellist and composer Paul Wiancko is a founding member of the duo Ayane & Paul with Grammy-nominated violist Ayane Kozasa, as well as the quartet collective Owls. He primarily performs chamber music, and has collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma, Mitsuko Uchida, Terry Riley, Caroline Shaw, as well as the Emerson, Guarneri, and JACK Quartets. Wiancko first worked with the Kronos Quartet when they invited him to participate in their 50 For The Future project, and he formally joined the group in 2023.  

The Washington Post describes him as “a restless and multifaceted talent ... [who] maintains a singular voice as a composer.” His music has also been described as “dazzling,” “compelling,” “joyous, riotous,” and “delicate.”  

Wiancko composed his American Haiku in 2014, honoring his Japanese-American heritage. He inherited his interest in Haiku from his father, a filmmaker who believed that Haiku could not be accurately translated into English because of the multiple meanings of each character. Wiancko grew up in California, and his Japanese heritage is very important to him. American Haiku is a piece in which he marries the Haiku with his love of Appalachian folk music.  

American Haiku is in three parts, mirroring the structure of a Haiku. It features playful rhythms, rich chords, and charming melodies. The viola and cello also share overlapping registers, and therefore their sounds blend well. Wiancko describes this piece as “[a] fusion of the broad earthiness that is Appalachian music, with the tender, sparse rhythms of Japanese folk song.”  

An Exaltation of Larks and Amazing Grace 
Jennifer Higdon (b. 1962) 

Jennifer Higdon is a wildly successful and popular composer. She has won three Grammys, a Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two separate awards from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and many (many!) other awards and grants. She works in multiple genres, and her music is performed hundreds of times each year around the world.  

Higdon started studying music later than most professional musicians, first playing flute as a teenager and then beginning to compose in college. Fanfare magazine wrote, “[Higdon’s music has] the distinction of being at once complex, sophisticated but readily accessible emotionally” and the Chicago Tribune called it “beautiful, accessible, inventive, and impeccably crafted.” 

In 2005, the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, sponsored by Mr. and Mrs. Charles M. Peters, commissioned An Exaltation of Larks for the Tokyo String Quartet. In her note on the score, Higdon writes, “‘An Exaltation of Larks’ Definitions: Larks – any of numerous singing birds. Exaltation – an act of exalting; the state of being exalted; and excessively intensified sense of well-being, power, importance; an increase in degree or intensity. Thoughts: The first time someone told me that a collection of Larks is called an ‘exaltation’ I immediately thought, ‘What a sound an exaltation of larks must make!’ This prompted my imagination to run wild in a composerly fashion, thinking of thousands of birds flying and singing wildly with extraordinary energy and intensity. Not to mention the wonderful play on words that is implied with ‘exaltation.’ How to capture the beauty of the idea of exalting and singing? A string quartet seemed perfect!” 

Higdon completed her lovely theme-and-variations arrangement of Amazing Grace in 1998 as part of a larger vocal work, and the Ying Quartet arranged it for string quartet. This was the first piece that she completed after the death of her younger brother and it is deeply personal to her.  

Night 
Florence Beatrice Smith Price (1887-1953) 

Arkansas-born composer Florence Price showed great musical promise at a young age. Having graduated from high school at only fourteen, Price attended the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston where she studied piano, organ, and composition. After completing her degree at NEC, Price moved back to the South to take up teaching posts in Georgia and eventually Arkansas. 

In 1912, Price married prominent civil rights attorney Thomas Price. The couple had two daughters and relocated to Chicago in the late 1920s because of rising racial tensions and violence. It was here that Price’s musical career began to flourish. She took additional courses at the American Conservatory of Music, Chicago Musical College, and the University of Chicago, joined the R. Nathaniel Dett Club for Music and Allied Arts, and became a part of the city’s robust African-American artistic landscape. Price had her first publications by McKinley and G. Schirmer, and got steadier work performing organ for silent films and orchestrating and arranging pieces for radio broadcast.  

