Emmy Award-winning composer 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, manatee and beluga whale bones and sea shells.
 
“From the scores of refugees we will hear the music of humanity. In the symphony called freedom, we will hear our common voice. In the notes of our very existence the unending song of compassion is written. In the key of humanity we will find peace. The chords of justice are before us. May we have the courage to hear them.” — Steve Heitzeg

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, ballet and PBS films.  His music has been performed by leading orchestras and ensembles, including the Auckland Philharmonia, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Chanticleer, Daedalus Quartet, the Dale Warland Singers, Des Moines Symphony Orchestra, Detroit Symphony, Houston Symphony, James Sewell Ballet, Minnesota Orchestra, The Philadelphia Orchestra, members of The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Stavanger Symphony Orchestra and VocalEssence, as well as at the Cabrillo and Grand Teton music festivals.

Conductors such as Marin Alsop, Philip Brunelle, William Eddins, JoAnn Falletta, Joseph Giunta, Giancarlo Guerrero, Sarah Hicks, Jahja Ling, Lawrence Renes, Christopher Seaman, Mischa Santora, André Raphel Smith, Joseph Silverstein, Osmo Vänskä and Dale Warland have all conducted his works.

Heitzeg has amassed a large body of works that address social and ecological issues with vision and compassion.

• Social Movements, funded through an Archibald Bush Artist Fellowship, is a 30-minute ballet that explores some of the seminal social issues of our time from war and global warming to refugees and human rights. The ballet opens with a “Protest” movement, which was inspired by the sacrifice of Norman Morrison, a 31-year-old quaker who set himself on fire in front of the Pentagon in 1965 to protest the Vietnam War. Choreographed by James Sewell, the work was premiered by James Sewell Ballet in April 2008.
• The four-movement string quartet Song Without Borders — also funded through a Bush Fellowship — is dedicated to Sergio Vierio de Mello and other United Nation’s personnel who lost their lives in pursuit of peace. Performed by the Daedalus Quartet, the work was premiered at the UN’s New York headquarters in August 2008.  Four months later, it was performed by the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra String Quartet in Baghdad.
• Together (Divided we are nothing…) sets a quote by Robert F. Kennedy for choir and orchestra. Osmo Vänskä led the work’s premiere with the Minnesota Orchestra and Minnesota All-State Choir at Orchestra Hall in February 2007.
• Wild Songs, commissioned by The Schubert Club as part of The Science Museum of Minnesota and National Musical Arts BioMusic Project, is scored for  soprano, recorded bonobo vocalizations and two percussion and was premiered in March 2007 by Maria Jette, Heather Barringer and Patti Cudd.
• In February 2006, the Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church premiered We, Too, Rise, with text from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from A Birmingham Jail.
• 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.)
• Elegy on Water is a choral work based on a Robert Bly poem, commissioned and premiered by the Dale Warland Singers (April 2004).
• 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.
• 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 a recording by the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra.
• 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.
• Aqua, which received its debut with JoAnn Falletta and the Virginia Symphony in 1999, commemorates the visionary spirit of ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau.
• 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 Peace Cranes, a fanfare for three violins premiered by Minnesota Orchestra violinists (January 2006);  I Am Earth, a setting of the Thomas Merton poem for soprano, tenor, chorus and organ (April 2006); 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.

Recordings and 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 Washington DC, starring Jane Alexander.

Heitzeg’s debut recording, earthworks: music in honor of nature, was released in April 1998.

ecoscores

An environmentalist, Heitzeg has been writing ecoscores, intimate works with inventive musical syntax that seek to honor nature and promote peace, 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. World Piece is among his most recent ecoscores.  Featuring 192 chords in honor of each of the 192 countries in the world, the work will be premiered by pianist Teresa McCollough. 

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 Enduring Earth; rain sticks in Litanies for the Living; birch bark and pine cone wind chimes in Raven and Crow: Medicine Birds; stones, an obsidian wind gong, and jade and agate-slice wind chimes in Sacred Stones (Symphony in Stone); acorns, maple seedlings and catalpa tree pods in Leaf Songs; and field stones, buffalo bones, prairie grass bundles, farm equipment (chisel plow shovels, John Deere plow moldboard) in Symphony to the Prairie Farm.  

Awards and Background

Heitzeg is the recipient of a 2005 Bush Foundation Fellowship, a 2001 McKnight Fellowship, a Meet The Composer/Reader’s Digest-Lila Wallace Commissioning Grant, and 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 lives in Saint Paul with his wife, daughter and their Weimaraner.