WHISTLING HENS
Diana Rosenblum
Say I Am a River (2021)
Say I Am a River is a setting of text by Mary Buchinger. The song has a canonic construct, with the clarinet often imitating the entirety of the voice's prior phrase. This structure connects the song to Rosenblum’s contrapuntal-instrumental works, while taking on additional meaning with reference to text. The canonic echo has semantic resonance in this poetic context, given the poem's theme of reciprocity. Say I Am a River was premiered March 4, 2022 at the Mississippi Music by Women Festival.
Over the past decade, Diana Rosenblum (b. 1983) has cultivated the craft of imitative counterpoint within a contemporary tonal idiom that embraces complex sonority. Her repertoire is distinguished, not only by its inclusion of many fugues and canons, but by their inquisitive premises and immaculate structures. The second movement of her Piano Quartet will be featured in Bradley Osborn’s textbook, Music Theory for the Modern Age, under contract with Oxford University Press. Rosenblum will join faculty at Nazareth College as Adjunct Professor of Composition in Fall 2022, serving as a year-long sabbatical replacement for Octavio Vasquez.
She holds a Ph.D in Composition from Eastman School of Music, where she studied with David Liptak, Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon and Robert Morris and co-taught freshmen majors (class of 2020) with Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, which earned her recognition as Finalist for Eastman’s Teaching Assistant Prize for Excellence. She has been inducted into Pi Kappa Lambda honor society. Her compositions have been awarded the Wayne Brewster Barlow Prize (twice), Belle S. Gitelman Award (twice), and Anthony and Carolyn Donato Prize.
Rosenblum also holds an A.B. in Philosophy from Princeton University and M.M. in Composition from University of Oregon, where she was named Outstanding Graduate Scholar. Rosenblum has enjoyed collaborations with harpsichordist Andrew Rosenblum, organist Chelsea Barton, violinist Wendy Toh, pianist Tze-Wen Lin, Eastman Broadband Ensemble, Whistling Hens, Khroma Quartet, Eastman Graduate Composers’ Sinfonietta, OSSIA New Music, Red Hedgehog Trio, as well as cellist Matt Haimovitz and vocal trio Voice.
About the Poet
Mary Buchinger grew up on a farm in Michigan, worked in Ecuador as a Peace Corps volunteer, and earned a doctorate in linguistics from Boston University. One of her poems is permanently installed in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she lives and served as Poetry Ambassador. She is professor of English and communication studies at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston and serves on the board of the New England Poetry Club (founded in 1915 by Robert Frost, Amy Lowell, and Conrad Aiken).
