Steve Danyew (b. 1983) is a composer, educator, and saxophonist based in Rochester, NY. His music has been critically acclaimed throughout the United States, and it has won him several awards. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Miami Frost School of Music, then continued his studies at the Eastman School of Music. Apart from composing, he teaches at Eastman’s Institute for Music Leadership and serves on the management team of the Paul R. Judy Center for Innovation and Research, also at Eastman.
Into the Silent Land was completed in 2018. I will let Danyew tell his own story, via the program notes from his website:
On December 14, 2012, twenty children and six educators were killed by a gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. Having grown up in Sandy Hook just a mile from the school, this is where I attended grades 3-5.
For the past several years, I have thought about writing a piece of music that would reflect on this tragedy, but I have struggled to know where to start. Even after beginning to sketch out ideas for this piece, I felt unsure of where the piece should go and what it should communicate. In an effort to find a clearer sense of direction, I searched for poetry that reflected how I was feeling.
When I came across “Remember,” a moving poem by Christina Rossetti, I found the direction I was looking for. Through the simple idea of remembering—not forgetting that this happened, not forgetting these children, not forgetting the grief that their families must feel—I realized this is what I wanted and needed to communicate through music.
The music incorporates elements of a funeral march, as well as a lament, using a descending tetrachord as a ground bass. The funeral march and the lament are combined early in the piece and after the ground bass repeats and grows to a climax, the funeral march gradually fades and a more ethereal music emerges.
“Into the Silent Land” was commissioned by a consortium of schools and individuals led by Dr. Jared Chase and Nazareth College.
Dr. Chase and Nazareth premiered the piece in several performances in March of 2018. Here is the performance from the CBDNA Eastern Division Conference at Yale University’s Woolsey Hall in New Haven, CT, just 25 miles from Sandy Hook.
This video documents some of their journey with the piece:
This premiere was well documented. Read about it at WXXI, a Nazareth student’s blog, the Nazareth College website, and of course Danyew’s own website. Danyew has bios there and at Naxos, and he is active on Twitter.