Her first-ever piece for trumpet, Sarah Hennies’s Monologue is a celebration of the trumpet as frustrating machinery, taking the tubing and valves as instruments in themselves activated, or not, by the player’s breath. In this sense, the work is a deconstruction of what it is to be a trumpet player, blowing into a machine in hopes of something meaningful coming out the other end.

Her first-ever piece for trumpet, Annea Lockwood’s Becoming Air completely inhabits the concept of the FOR/WITH festival. It was composed through intimate collaboration with Wooley, using much of his improvising electro-acoustic vocabulary. And, yet, it is absolutely an Annea Lockwood composition: performative, shamanic, and with an attention to the naturalness of sound that makes the audience rethink their aural surroundings.

Stem-Flower-Root, the title of Michael Pisaro’s commissioned work for trumpet and sine waves, provides an apt metaphor for the FOR/WITH series at-large. Wooley describes how each of the composers featured have something in common with the structure outlined in Stem-Flower-Root; they demonstrate a power and creativity that can remain hidden, yet essential, in the structure of their works.

Christian Wolff’s For Trumpet Player was the first piece Nate Wooley received after undertaking the commissioning series. Wooley describes the impetus of commissioning these works as coming from a desire to add music to the solo trumpet repertoire that met a certain aesthetic that felt lacking in the contemporary literature: music with an attention to non-linear forms, an attention to sound and timbre over technical flash, and music that was personal not only within the language of the composer but the player as well.