First Light

Dan Sonenberg

Dan Sonenberg is a composer, performer and educator living in Portland, Maine. The Maine Arts Commission named him the Maine Artist Fellow for the Performing Arts for the year 2019. 

His opera The Summer King, received national productions at Pittsburgh Opera (2017) and Michigan Opera Theater (2018), with the premiere production featuring internationally-renowned mezzo soprano Denyce Graves. 

His fanfare, First Light, was commissioned by the Portland Symphony Orchestra in celebration of Maine’s bicentennial, and premiered in the PSO’s season-opening concert in October 2021. Dr. Sonenberg’s one-act opera Girl in Six Beats (2018), was commissioned by Opera Maine, and received its premiere in a production co-mounted by Opera Maine and the University of Southern Maine. 

Dr. Sonenberg has collaborated extensively with international percussion performing artist Lynn Vartan. He has written three pieces for her, the most recent of which, The Surprise Guest, was premiered in performances at USM, Bates College, and Farmington Arts in 2023. Other recent commissions and performances include the Cassatt String Quartet, the Da Capo Chamber Players, Resinosa Ensemble, Songs from Here, Portland Ovations and many others. 

 His work has been supported by New Music USA, Meet the Composer, The American Music Center, the Dan Crew Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and numerous others. He is full professor and director of composition studies at the University of Southern Maine, where he has taught since 2004.

Dr. Sonenberg has also released numerous albums of original rock music, both as a solo artist and with his band Lovers of Fiction. 

Nancy Gunn

Nancy Gunn has written for orchestra, chamber ensembles, and chorus.  Her work has been performed by the New York Festival of Song, the Colorado Symphony, the Arapahoe Philharmonic, the Rocky Mountain Children’s Choir, the Ariel Trio, and the Portland Youth Wind Ensemble, among others, and has been featured on WNYC in New York and KVOD in Denver. 

Gunn’s compositions have received numerous awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the ASCAP Foundation, the Maine Humanities Council and the Maine Arts Commission, Meet the Composer, and the Aspen Music Festival.  

She was born in New York City and earned a Masters in Composition from the University of Michigan, where she studied with Leslie Bassett and William Albright, and a Ph.D in Composition from the City University of New York Graduate Center, where she studied with David Olan and Charles Dodge.   While in New York, she was one of the founding members of Friends and Enemies of New Music, which produced concerts of new music in New York City for over twenty years. 

Gunn has held teaching positions at Hunter College and the Third Street Music Settlement in New York and at Metropolitan State College in Denver. She is currently on the faculty of the University of Southern Maine and Southern Maine Community College, where she teaches music theory, music history, and world music.

Richard Nelson

Composer/guitarist Richard Nelson is recognized for his skillful and original integrations of contemporary classical and jazz composition and performance practices.  He is co-leader, guitarist, and a principal composer for the Makrokosmos Orchestra, a 15-player, New York-based hybrid jazz/new-music ensemble, with multiple appearances at ShapeShifter Lab in Brooklyn.  

His works additionally have been performed by ensembles such as ALEA III, the Charleston Symphony Orchestra, the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra, and the Portland Piano Trio at venues including the Piccolo Spoleto Festival, Miller Theater, the University of Cape Town (South Africa), and numerous other U.S. festivals and universities.  He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Charles Ives Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the BMI Jazz Composers Workshop, and commissions from a number of notable performing ensembles. As a guitarist, Nelson has performed widely and with many renowned figures at festivals, clubs, colleges and other venues across the U.S. and abroad.                  

Nelson has released four albums–Deep River, Pursuit, Origin Story and Figurations–as a leader, and he appears as a sideman on many others, including over ten with the Boston-based Aardvark Jazz Orchestra. 

 AllAboutJazz.com called him "an ambitious and daring composer," praising his CD Pursuit as "a distinctive synthesis of modern jazz, and contemporary orchestral music."  

The Boston Globe called Deep River, in a recording by the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra, "a masterful suite . . . that merges jazz and American folk music."   

