The 2025-26 Randolph A. Foster Seize The Music Series:
Celebrating 20 Years of CDSQ
Saturday, February 28 at 3 PM Eastern Time
William Henry Harrison House
570 West Broad Street
Columbus, Ohio 43215
Sunday, March 1 at 3 PM Eastern Time
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus
93 W. Weisheimer Rd
Columbus, OH 43214
Program:
Grażyna Bacewicz: String Quartet No. 4
Michael Rene Torres: in the never-ending shore of your tomorrows*
Ludwig van Beethoven: String Quartet in F Major, Op. 18, No. 1
*world premiere, 15 for 15 commission, preceded by a poem by Jennifer Hambrick
About Michael Rene Torres
Saxophonist, composer, educator, and curator, Michael Rene Torres serves as Assistant Professor of Saxophone at The Ohio State University. He is the Artistic Director of the Columbus Ohio Discovery Ensemble (CODE); a 501(c)3 nonprofit contemporary music ensemble that is dedicated to the promotion, performance, and perception of contemporary concert music in Central Ohio. Additionally, Michael serves as Artistic Director of the ComProv Symposium, a gathering of performer-composers and improvisers, and the Program Director of the Johnstone Fund for New Music, which advances the performance of new music for the benefit of the Central Ohio community.
As a composer, Michael is a winner of the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award and the Greater Columbus Arts Council Composition Fellowship and has previously taught composition at Ohio State University and Muskingum University. Michael’s compositional interests are in music that explores the juxtaposition of consonance and dissonance and is often inspired by psychology and poetry. He describes his music as dramatic and theatrical with complex, intricate moments and calm, introspective moments. Michael's music is distributed through ADJ•ective New Music. An active performer, Michael has presented recitals, concerto performances, clinics, and masterclasses at festivals, conferences, arts spaces, and universities throughout the USA, Canada, Cuba, Brazil, and Spain. Michael is an active chamber musician as a member of the Iovi Saxophone Quartet and the contemporary flute and saxophone duet, Tower Duo.
About Jennifer Hambrick
Hailed for her “brilliant imagery,” “masterful craftsmanship,” and “uniquely musical voice,” poet Jennifer Hambrick is a seven-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of the poetry collections a silence or two (Red Moon Press), winner of a 2025 Merit Book Award from the Haiku Society of America; In the High Weeds (NFSPS Press), winner of the Stevens Manuscript Award from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies; Joyride (Red Moon Press), winner of the Marianne Bluger Book Award; and Unscathed (NightBallet Press). Hambrick is featured by U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser in American Life in Poetry, with Rattle editor Tim Green on Rattlecast, on Inside the Writer’s Head, in Pittsburgh Quarterly, Columbus Monthly, and elsewhere. Her poems are published in The Columbia Review, Rattle, Southeast Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Santa Clara Review, Modern Haiku, Contemporary Haibun Online, and in many other journals and invited anthologies.
The frequent recipient of poet laureateships, residencies, and commissions for interdisciplinary collaborations, Hambrick has won numerous awards for her poetry and literary criticism, including the Sheila-Na-Gig Poetry Prize, First Prize in the Haiku Society of America’s Haibun Award Competition, First Prize in the Martin Lucas Haiku Competition (U.K.), and the Best of Issue Award from Juxtapositions: The Journal of Haiku Scholarship and Research.