“H2 Quartet is a relatively young group with an already impressive list of accomplishments……On the program I attended, they performed Echolocation by Takuma Itoh and Chasing the Silence by Roger W. Petersen. Both these intriguing and beautiful pieces were flawlessly performed……The work by Petersen was flat-out gorgeous.”
-Susan Fancher, Saxophone Journal, Nov/Dec 2009
“Roger Petersen’s Where Her Lingering Smile Resides is meant to recreate a thought image of the composer’s recently departed grandmother and her enigmatic smile. The work does a good job of guiding the listener through the narrow passageways of the mind and recreating moods and shaping them into sounds. Petersen’s style calls for broad-tone string playing and prolonged spaces of time between climatic moments. The first half of the work communicates distance with the musical material firmly entrenched in a pedal tone which is freed roughly at the mid-point of the piece. The middle of the piece is preoccupied with developing a bittersweet melody through a significant reduction of texture. The overall treatment of musical material is largely poetic and intimate and, unlike the first Ogburn piece and “Glory to God”, Petersen seems to prefer leaving whatever meaningful journey he is on unanswered. For him, the gentle meditative quality of the music is a reward in itself.”
-Paul Cesarczyk, “Review of Faces of Love,” Music Journal, vol. 18, no. 10, 2013
“There are two pieces by the San Francisco composer, Roger W. Petersen, on this disc. Chasing the Silence is built on an ascending motive around a pedal D which is disrupted through a series of attacks and intense articulations, ebbing temporarily into something almost bluesy before its violent conclusion…… The framework for In Dreams is a series of interweaving voices and diatonic dissonances. It is very pretty and listener friendly……Both of these works make solid additions to the quartet genre.”
-Daniel Coombs, Audiophile Audition, July 14, 2010
My appearance on SoundNotion, a weekly podcast on new music and music news.
-Episode 15, April 24, 2011
My interview with Eastern Echo after a performance of Chasing the Silence at Eastern Michigan University.
-Lindsay Johnson, Eastern Echo, March 14, 2010
