April 30 at 7:30pm
RAM Composers ~ RAM Players 

May 1 at 7:30pm
Fifteen Minutes of Fame

May 2 at 3pm
KOE (Eva Ding, flute & Emma Kato, cello)

May 2 at 7:30pm
Aaron Copland School of Music
Queens College Percussion Ensemble

May 3 at 3pm
Luminae Trio

May 3 at 7:30pm
RAM Composers/Players and Guest Composers
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Winner of the RAM Queens New Music Festival
Composition Competition
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SCROLL DOWN FOR PROGRAMS

QNMF Opening Concert​
Thursday April 30 at 7:30pm

RAM Composers ~ RAM Players ​

RAM Sings
Risa Harman, soprano
Seth Gilman, baritone
Adelina DeBella, flute
Thomas Piercy, clarinet
Laurel Gagnon, violin
Corey Chang, piano
Marina Iwao, piano

 

Beata Moon
“Prayer of Saint Francis”
for baritone, clarinet, violin, and piano
(2026) (World Premiere)
Gilman, Piercy, Gagnon, Iwao
 

"Seigneur, faites de moi un instrument de votre paix.

(Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.)
Where there is hatred, let me bring love.
Where there is offence, let me bring pardon.
Where there is discord, let me bring union.
Where there is error, let me bring truth.
Where there is doubt, let me bring faith.
Where there is despair, let me bring hope.
Where there is darkness, let me bring your light.
Where there is sadness, let me bring joy.

Ô Seigneur, que je ne cherche pas tant
à être consolé qu'à consoler,
à être compris qu'à comprendre,
à être aimé qu'à aimer,

(O Lord, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love,)
for it is in giving that one receives,
it is in self-forgetting that one finds,
it is in forgiving that one is forgiven,
it is in dying that one awakens to eternal life."

 

Masatora Goya
"Robert Louis Stevenson Suite"
for soprano, baritone, flute, clarinet, violin, and piano
(2026) (World Premiere)
Harman, Gilman, DeBella, Piercy, Gagnon, Chang

Allen Schulz
“8 miniatures” for alto flute and clarinet
(2026) (World Premiere)
DeBella, Piercy

Corey Chang
“Shimmer” for piano
(2023/2024)
Chang

Frances White
"The lily bearers" for narrator, alto flute, violin, and piano
(2026) (World Premiere)
Harman, DeBella, Gagnon, Iwao

Gilbert Galindo
“Braided Soul” for soprano, flute, bass clarinet, violin, piano
(2026) (World Premiere)
Harman, DeBella, Piercy, Gagnon, Chang


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Friday May 1 at 7:30pm
Fifteen-Minutes-of-Fame and Vox Novus

Fifteen-Minutes-of-Fame
Alyssa Reit, Lever Harp

"RUST" duet for violin and voice by Melinda Faylor

Charlotte Munn-Wood, violin;  Melinda Faylor, voice

"Little Decoherence for Piano" by Leslie de Melcher
Eunmi Ko, piano

"sang de glacier" for piano and toy piano by Emily Koh
Eunmi Ko, piano

One Minute More - "Frolic In An Endlesss Sky" by Allen Schulz
Eunmi Ko, toy piano

Fifteen-Minutes-of-Fame DANCE

featuring Eunmi Ko, toy piano

Full Program info
www.voxnovus.com/15_Minutes_of_Fame/dance/QNMF/2026/program

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Saturday at 3pm
KOE
(Eva Ding, flute & Emma Kato, cello) 


 

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Lei Liang Gobi "Canticle"  (2005, arr. Eva Ding, 2021)

Lei Liang first encountered Mongolian folk music through a family friend who was one of the Tradition’s leading scholars, and it stayed with him. Gobi Canticle belongs to a series of works he built from that encounter, drawing on the urtiin duu, the Mongolian “long song”; a form of singing UNESCO has recognized as intangible heritage of humanity and which can sustain a single song for hours. Originally written for violin and viola, this arrangement for flute and cello was made by KOE’s Eva Ding in 2021. The two instruments share a single melodic line and its mirror image, moving simultaneously forward and in reverse – a structure borrowed from the cyclical, expansive quality of the long song itself.
 

Chen Yi “Three Bagatelles from China West”
(2006, arr. composer for KOE, 2021)
I. Shan Ge;  II. Nai Guo Hou

Chen Yi is one of the most celebrated living composers working between Chinese and Western traditions. Born in Guangzhou and trained at Beijing Central Conservatory, she came to the United States in the 1980s and has been a defining voice in American new music ever since. Three Bagatelles from China West draws on folk music from China’s western regions – specifically the musical traditions of the Jingpo, Yi, and Miao peoples – and the instruments associated with them: the bawu flute, the lerong fiddle, and the lusheng mouth organ.
 

