Originally from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Steinway Artist Dr. Heather Conner is Chancellor’s Chair of Pre-College Piano and Professor of Piano at the Vanderbilt University Blair School of Music. Prior to this appointment, she was Professor of Piano at The University of Utah School of Music where she served on the faculty for fourteen years. As a recitalist, she has performed in many prestigious venues in New York City, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Moscow, Salzburg, Antweiler, Germany, Seoul, Niagara-on-the-Lake (Canada), New Haven, Greenville (SC and NC), Stillwater and Oklahoma City, (OK), Tuscaloosa, (AL), Montgomery (AL), Murfreesboro (TN) and Salt Lake City.

Conner has won Grand Prizes at several international and national competitions including the First Hilton Head Island International Piano Competition and the Kingsville International Young Performers Competition, and has performed on numerous occasions as soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra. She has also appeared as soloist with the Lancaster (PA), Lansdowne (PA), Corpus Christi (TX), Pennsylvania Sinfonia Orchestra, Haddonfield Symphony (NJ), Altoona Symphony (PA), Hilton Head Island Symphony Orchestra (SC), Midland-Odessa Symphony (TX), Warminster Symphony (PA), Yale Philharmonia (CT), Norwalk Symphony (CT), New American Symphony (UT) and the Salt Lake Symphony (UT). Heather has recorded commercially for the Naxos, Centaur and Acis Productions labels and has been heard on NPR’s Performance Today, WQED in Pittsburgh, WFLN in Philadelphia, and KCSC in Oklahoma City. Her performances can also be heard on the web at instantencore.com. An avid chamber musician, Heather has appeared in Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall and at the Glenn Gould Studios in Toronto. She holds degrees from The Curtis Institute of Music, Yale School of Music, and Manhattan School of Music. She enjoys collaborating with her husband, Caleb Harris and their children, Logan and Emery Harris on the stage.

Caleb Harris has forged a unique musical path as a conductor, pianist, and chamber musician. Harris has appeared throughout the United States, Austria, Germany, France, Italy, Scotland, Slovenia and Asia at many prestigious venues including Carnegie Hall, Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood and the National Concert Hall in Taipei, Taiwan. Harris has been involved in the preparation and performance of approximately 40 operas: recent productions include, Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, Puccini’s Turandot, Verdi’s La Traviata, Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio, Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, Stravinsky’s Renard, and Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges. He has guest conducted many orchestras including the Frankfurt Symphony, Dubrovnik Symphony, Utah Symphony, Southwest Michigan Symphony, and the Brevard Festival Orchestra. Harris has recorded professionally in a wide variety of genres for Summit Records, Navona Records, Potenza Music and Acis Productions.

Harris formerly held positions at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music, the University of Northern Colorado, the University of Utah and Utah Symphony/Utah Opera. Recent concerto performances include Bach’s Keyboard Concerto in D minor, Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Winds, Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto and Triple Concerto, Brahms’ Second Piano Concerto, and Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. He completed his DMA degree in piano performance at the Eastman School of Music and also held fellowships at the Tanglewood Music Center. Having earned his pilot’s certificate in high school, Harris recently pivoted vocations and now serves as a professional pilot flying the Airbus 320 for Allegiant Air.

Percussionist Ji Hye Jung has been praised as "spectacular" by the Los Angeles Times and "extraordinary" by the Ventura County Star, with the Times further describing her as "a centered player who can give the impression of being very still yet at all places at once."

Ms. Jung began concertizing in her native South Korea at the age of 9, going on to perform more than 100 concerts including solo appearances with every major orchestra in Korea. Soon after coming to the United States in 2004 she garnered first prizes at the 2006 Linz International Marimba Competition and the 2007 Yale Gordon Concerto Competition.

With percussion repertoire still in its formative stages, Ms. Jung feels strongly about collaborating with composers to further the creation of a new voice for the art form. To this end she has commissioned and premiered works by Kevin Puts, Emma O’Halloran, Annika Scolofsky, Bora Yoon, Molly Herron, Christopher Theofanidis, Alejandro Viñao, Lukas Ligeti, Paul Lansky, Jason Treuting, and John Serry.

For more than ten years Jung has served as principal percussionist for Camerata Pacifica, with whom she has debuted works by Bright Sheng, David Bruce, Lera Auerbach and Huang Ruo. Recent solo engagements include appearances at the Westport Festival of Chamber Music in Ireland, Portugal’s Tomarimbando Festival, New Music Indaba in South Africa, The Intimacy of Creativity in Hong Kong, the Grand Teton Music Festival, Germany’s Schleswig-Holstein Festival, the Cortona Sessions for New Music in Italy, the Grachtenfestival in Holland and the Ligeti Symposium in Helsinki, Finland.

Since 2015 Ms. Jung has served as Associate Professor of Percussion at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee where she lives with her husband Lee and their daughter Eugenia.

