On Saturday, April 18, the DMA in Contemporary Music cohort at Bowling Green State University presented a composer portrait of Tyson Gholston Davis, an award-winning young New York City-based American composer whose music is characterized by expansive and resonant textures, kinetic gestures, and a deep affinity for the visual arts.

The concert included premieres of two new arrangements of Davis’s music. Wesley Nielsen played a trombone arrangement of Tableau VI, which was originally composed for horn, and Jake Loitz and Niayesh Javaheri presented Grey Fireworks (Duo Concertante), a piece for violin and piano that Davis adapted for soprano saxophone and piano.

Although Davis most enjoys composing for large ensembles, the concert’s opening half demonstrated his skill as a musical miniaturist. Davis’s Fragment, for marimba, and several short solo pieces from his Tableau series explored the expressive possibilities of various instruments.

“I’ve been playing Tyson’s solo cello Tableau for some time now and it’s always a hit with audiences whether I’m playing in a bar or in a concert hall,” says cellist Liam Battle. “His music combines dissonance and abstraction with levity, humor, and energy. It’s fun to play and fun to listen to.” Davis’s musical miniatures provided an ideal showcase for the doctoral students’ virtuosic playing.

The second half of the program contained several instrumental duets, as well as two pieces from Davis’s series of compositions inspired by the paintings of Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011), an American abstract expressionist. Grey Fireworks evoked the seemingly improvisational moods, colors, and gestures of Frankenthaler’s painting of the same name (1982), whereas …Expansions of Light, for solo piano, offered a musical triptych of Frankenthaler’s Winter Light (1979).

“…Expansions of Light deals with color in a beautiful way,” says pianist Francisca de Castanheiro de Freitas, who had previously performed the piece in February as part of a degree recital. “Playing it, you need to find many different touches on the piano, which really focuses your attention on molding your sound. There’s almost a narrative in how color and texture happen in this piece; timing becomes very important.”

In between the two halves of the program, Davis joined composer Will Hermanowski on the stage of Bryan Recital Hall to discuss his compositional inspirations, goals, and future plans, and to take questions from the audience.

This portrait of Davis concluded the inaugural year of the DMA cohort’s Composer Portrait series, which launched in September 2025 with a profile in memoriam of Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina (1931–2025). At the end of each academic year, students in the DMA program collectively determine the next year’s Composer Portrait subjects. The series is one of the many activities that demonstrate the leading role that members of the DMA cohort play in making BGSU’s College of Musical Arts one of the nation’s top schools for contemporary music. The DMA students are already looking forward to their next Composer Portrait on Tuesday, September 29, which will feature the music of George Lewis.