Loggins-Hull is one of the most successful of the new generation of young composers, and her musical style is a reflection of her diverse musical interests. During her youth she was exposed to all manner of music—classical, rock, jazz, rhythm and blues, electronic, acid jazz, and a “lot of weird stuff.”
She is clearly in the forefront of avant-garde composers for flute combined with various other instruments, but is increasingly writing for larger ensembles, as well. A virtuoso performer, Loggins-Hull is engaged in an active career of composing and performing, not only in the New York City area, but nationally, as well. A graduate of SUNY Purchase in flute performance, she also holds a MA in composition from NYU. The breadth of her music activities is impressive: composition, solo performances, television, radio, movies—you name it. To that, she adds a dedicated career in education at a variety of distinguished institutions. Her latest distinction is a most impressive engagement by the venerable Cleveland Orchestra in a three-year composing fellowship.
Her musical style is nothing, if not imaginative. Electronic effects, elaborate percussion, vocals for the flutist, she consistently challenges the listener in a constant kaleidoscope of novel and creative musical concepts.
The Inheritors Overture is scored for chamber orchestra, was commissioned by the Raleigh Civic Chamber Orchestra, and received its première by that group in 2020. Notwithstanding her reputation as a composer of diverse musical combinations and styles, in The Inheritors Overture she has chosen to score for the resources of the conventional, small chamber orchestra: strings with a reduced woodwind, brass and percussion section. Eschewing many of the markers that provide clear shape and architecture in much of traditional musical styles, she rather has composed a work that focuses on the expression of an intense emotional idea. And while specific in focus, it nevertheless expresses a variety of evolving interpretations of that thought.
And the thought is: “the intergenerational transmission of trauma.” The Inheritors Overture takes as its focus the narrative of descendants of victims of slavery and the Holocaust, and by implication, all of humanity that suffers from outrageous transgressions wrought by their fellow humans. The perspective of narrative is central to the work, for the very title refers to the “inheritance” of each succeeding generation of those victims—each generation, being removed in time, but not in emotional burden of the dark legacy of its ancestors.
--Wm. E. Runyan
©2024 William E. Runyan