W. Lee Vinson is a classical percussionist, music educator, and snare drum historian with an extensive back- ground in symphony orchestra performance. For four seasons, from 2007 through 2011, he was a member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and from 2000 to 2004 served as a member of the United States Navy Band in Washington, DC. Mr. Vinson holds a bachelor's degree from the Eastman School of Music where he was a student of John Beck, and has done graduate study at Boston University. He attended summer music festivals at Interlochen, Tanglewood, and the Brevard Music Center.

An active performer, Mr. Vinson has appeared with the orchestras of Detroit, Toronto, Houston, Atlanta, Colorado, Kansas City, and Nashville. A dedicated music educator, Mr. Vinson was a guest lecturer at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York during the 2014 – 2015 academic year while also serving on the music faculty of the University of Kansas. He was previously a faculty member at Boston University and the Boston University Tanglewood Institute, and presently serves as Adjunct Associate Professor of Percussion at Vanderbilt University's Blair School of Music in Nashville, TN.

Christopher Theofanidis (b. 1967 in Dallas, Texas) has had performances by many leading orchestras from around the world, including the London Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony, the Moscow Soloists, the National, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Detroit Symphonies, among many others. He has also served as Composer of the Year for the Pittsburgh Symphony during their 2006-2007 season, for which he wrote a violin concerto for Sarah Chang.

Mr. Theofanidis holds degrees from Yale, the Eastman School of Music, and the University of Houston, and has been the recipient of the International Masterprize, the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Fulbright fellowship to France to study with Tristan Mural at IRCAM, a Tanglewood fellowship, and two fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2007 he was nominated for a Grammy award for best composition for his chorus and orchestra work, The Here and Now, based on the poetry of Rumi, and in 2017 for his bassoon concerto. His orchestral work, Rainbow Body, has been one of the most performed new orchestral works of the new millennium, having been performed by over 150 orchestras internationally.

Mr. Theofanidis’ has written a ballet for the American Ballet Theatre, a work for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra as part of their ‘New Brandenburg’ series, and two operas for the San Francisco and Houston Grand Opera companies. Thomas Hampson sang the lead role in the San Francisco opera. His work for Houston, The Refuge, features six sets of international non-Western musicians alongside the opera musicians. He has a long- standing relationship with the Atlanta Symphony and Maestro Robert Spano, and has just four recordings with them, including his concert length oratorio, Creation/Creator, which was featured at the SHIFT festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. this year with the ASO, chorus, and soloists. His work, Dreamtime Ancestors, for the orchestral consortium, New Music for America, has been played by over fifty orchestras over the past two seasons. He has served as a delegate to the US-Japan Foundation’s Leadership Program, and he is a former faculty member of the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University as well as the Juilliard School. Mr. Theofanidis is currently a professor at Yale University, and composer-in-residence and co-director of the composition program at the Aspen Music Festival.

Two things came together in my mind for the creation of Ways of Seeing.

In the past couple of years, I have had the great delight of going to the Salvador Dalí museum in St. Petersburg several times. That museum rotates its collection regularly and brings in other surrealist artists to show in its spaces, apart from Dalí. On one visit, there was an elaborate exhibition of the works of Magritte alongside those of Dalí. I found myself marveling not only at the sheer inventiveness and psychological dreamscape quality in these two, but also of the wonderful specificity and abstraction of their titles. The experience made me wonder if these artists imagined something and then titled them, or if they instead came up with a title/idea and then painted a work in a certain relationship to that concept. In either case, there is a vital dance between the title and execution which I find completely alive and stimulating.

The other thing that came parallel into the picture, so to speak, was that my girlfriend, the poet Melissa Studdard, who almost nightly has the most extravagant and elaborate dreams, shared a few of her dreams specifically which lead to musical concepts. I look forward to waking up and hearing about these almost every day- they are so far beyond a linear logic, but they are still very intuitive logical, and her sense of recall in them is so vivid. Sometimes we have to artificially stop the conversation because an hour will have passed talking about them. And like the Dalí and Magritte works, and as many dreams are, her dreams always seem to inhabit the realm of the surreal and psychological.

The subtitles of each of the movements in my piece, then, come from both descriptions of Melissa’s dreams and their logic, and also, in at least two cases, in an invented phrase of my own making- invented when I was trying to find words to describe the building blocks I was coming up with when I started composing each movement. The process has been great fun, and all just a little beyond the tangible.

And so in the spirit of that surrealist reading of painting and title, that dance, I think rather than discuss any of the movements in further detail, I would just invite the listener to make the connective leaps their mind will make between the two.

I am so grateful to Heather Conner, Caleb Harris, Ji Hye Jung, and Lee Vinson, for making this piece possible through a generous commission from the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University.

This piece is dedicated to them.