For Minnesota-bred composer Sky Macklay, there's no limit

Sky Macklay took an unusual path from the southern Minnesota town of Waseca to a career as an increasingly renowned contemporary classical composer.

Inspiration has come less from the prairie soundscapes and scenery of her childhood than the likes of zombie movies, the musical "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" and those "inflatable, arm-flailing tube people" you see outside oil-change shops.

Macklay has made her name with chamber music that asks musicians to do unusual things on their instruments and inflatable sound-art installations that invite you to create music by plopping down on air mattresses. She's also written a chamber opera in which the three characters are a uterus and two spermatozoa.

Now she's returning to her home state for the premiere of a work commissioned by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra.

"Disassemblage" is a piece for six musicians that will debut at this weekend's SPCO concerts at St. Paul's Ordway Concert Hall plus a free concert at the Capri Theater in north Minneapolis; it's the centerpiece of a program that also features SPCO violinist Eunae Koh soloing on Antonio Vivaldi's "Four Seasons." The SPCO will perform another Macklay piece, "Many Many Cadences," Oct. 29-31.

At age 33, Macklay is also a professor of composition, having just joined the faculty of one of America's most prestigious music schools, Johns Hopkins University's Peabody Institute. She spoke last week from her home in Baltimore, and I asked her when she knew that music would be her chief source of communication.

"When I really caught the music bug, I was 8," she said. "I was in a local community theater production of 'Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.' … I just remember singing the 'aaah-aaah-aaahs' in the song, 'Any Dream Will Do,' and hearing the harmony between us and Joseph, who I thought was this amazing, resplendent performer. Making that harmony really gave me a tingle in my spine. From that moment, I was really obsessed with music."

"My actual first composition was a project for my Shakespeare class in 12th grade," she said. "I wrote a setting of the text, 'O Mistress mine, where are you roaming?' from 'Twelfth Night' for voice and piano. I sang it in the performance and my band teacher, Deron Jimmerson, played the piano. … Some of the plot was about costumes and gender-bending and such, and so I, the singer, was supposed to be dressed as a man, but singing in soprano register. But then some of the lowest notes I would lip-sync and Mr. Jimmerson would sing the low notes, but telegraphed through my body."

A piece she premiered at her senior recital at Luther convinced her to pursue composition as a career. Titled "DIEchotomy," she said "it was like a mini-zombie musical."

"The main character is very obsessed with this idea that he learns about in philosophy class about binaries. A zombie is an example of something that deconstructs a binary. But he takes it way too seriously, and applies it to his life in a way that doesn't really work out, because he then ends up falling in love with a zombie and getting his brain eaten."

Macklay laughed. "That was a piece for which I wrote some really great melodies and some really compelling, musically catchy songs, but it also had this weird intellectual playfulness to it."

Did she always desire to create something out of the ordinary?

"There's so much amazing music in the world. In order to try to live up to my artistic potential, I should try to do things that no one else has done before."

Such as those sound-art installations.

"I have three of them," Macklay said. "Inflatable sculptures that use harmonicas to make the sound. Those were partially inspired by wacky, waving, inflatable, arm-flailing tube people. ...

"Being a wind player, I always think about how much air pressure it takes to make a sound on a reed or other kinds of wind instruments. It just made me wonder whether there would be enough pressure in the wacky, waving, inflatable, arm-flailing tube person to vibrate something like the tines of a harmonica."

Macklay actually staged her first version, "Harmonibots," in Waseca. She has since created "Mega-Organ," which involves tones produced by air mattresses and inflatable tents, and "Harmonitrees," with inflatable plastic pine trees.

Which sounds a lot like life of the past 18 months or so.

"Totally," she said. "I think that definitely worked its way into the piece."

St. Paul Chamber Orchestra
What: Works by Sky Macklay, Errolynn Wallen and Antonio Vivaldi
When: 11 a.m. Fri., 8 p.m. Sat. and 2 p.m. Sun., Ordway Concert Hall, 345 Washington St., St. Paul; 7 p.m. Friday, Capri Theater, 2027 W. Broadway, Mpls.
Tickets: $12-$50 (students and children free) for Ordway shows; Capri concert is free for all. 651-291-1144 or thespco.org