The Chicago Symphony premiered her First Symphony in 1932, making Price the first African-American female composer to be performed by a major orchestra. The premiere was greeted with accolades; a writer from the Chicago Daily News called it “a faultless work, a work that speaks its own message with restraint and yet with passion… worthy of a place in the regular symphonic repertoire.” 

Nevertheless, her race and gender were ongoing sources of professional difficulty for Price, and in a letter to Boston Symphony director Serge Koussevitzky in 1943, she wrote, “Unfortunately the work of a woman composer is preconceived by many to be light, frothy, lacking in depth, logic and virility… Add to that the incident of race—I have Colored blood in my veins—and you will understand some of the difficulties that confront one in such a position.”  

Violist and composer Jonathan Blumhofer calls the fact that most of today’s orchestral literature is written by so few people one of the “enduring ironies of classical music.” He goes on to point out, “Even so, Price’s initial symphonic success didn’t break the taboos surrounding her gender and race. However, she continued to compose prolifically and was performed more widely…. Clearly, she was a composer to be reckoned with: a musician with a strong, distinct voice, who had something to say, and whose work appealed to an impressive cross-section of prominent musicians of her day.” 

Price’s music, in general, was both inspired and influenced by her black heritage, something she showed by incorporating traditional songs and spirituals. She composed Night in 1946 based on the poem by Louise C. Wallace. The poem describes “[a] Madonna clad in scented blue” watching over a “[resting,] dreamy child,” and centers itself on peace and restfulness. Though Night is originally written for a vocalist, it is often arranged for piano trio.  

Night comes, a Madonna clad in scented blue. 
Rose red her mouth and deep her eyes,  
She lights her stars, and turns to where,  
Beneath her silver lamp the moon, 
Upon a couch of shadow lies 
A dreamy child, 
The wearied Day. 

Café Music 
Paul Schoenfield (1947-2024) 

Originally from Detroit, pianist and composer Paul Schoenfield began music lessons at the age of six and went on to earn a DMA from the University of Arizona. He later taught here in Toledo for a time before moving to Israel to live on a kibbutz and teach mathematics to high school students. After moving back to the US, Schoenfield freelanced in Minneapolis–St. Paul, and then moved back to Israel, which he considered his other home. For the rest of his life, he continued to move between the two countries.  

Schoenfield’s music combines multiple genres, including pop, folk, and classical. His work has been performed by the New York Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, Orchestra Sinfonico di Milano, and Haifa Symphony Orchestra, among others. He has also received numerous commissions and grants, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Fund, the Bush Foundation, Meet the Composer, and Chamber Music America.  

Schoenfield explains, “I don’t consider myself an art-music [serious music] composer at all. The reason my works sometimes find their way into concert halls is [that] at this juncture, there aren’t many folk music performers with enough technique, time or desire to perform my music. They usually write their own anyway.”  

In a speech introducing Schoenfield at the Cleveland Arts Prize in 1994, commentator Klaus George Roy noted, “Paul Schoenfield writes the kind of inclusive and welcoming music that gives eclecticism a good name. In the tradition of Bach, who never left German soil but wrote French suites, English suites and Italian concertos, and in the tradition of Bartók, who absorbed and transformed not only Hungarian music, but that of Romania, Bulgaria and North Africa, Paul draws on many ethnic sources in music, assimilating them into his own distinctive language.” 

Completed in 1986, Café Music is one of Schoenfield’s most popular works. In his program note, he writes: 

“The idea to compose Café Music first came to me in 1985 after sitting in one night for the pianist at Murray’s Restaurant in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Murray’s employs a house trio that plays entertaining dinner music in a wide variety of styles. My intention was to write a kind of high-class dinner music – music which could be played at a restaurant, but might also (just barely) find its way into a concert hall. The work draws on many of the types of music played by the trio at Murray’s. For example, early 20th-century American, Viennese, light classical, gypsy, and Broadway styles are all represented. A paraphrase of a beautiful Chassidic melody is incorporated in the second movement. 

“Café Music was commissioned by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra (SPCO) and received its premiere during a SPCO chamber concert in January 1987.”