Katherine Hoover was born in West Virginia and resides in New York, where she maintains an active career as composer, conductor, and flutist. She is the recipient of a 1979 National Endowment Composer’s Fellowship and many other awards, including an 1994 Academy of Arts and Letters Academy Award in Composition. Four of her pieces have won the National Flute Association’s Newly Published Music Competition, in 1987, 1991, 1993 and 1994.

Ms. Hoover’s works have been performed by many orchestras. Her tone poem Eleni: A Greek Tragedy, premiered by the Harrisburg Symphony under Larry Newland in 1987, has been performed by eleven other orchestras. including the Fort Worth Symphony, under conductor John Giordano. Her Clarinet Concerto, written for the jazz virtuoso Eddie Daniels, was premiered by Mr. Daniels with the Santa Fe Symphony. In January, 1994, Ms. Hoover conducted the premiere of her Night Skies, a 25-minute work for large orchestra, with the Harrisburg Symphony.

“Summer Night was completed in July, 1985, and premiered by the New York Concerto Orchestra outdoors at Lincoln Center the following September. The flute and horn are a rather mismatched pair in many ways. To let their individual qualities sound, I began with a short soliloquy for each. This is followed by a slow dance which grows out of the soliloquies, and then a lively one, as the instruments (or characters, or thoughts) meet and interact.” K.H.