Director of the School of Music at the University of Oklahoma from 1998 to June 2005, Kenneth Fuchs has written for orchestra, band, chorus, jazz ensemble, and various chamber ensembles. One of Fuchs’ most recent works, An American Place, is written on a grand scale ‘intended to suggest the rich body of music created by the American symphonists who have come before me and from whom I continue to take inspiration’. The English Horn Concerto Eventide takes its creative impulse from the spiritual tunes ‘Mary Had a Baby’ and ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’, among others. Out of the Dark, inspired by three large paintings by the contemporary American artist Helen Frankenthaler, is the composer’s first work to convey through musical sound and form the relationships between music and the arts of painting, collage, and poetry.