Yuki Ohnishi “Sunset in Gion” (2021)

Gion (祇園) is a historic district in Kyoto, Japan, known for its preserved geisha culture and traditional architecture. Ohnishi – a composer and pop producer, and a close friend of KOE cellist Emma Kato – wrote this piece in response to the atmosphere of the neighborhood at dusk: the temple bell, the stone streets going quiet, and the particular feeling of standing somewhere so saturated with history that you don’t quite know what to do with it. The music draws on folk motifs common to Japanese traditional music alongside contemporary harmonic language.
 

Yuko Uebayashi “Suite for Flute and Cello” (2004)
II. Adagio; III. Allegro vivace

Japanese composer Yuko Uebayashi studied in Tokyo before moving to Paris in 1998, and her music sounds exactly like that biography: French impressionism and Japanese film music, which is a pairing that sounds stranger on paper than it does in practice. The Suite for Flute and Cello is among the most significant works in the repertoire for these two instruments – six movements that inhabit, as flutist Jean Ferrandis put it, “a world of vivacity, dreams, tenderness, humor”; haunted by “melancholy and sorrow.”

 

Zygmund de Somogyi “ka-wei-mee-na” (2023/2024)

This piece was written for Eva Ding and Emma Kato specifically and it’s about the kind of language that only exists between two people who know each other incredibly deeply. De Somogyi, a British-Filipino composer based in London, drew from three memories that converged into one: hearing elder relatives sing songs in a language they couldn’t understand; reading about twins who invent private languages only they share; and the last time they played “pretend” with childhood friends. The piece explores invented language and shared imagination as its subject, and ends with a hand game performed by the two players – a gesture that is also, in its way, a kind of language.
 

Yuki Ohnishi “Homecoming” (2022)

Written a year after Sunset in Gion, Homecoming is Ohnishi’s most direct piece on tonight’s program – melodically immediate, pop-influenced, and rooted in the kind of Japanese songwriting that moves easily between folk and film score traditions. It is about returning: to a place, to a person, to something familiar.
 

Zhou Long “Su (Tracing Back)”
(1986, arr. composer for flute and cello)

Su is a Chinese word that holds two meanings at once: to trace back, and plain, simple, original. Zhou Long – born in Beijing, later trained at Columbia University in New York – wrote this piece first as a dialogue between flute and qin, the ancient Chinese zither, before eventually arranging it for flute and cello.

The music reaches toward something elemental. Zhou Long has spoken about the years he spent on a state farm during the Cultural Revolution, when his formal musical training was interrupted and he lived close to the land – roaring winds, open sky, earth without ornamentation. Something of that landscape is in this piece. It doesn’t try to arrive anywhere. It tries to remember. By the time you hear it tonight, the program will have already traveled far –through mountains, city streets, childhood games, and living rooms. Su is the moment of sitting still and asking: where did all of this begin?

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Saturday at 7:30pm
Aaron Copland School of Music
Queens College
 

Performed by the Copland Ensemble,

Michael Lipsey, director
and the Alegría Ensemble

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Music by Sawyer Adler, Matt Krane, Steve Reich,
Emre Arslan Tetik, Latai Zhuo

Latai Zhuo Fireworks

for Flute, Clarinet, Violin, Cello, and Piano

[A trace of fleeting fragments, where sound, silence, and resonance linger beyond disappearance.]

Program Note: 
Fireworks is not a linearly unfolding work, but a constellation of independent fragments — like the brief flare of fireworks that have already vanished, leaving only resonance, after-image, and a suspended tension in the air. What the piece points to is not the moment of “bursting,” but what remains after disappearance. Each fragment behaves like a breath: it appears, it is held, and it slowly fades away. For this reason, tempo and dynamics function not as fixed structures but as living shapes — expanding and contracting with breath rather than driven by metric logic. Silence is not treated as emptiness, but as something weighted: the retreat of sound, the residue of memory, and the anticipation of what is yet to come. Like separations in life, these pauses do not signify an ending, but a preparation for the next return. What is heard is therefore not only the sounding material, but also the spaces between sounds. These distances — suspended between impulse and disappearance — exist entirely in preparation for a more radiant unveiling that has yet to arrive.

