CONCERTO FOR CHAMBER ORCHESTRA was commissioned by River Oaks Chamber Orchestra (ROCO) for its 11th season, “Side by Side,” with generous support from the Wortham Foundation.

In discussing the commission with Alecia Lawyer (founder, artistic director, and principal oboist of ROCO), she expressed great fondness for the second movement of Béla Bartók’s iconic Concerto for Orchestra, and asked if I might consider using it as inspiration. Bartók presents the wind instruments of the orchestra in pairs in that movement, and, in the first movement of my Concerto (“Epigraph”), I follow suit, although the musical content is otherwise quite different. The second movement (“Variations”) presents a simple theme in the winds that I mine for potential twists and turns, the stately minuet gradually accelerating into a stomping scherzo. The driven finale (“Ostinato”) features a persistent one-measure rhythmic idea that I hope generates momentum and excitement toward the end of the work.

CONCERTO FOR CHAMBER ORCHESTRA is dedicated to my husband, Michael J. Muña, who, once upon a time, spent countless hours mastering the opening bassoon passage of Bartók’s masterwork.

Purchase score. Parts available upon request.

Program Notes from Baltimore Chamber Orchestra Performance (16 Nov 2025)

“Marcus Maroney's Concerto for Chamber Orchestra is a carefully constructed argument about how groups function. It's a work of tension and release, of friction and synthesis, and it belongs to a lineage of music that sees the orchestra not as a unified voice, but as a site of negotiation.

Composed in 2008, the concerto reflects Maroney's deep engagement with the idea of "chamber" as something both intimate and dynamic. Unlike a traditional concerto where a soloist engages in virtuosic dialogue with the orchestra, this work internalizes that structure. The ensemble is fractured into smaller voices with each section vying for space, asserting character, resisting or reinforcing one another. The result is a piece that feels almost democratic: polyphonic, yes, but also political. The work's clear and edgy writing style highlights Maroney's position as a composer with one foot in the academic world and another in America's vibrant new music performance scene.

His textures shimmer and collide as the motivic fragments ricochet across the ensemble. There's momentum, but also restraint-a tension between order and interruption that mirrors how contemporary society can feel: interconnected but noisy, full of urgent ideas that don't always resolve. The concerto ends not with triumph or closure, but with a kind of open-ended coherence-threads held in common, even if not neatly tied. In performance, this piece demands real listening-from both musicians and audience. It's not background music; it's foreground music written for our current era when resolution is elusive. Music that asks: how do we live together in complexity? What does it mean to be part of a whole without giving up your voice? This is not just a concerto, it's a dialogue. And it's one worth hearing.