ABOUT THE PIECE

Written as part of Min Kwon’s fantastically ambitious America/Beautiful project, You are welcome here is an expression of my belief that immigration is central to the idea of America. It is also an expression of my belief that Americans must continue the difficult work of defining a set of values which we all share and which we feel comfortable expecting of those who would join us in our ongoing national experiment.

The piece is short, energetic, uncomplicated, and offers the pianist an unusual degree of freedom and flexibility with regard to tempo and dynamics. A short, bright toccata leads to a chorale on the tune “America the Beautiful”, which in turn disintegrates as the piece ends with an unresolved, rising scale. With this piece, I urge us to consider several questions:

What is the role of immigration in our own cultural backgrounds? How do immigrants currently support us in seen or unseen ways? What is the immigration system we would like for us follow as a country? If a system of this kind is not supported by our elected officials, why not? If we imagine the argument against this system, can we formulate the best version of that argument and understand why someone might subscribe to it? Why has the status quo prevailed for so long?

Everyday Americans must relearn to discuss ideas that matter in public and in person. Live music is a space where we still gather to listen quietly as a group and, as such, might lend itself to this kind of discussion. I hope to use my small platform as a musician to encourage this by bringing the ideas that matter the most to me to the center of each work I present.

Philadelphia—Boston, Winter 2025

About Scott Ordway

Scott Ordway is an American composer and multimedia artist whose widely acclaimed music and mixed-media projects have been called “exquisite” (New York Times) and “arresting” (Gramophone), “hypnotic” (BBC) and “a marvel” (Philadelphia Inquirer). His works are presented on major concert stages around the world with recent and upcoming performances at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Wigmore Hall, Park Avenue Armory, Hong Kong City Hall Theater, Bing Concert Hall of Stanford University, and the Beijing Modern, Hong Kong Arts, Bang on a Can, and Aspen Music Festivals, among many others.

Drawing on his deep interest in literature, languages, and the humanities, Ordway’s remarkably diverse works often fuse his music with text (frequently his own), video, and photography to explore an eclectic array of contemporary themes including ecology, religion and philosophy, and the landscape and culture of the American West.

His work is supported by numerous awards, fellowships, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, ASCAP, NewMusicUSA, the American Composers Orchestra, Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, American Music Center, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, American Composers Forum, and American Opera Projects, where he was a Fellow. A recipient of the Tuttle Creative Residency Award from Haverford College’s Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities, he has also been invited for residencies at Copland House, Visby International Center for Composers (Sweden), Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts (WY), Willapa Bay AiR (WA), and Hambidge Center for Creative Arts & Sciences, where he was a Distinguished Fellow. He has served as Composer-in-Residence at the Cabrillo, Newburyport, and Carolina Chamber Music Festivals.

Ordway studied at the Universities of Pennsylvania, Oregon, and Puget Sound, the Freie Universität Berlin, and Accademia Chigiana where his teachers included Samuel Adler, Azio Corghi, Robert Hutchinson, Robert Kyr, James Primosch, Jay Reise, and Veljo Tormis. A voting member of the Recording Academy, Scott currently serves as Associate Professor of Music and Head of Composition at Rutgers University. He lives in Philadelphia where he taught previously at the Curtis Institute of Music.

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