Matt Krane Canned Gopher for Flute, Clarinet, Violin, Cello, and Piano

Program Note: Canned Gopher is a semi-programmatic work of which the defining features are both a persistent piano ostinato and recurring harmonic texture. The work makes partial allusion to the penultimate chapter of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, which tells an allegory of a gopher briefly finding what is seemingly an ideal home before circumstance forces him to leave. The music does not narrate the episode literally. Rather, it reflects certain aspects of the parable at a distance: themes of comfort, routine, and disturbance. The gestural nature of Canned Gopher seeks to contribute to the tradition of the Pierrot ensemble and maintain an established contrast between stability and interruption as it shapes the work’s broader character. No gophers were hurt in the making of this piece.

Sawyer Adler Dale - A Monodrama
for Soprano, Flute, Clarinet, Violin, Cello, and Piano

[Dale - A Monodrama tells the story of a husband and wife who don’t quite know each other like they used to.]

Program Note:
It can be difficult to acknowledge when you aren’t quite as close with someone as you used to be. “Is it my fault? I hardly reached out… But, then again, neither did they…” It’s been years since I’ve spoken to various old friends — ones that I used to see nearly every day. I wrote Dale in an attempt to examine the kind of passivity that leads to the end of relationships like those. Set in the bleak, everyday England of my childhood, Dale tells the story of a husband and wife who don’t quite know each other like they used to. 

Alegría Ensemble
Chloë Dickens, violin; Robert Feifan Hurley, cello;
Mina Šuković, flute; Alex Yu, clarinet, Lydia Saylor, soprano;
Emre Tetik, conductor

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Sunday at 3pm
LUMINAE TRIO

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Jacob Nordlinger, cello
Jestin Pieper, piano
​Elizabeth Wright, violin​
 

Paul Shoenfield (1947-2024)
Cafe Music, Movement 1:  Allegro
 

Jennifer Higdon (b. 1961)
Brilliant Blue, Pale Yellow
 

Fred Hersch (b. 1955)
Lyric Piece

Lowell Liebermann (b. 1961)
Piano Trio no. 1,  Op. 32
 

James Bassi (b.1961)
Piano Trio, Variations on "O Filii Et Filiae"
(World Premiere) 

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Sunday May 3 at 7:30pm
Closing Concert
RAM Composers/Players
Guest Composers
Winner of the RAM QNMF Composition Competition

Thomas Piercy, clarinet
Laurel Gagnon, violin
Elena Ariza, cello
Corey Chang, piano
Zhihua Hu, piano
Marina Iwao, piano


RAM COMPOSERS

Corey Chang
"Calm." for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano
(2026) (World Premiere)
Piercy, Gagnon, Ariza, Chang

Frances White
“From the book of infinite secrecy”
for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano (2025)
I – Through a hidden doorway
II – The miracle of the roses
Piercy, Gagnon, Ariza, Iwao

Zhihua Hu"
Wind" from "Autumn Wind" for clarinet and piano
(2026) (World Premiere)
Piercy, Hu

RAM Queens New Music Festival
2026 Composition Competition Winner 
Chihchun Chi-sun Lee
"Layers of Waves” for clarinet, cello, and piano
(2026) (World premiere)
Piercy, Ariza, Iwao
 

GUEST COMPOSERS

Miho Sasaki
“Winter Red Blossoms” for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano
(2026) (World Premiere)
Piercy, Gagnon, Ariza, Chang

Michael Schelle
“Torched Songs” for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano
(2025) (World Premiere)
1. Crazy All Through the Night
2. Smoke Gets in My Eyes
3. The Man That Got Away
4. I'll Be Seeing You at Last
5. Scarlett by Starlight
Piercy, Gagnon, Ariza, Iwao

A collection of chamber pieces inspired / influenced by 1920s - 1940s "torch songs" - Torch songs are sentimental ballads (often from The Great American Songbook) about unrequited or lost love, defined by themes of longing and sorrow. Brief (but recognizable) fragments of numerous famous torch songs emerge and disappear throughout the piece, and are distorted, manipulated, developed, re-purposed, dismantled, destroyed and torched, all under an umbrella of bittersweet love, sentimentality, distress, acceptance, resolution, humor, sincerity and respect. Movements 1, 2, 3 and 4 manipulate torch song motives, Movement 5 is completely original, my own "torch song". for our new calico Maine Coon cat (b. March 2025), with no reference to Victor Young's 1944 classic torch song "Stella by Starlight". Heartfelt thanks to Mr. Clayton Baker for his generous financial support of this project.