Nelson studied composition at Indiana University with Donald Erb (Masters degree), at Columbia University with Mario Davidovsky (Doctor of Musical Arts), and at the BMI Jazz Composers Workshop with Bob Brookmeyer and Manny Albam.  He was Visiting Artist at the University of Cape Town for the Fall 2004 semester. He is Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of Maine at Augusta. 

John Newell

Born in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1949, John Newell’s earliest musical training was in piano. He attended Duke University (B.A 1971) and the recently established California Institute of the Arts (M.F.A 1973). His primary teacher at CalArts was composer Mel Powell.

John’s formal training was completed at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he studied with Morton Feldman. Holder of the first Edgard Varèse Fellowship, he received his Ph.D. in 1979. Since that time John has pursued an independent creative path, finding inspiration in the wonder of nature and in what he learns from the world’s sacred traditions. He has composed a broad range of works for orchestra, chorus, solo instruments and chamber groups.

Organizations that have commissioned works include Eight Strings & a Whistle, Bowery Ensemble and Atlantic Sinfonietta (New York), Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), the Enid Symphony Orchestra (Oklahoma), Resinosa Ensemble, Passamaquoddy Bay Symphony Orchestra and Songs From Here (Maine). His work has received support from the American Music Center, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and Meet the Composer. John self-publishes his works through Abierto Music and he is a member of BMI.

An accomplished pianist and conductor, John is experienced in collaborating with performers to create and present new works. He has participated in a number of premiere performances, including the solo part in his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra. John was the founding director of Quoddy Voices, a choral ensemble based in Eastport, Maine.

Outside of music John pursued a career in financial services, creating and directing a host of training programs in insurance products as well as sales and management skills. He currently maintains a private teaching studio and is on the faculty of the SummerKeys adult music program in Lubec, Maine. He and his wife Linda now live in Bozeman, Montana. 

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) was one of America's most celebrated poets, renowned for her lyrical mastery, vivid imagery, and distinctive voice. A Pulitzer Prize winner, she published numerous acclaimed collections, including Renascence and Other Poems (1917), The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems (1923), The Buck in the Snow (1928), and Fatal Interview (1931). Millay spent her formative years in Camden, Maine, where the state's coastal beauty and natural landscapes profoundly shaped her imagination and poetry. 

Elizabeth Spire (b.1952) is the author of several poetry collections, including The Wave-Maker (W. W. Norton, 2008), Now the Green Blade Rises (W. W. Norton, 2004), and Worldling (W. W. Norton, 1995), winner of the 1996 Whiting Writers’ Award.  In her second collection Swan's Island (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1997),  Spires draws on the natural beauty and isolation of the Maine island, using motifs of solitude, wildlife, and seasonal change to reflect on transience and renewal. 

An acclaimed children’s author, Spires has also published several children’s books as well, such as The Mouse of Amherst (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), about a mouse who lives behind a wall in Emily Dickinson’s room. Her honors include the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry. She teaches at Goucher College and lives in Baltimore, Maryland. 

Dr. Ellen M. Taylor is a poet, teacher, scholar and organizer of Maine’s Plunkett Poetry Festival. Her work has appeared in the North American Review, New England Review, and elsewhere, and her latest collection, Homelands, was nominated for a Maine literary award. 

Ellen has three poetry collections from Moon Pie Press, Homelands (2022), Compass Rose (2015), and Floating (2009), as well as two chapbooks Humming to Snails (2005), and Letters from the Third World by Sheltering Pines Press (2006). She has published in literary journals regionally, nationally, and internationally. She teaches at the University of Maine in Augusta and in the Maine Prison Education Program.

Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) was an American lyric poet celebrated for her luminous, deeply personal poetry exploring love, beauty, nature, and the passage of time. A Pulitzer Prize winner, her collections Rivers to the Sea (1915), Love Songs (1917), Flame and Shadow (1920), and Dark of the Moon (1926) established her as one of the leading poetic voices of the early twentieth century. Although born in St. Louis, Missouri, Teasdale developed a lasting connection to Maine through her summers on Mount Desert Island, where the state's rugged coastline and quiet landscapes inspired many of her poems.