Emmy Award-winning composer, 2005 Bush Fellowship recipient Steve Heitzeg is recognized for his orchestral, choral and chamber music written in celebration of the natural world, with evocative and lyrical scores frequently including naturally-found instruments, such as stones, birch bark, wind chimes, acorns, manatee bones, sea glass shards and sea shells.

An advocate for the “peaceful coexistence of all species through music,” Heitzeg has written more than 100 works, including compositions for orchestra, chorus, chamber ensemble and PBS films. His music has been performed by leading orchestras and ensembles, including the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Auckland Philharmonic, Chanticleer, the Dale Warland Singers, Detroit Symphony, Houston Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, The Philadelphia Orchestra, members of the The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, and VocalEssence (formerly Plymouth Music Series), as well as at the Cabrillo and Grand Teton music festivals.

Distinguished conductors such as Marin Alsop, Philip Brunelle, William Eddins, JoAnn Falletta, Giancarlo Guerrero, Jahja Ling, Lawrence Renes, Christopher Seaman, André Raphel Smith, Joseph Silverstein, Osmo Vänskä, and Dale Warland have all led his works.

Named "Composer of the Year" at the 2000 Minnesota Music Awards, Heitzeg has amassed a large body of works that address social and ecological issues with vision and compassion.

• We Are Met at Gettysburg, a co-commission of the Philadelphia Orchestra and Minnesota Orchestra written with Philadelphia composer Amy Scurria, marks the 140th anniversary of the fateful Civil War Battle of Gettysburg. Premiered in 2003 by the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Kimmel Center, the work is comprised of three movements: "Honor and Sacrifice" (by Scurria), "Wounded Fields" (by Heitzeg) and "The Last Full Measure" (co-written by Heitzeg and Scurria). Written for young people, the piece "is about how each of us personally reconciles the events of Gettysburg. It's about social justice, human rights and the hope for positive change in the future," says Heitzeg.
   
  The Minnesota Orchestra and Music Director Osmo Vänskä performed Heitzeg's "Wounded Fields" on their 2004 European Tour.
• Madeline Island: Sanctuary in Blue, commissioned by the Madeline Island Music Camp for their 20th anniversary (with funding provided by Fred & Gloria Sewell) is a 7-minute tone poem for string orchestra and percussion evoking the natural beauty of this Lake Superior island. (The work was premiered July 2nd, 2005.)
• His four-movement Symphony to the Prairie Farm, premiered by Music Director Joseph Giunta and the Des Moines Symphony in 2002 and featuring farm equipment as percussion instruments, is a tribute to a vanishing way of life -- the family farm on the prairie.
• Elegy On Water is a choral work based on a Robert Bly poem, commissioned and premiered by the Dale Warland Singers (April 2004).
• Voice of the Everglades, premiered by Christopher Seaman and The Naples Philharmonic in 2000, is a portrait of environmentalist and Everglades defender Marjory Stoneman Douglas that includes a recording of manatee vocalizations. This work is now available on CD by the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra.
• Aqua, which received its debut with JoAnn Falletta and the Virginia Symphony in 1999, commemorates the visionary spirit of ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau.
• In 2000 Heitzeg wrote What the River Says, commissioned by the Grand Forks Master Chorale to contribute to the healing of that community in the wake of the disastrous flood of the Red River in 1997.
• Mustang, hailed as "six minutes of magnificence" by the Billings Gazette, was commissioned by the Tucson Symphony and a consortium of five other orchestras in 1996 to explore the mythology of horse power in North America -- both the wild animal and automobiles varieties. Percussionists play Ford Mustang hubcaps, among other special instruments, in the work.
• In 2001 a combined choir and orchestra of 300 at Gustavus Adolphus College premiered Heitzeg's 75-minute Nobel Symphony. Commissioned by Gustavus to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prizes, the monumental work is comprised of six movements -- one for each of the Prizes -- that set texts by sixteen Nobel Laureates, including Dag Hammarskjöld, Martin Luther King, Jr., His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Toni Morrison, Mother Teresa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Elie Wiesel. This "symphony for peace," which was profiled on National Public Radio, features such instruments as Tibetan horns, olive tree branches, a plowshare and prosthetic leg limbs (a protest against war and land mines).
   
  The work received its professional premiere in April 2004 by Philip Brunelle's VocalEssence in a collaboration featuring new media work by students and faculty of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
• A previous Gustavus commission in 1997, Blessed Are the Peacemakers for alto, chorus and orchestra is a setting of texts by Martin Luther King, Jr, Hildegard of Bingen, Saint Francis of Assisi, Dag Hammarskjöld and Raoul Wallenberg, five individuals who fought for peace and justice.

