Santa Clara University

Pamela Layman Quist

Pamela Quist, composer and teacher, received her education at the Peabody Conservatory of Music and in 1984 earned a doctoral degree in composition from Johns Hopkins University.

Currently she is a lecturer at Santa Clara University where she teaches music theory, history, composition, and Performance and Culture—the history of performing arts throughout Western civilization.

Pamela Quist is a co-founder and past director of The Walden School, a summer school and music festival for young composers. She also acted as director of The Walden School Teacher Training Institute in its initial years from 2001 to 2004.

Among her compositions from recent years, Quist has produced Revival for guitarist, Bryce Dessner (2004); Ice Dance for Clogs (2003); Pie Jesu (2002); Caelestis formam gloriae; Dyad for oboe/english horn and piano; and a solo piano work, Homage, her most-performed work to date.

A contributing author to The Walden School Musicianship Course: A Manual for Teachers (2002), she also authored Indeterminate Form in the Work of Earle Brown (1984) in partial fulfillment of her Doctoral requirements. She is a member of ASCAP.

COMPOSER’S PROGRAM NOTE

Three movements of Requiem for the People (2005) will be previewed during the 2006 New Music Festival.  The complete work of six movements will receive its premiere at the Santa Clara Mission on June 2 performed by the Santa Clara University choir in collaboration with the Santa Clara Chorale conducted by Thomas Colohan.

Requiem for the People addresses a range of universal spiritual thought and human emotion, and I intend for this work to have meaning for a diverse listening audience.  Each movement contains a dedication to a different group of people whose lives and deaths have held great significance for us in varying ways.

The gentle Introit/Kyrie is “in memory of those we have loved.”  In contrast, the hard-hitting Dies Irae is composed “in memory of those we must forgive.”  Sanctus, the third movement to be performed during the Festival, is both reverent and joyous and was written “In memory of our children.” 

I have been deeply moved over the years by both the beauty and the terror of life. The brief years of our lives affect others in ways we may not know or always understand. As a composer I wanted to write a piece that reminds us of the fragility of life and the tremendous impact we have on one another in life and death.  Requiem for the People honors those whom we have lost and acknowledges that wide spectrum of thought and emotion we must each confront when we simply choose to remember.

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