You can view the score here:
Hank Hehmsoth, a faculty member in the School of Music at Texas State University-San Marcos, has been selected as the MacDowell Colony Norton Stevens Fellow. Hehmsoth was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship in 2011
Hehmsoth was selected for this honor based on the spirit of his work and importance to the world community of artists.
In 1975, in honor of Colony fellow Aaron Copland, the Norlin Foundation established an endowment to provide the fellowship for composers. The MacDowell Colony Norton Stevens Fellowship is one of the highest awards given in the United States to artists. The MacDowell Colony is the nation’s leading artist colony. The Colony nurtures the arts by offering creative individuals of the highest talent an inspiring environment in which they can produce enduring works of the imagination.
I was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship in music composition for 2011 for a 2010 composition, “Two Desert Dances,” a jazz and string ensemble piece featuring live performance with 60-year-old recordings of Native American dance from the John Donald Robb Archive of Southwestern Music.
“These two dances are inspired by field recordings of New Mexican Native Americans,” Hehmsoth said.
“Arroyo Storm is derived from a Taos Jemez Indian dance. The source material for Blue Moon Mist is a four-note melody played on a pito, a Native American flute, similar to an ocarina. Both were recorded in the 1950s.”
In order to find these two pieces I spent hours listening to almost all 6,000 recordings on line at the Robb Archive. Both fascinated me in many ways, both for their seeming simplicity, and yet full of musical content. I transcribed both, deconstructed them in terms of harmony, melody and rhythm, and ultimately wrote a contemporary jazz composition that allows a live ensemble to perform in sync with the 60-year-old recordings.
Research helps me to interpret and seek patterns from multiple sources, test concepts simultaneously, and ultimately decide and finalize a concept and personal artistic vision.
I was invited to speak about Creativity at UT during the summer of 2021:
I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.
– Pablo Picasso