Chenette work on Symphonies of Iowa this week

Works by five Iowa composers, including Grinnell musician Jon Chenette, will broadcast on Iowa Public Radio's "Symphonies of Iowa" series in July.

The works were performed and recorded in May by the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Symphony Orchestra and will be broadcast on WOI (90.1), KSUI (91.7), and KHKI (89.5) on Mon., July 21 at 8 p.m. and rebroadcast on Sat., July 26 at 9:55 a.m.

Chenette's composition, "Oh Millersville!," involves settings of five whimsical poems by James Norman Hall 1910, author of Mutiny on the Bounty. Hall wrote a larger set of 58 poems under the title Oh Millersville! late in life, reflecting back on his childhood in Colfax, Iowa. Hall took the pen name and persona of a 12-year-old Iowa school girl, Fern Gravel, and published the poems as a literary hoax in 1941. Chenette set some of the poems to music with piano accompaniment in 1990 and later arranged a smaller set for orchestral accompaniment, commissioned by the Dubuque Symphony Orchestra.