Other works include Blue Liberty, an orchestral fanfare written for the Minnesota Orchestra (premiered 2002); Open Spaces, a brass fanfare written for the opening of the SPCO Center (2004), The Tin Forest, a chamber ensemble work based on the children's book of the same title, which Heitzeg subsequently re-orchestrated for performances with the Minnesota Orchestra, narrated by Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak (2005); and the Centennial Fanfare (A Common Call), a virtuosic two-minute fanfare premiered by the trumpet section of the Minnesota Orchestra (2002) in honor of the Orchestra's 100th anniversary.

Productive in many genres, Heitzeg has composed Leaf Songs, settings of three Wendell Berry poems about trees premiered by the West Virginia Wesleyan College Concert Chorale; Earthbridge, a work for piano and percussion, commissioned by the Walker Art Center for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden; and the solo cello work Endangered (Written in Honor of All Turtles and Tortoises), premiered by Laura Sewell and later performed as a solo dance work by Sally Rousse of the James Sewell Ballet. In 1990, the Dale Warland Singers premiered, and later recorded, one of his most widely performed works, little tree.

Multimedia Works

The Minnesota Orchestra premiered Heitzeg's On the Day You Were Born, a 20-minute tone poem based on Debra Frasier's award-winning book of the same name, in October 1995 with actress Jane Alexander narrating. The orchestra subsequently recorded and released the work as an animated children's video to much acclaim. The video won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Best Children's Video of 1997, as well as numerous other awards, including the Oppenheim Toy Portfolio and a Parents' Choice Award. The Orchestra issued an On the Day You Were Born CD and curriculum guide in 1997.

Heitzeg received a regional Emmy Award for his original score for the public television documentary Death of the Dream: Farmhouses in the Heartland in 2000. His score for the PBS film A Marriage: Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz (starring Jane Alexander and Christopher Plummer) premiered nationwide as part of the American Playhouse Series in 1991. In 2003 Heitzeg wrote incidental music for the Shakespeare Theatre's production of Ibsen's Ghosts in Washtongton DC, starring Jane Alexander.

ecoscores

An environmentalist, Heitzeg has been writing ecoscores, intimate works with inventive musical syntax that seek to honor the beauty and rights of nature, for over a decade. Two of those works, Peace March for Paul and Sheila Wellstone (composed in the shape of a peace sign) and American Symphony (Unfinished) -- (ten chords that honor famous American peace activists, superimposed on an unfinished American flag), are in the permanent collection of the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis.

He also constructs and includes naturally-found instruments in his compositions to symbolize the interconnectedness of humans with nature. As a result, rocks and leaves appear in his Enduring Earth; rain sticks in Litanies for the Living; birch bark and pine cone wind chimes in Raven and Crow: Medicine Birds; stones, an obsdian wind gong, and jade and agate-slice wind chimes in Sacred Stones (Symphony in Stone); and acorns, maple seedlings and catalpa tree pods in Leaf Songs.

Recordings and Awards

Heitzeg's debut recording, earthworks: music in honor of nature, was released in April 1998. He is the recipient of a 2005 Bush Foundation Fellowship, a 2001 McKnight Fellowship, a Meet The Composer/Reader's Digest-Lila Wallace Commissioning Grant, an American Composer's Forum Continental Harmony grant, Meet The Composer/New York and Midwest grants, and numerous other grants and commissions. He was named Minnesota's "Composer of the Year" in 2000 by the Minnesota Music Academy.

Born in 1959, Steve Heitzeg grew up on a dairy farm in southern Minnesota. As a child he studied guitar and piano and wrote his first compositions, including a rock opera. Following undergraduate work at Gustavus Adolphus College, he received his doctorate in music theory and composition from the University of Minnesota School of Music, studying composition with Dominick Argento. He served as the 1993-94 composer-in-residence at the University of Saint Thomas and has taught at Mankato State University and Gustavus Adolphus College. Heitzeg now lives in Saint Paul with his wife Gwendolyn, their new daughter Zadie and their Weimaraner Heddy.

Recent and Forthcoming works

• A ballet project with James Sewell Ballet, and a string quartet for the Daedalus Quartet; both projects funded through a 2005 Bush Foundation Fellowship.
• Hymn for Nonviolence (from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail and commissioned by The Greater Minneapolis Council of Churches in honor of their centennial) to be premiered by the Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church Choir, Sanford Moore, director, January 2006
• From War to Peace Song (commissioned by peace activist Marj Wunder in remembrance of the 60th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) to be premiered at the Lake Harriet Peace Garden, Minneapolis.
• Work for chorus and orchestra (commissioned by ACDA and MMEA) to be premiered by the Minnesota All-State Choir and the Minnesota Orchestra, Orchestra Hall, Minneapolis, March 2007
• Chamber work commissioned by The Schubert Club as part of The Science Museum of Minnesota and National Musical Arts BioMusic Project to be premiered March 2007
• Peace Cranes, a fanfare for four violins, commissioned by WAMSO - Minnesota Orchestra Volunteeer Association, and set for premiere by Minnesota Orchestra violinists in January 2006.