John Corrie conducts the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Choir.

Directed by John Corrie, the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Choir performs Haydn’s “Lord Nelson Mass” and a piece by a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ professor at 8 p.m. Friday, March 21, and 3 p.m. Sunday, March 23, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

The concerts are free and open to the public, but tickets are required, available at . For more information, please contact 207-786-6163 or olinarts@bates.edu.

The choir will sing Haydn’s “Missa in Angustiis,” better known as the “Lord Nelson Mass,” and “Missa Brevis for the Virgin of Guadalupe,” a piece by Scott Ordway, conductor of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Orchestra and visiting assistant professor of music.

One of six masses that Haydn wrote toward the end of his life, and one of 14 in all, the 1798 “Missa in Angustiis” is considered one of his greatest works. “If the students should learn one Haydn mass as part of their choral education,” says Corrie, “then it should be this one.”

“Missa in Angustiis” is Latin for “Mass for Troubled Times.” Haydn, an Austrian, completed the piece as the armies of Napoleon made his nation extremely vulnerable — yet a mere six weeks before the work’s debut in September 1798, the British under Admiral Horatio Nelson defeated the French emperor in the Battle of the Nile, leading to the nickname of the mass.

Scott Ordway conducts the University of Puget Sound Chamber Orchestra, Tacoma, Wash.

Ordway was inspired to compose his 2010 “Missa Brevis for the Virgin of Guadalupe” by a research trip to Mexico City when he was a Benjamin Franklin doctoral fellow in the University of Pennsylvania music department.

The mass, he told The Penn Current, is an exploration of the complexity he found in Mexico City, which in his experience was a place of “warmth, beauty, and friendship amidst a backdrop of violence and tragedy.”

He said, “As a foreigner, this duality was both shocking and poignant but, as I would come to learn, [it] lies at the heart of the story of Guadalupe,” the image of the Virgin Mary, in a Mexico City basilica, that is one of the world’s most visited Christian shrines.

“She is an expression of unqualified love, tenderness and compassion, risen in an historical moment of unchecked destruction and conquest, and she remains a symbol of this duality at the heart of contemporary Mexican culture.”

The music for the piece, Ordway told Current writer Jacquie Posey, “reflects both the austere severity of Mexican Baroque architecture and the exuberant chaos of North America’s largest metropolis.”

William Matthews, Alice Swanson Esty Professor of Music at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, is among Maine composers presenting new music in a Jan. 31 concert. (Doug Hubley/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Prominent composers living in Maine present new music at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 31, in the Olin Concert Hall at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College, 75 Russell St.

This event is open to the public at no cost, but tickets are required, available at . For more information, please contact 207-786-6135.

The Maine composers featured are ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ faculty members William Matthews and Scott Ordway, as well as Vineet Shende, Joshua DeScherer, Beth Wiemann, and Phillip Carlsen.

Ordway has composed three symphonies, of which the third was premiered by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Orchestra last fall; two full settings of the Mass; and numerous other works, many of which have been performed throughout the United States and Europe. He is a visiting assistant professor of music and acting orchestral conductor at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

Matthews, Alice Swanson Esty Professor of Music, has received several national awards and commissions. His works include music for the inaugurations of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ presidents Clayton Spencer and Elaine Hansen. He is interested in electronic and computer-generated music, and in American music of all types.

Matthews teaches composition along with courses in jazz and popular music. A Book of Hours, a recording on the Albany Records, is a compilation of Matthews compositions featuring the Capital Trio, whose pianist is Duncan Cumming ’93.

Scott Ordway is shown conducting the University of Puget Sound Chamber Orchestra, Tacoma, Wash.

Shende is an associate professor of music at Bowdoin College. His music incorporates a wide variety of styles, including North Indian classical music, rock music and a harmonic language described as “hard to characterize, dissonant in some places and with celestial harmonies in others, but unusually accessible” (Maine Sunday Telegram). Recent premieres include “Three Longfellow Poems,” commissioned by the Portland Symphony Orchestra.

DeScherer has performed extensively with professional and amateur ensembles throughout the northeastern United States. As a performer, he focuses on music written after the 1950s. Many of his pieces draw their inspiration from the New England wilderness. With few exceptions, his pieces are for small ensembles. Among his works are numerous settings of poetry from the Beat Generation, particularly the work of Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Wiemann studied composition and clarinet at Oberlin College and received her doctorate in theory and composition from Princeton University. She teaches orchestration, tonal counterpoint, 20th-century musical techniques and other topics at the University of Maine. A CD of Wiemann’s music, Why Performers Wear Black, was released on Albany Records in 2004. Her music also appears on the Capstone, Innova and Americus labels.

Carlsen is a professor of music at the University of Maine at Farmington, where he conducted the orchestra for 20 years and has taught since 1982. In addition to numerous performances at UMF and elsewhere in Maine by such organizations as the Portland Symphony Orchestra and the Sebago-Long Lakes Region Chamber Music Festival, his music has been played at New York’s Town Hall and the Museum of Modern Art Sculpture Garden, at the Kennedy Center and other locations.

As a visiting assistant professor of music, Carlsen taught and conducted the orchestra at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ during the 2000s.

Scott Ordway conducts the University of Puget Sound Chamber Orchestra.

A conductor and prolific composer who has performed and taught across the U.S., Scott Ordway leads the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Orchestra in the world premiere of his Symphony No. 3 at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 9, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

The program also includes Beethoven’s Overture to Coriolanus and Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll. Admission is open to the public at no cost, but tickets are required, available at . For more information, please contact olinarts@bates.com or 207-786-6163.

Ordway, visiting assistant professor of music at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, started the symphony in Colorado in 2012 while he was a fellow at the Aspen Summer Music Festival, and continued it in Philadelphia and New York City. “The work reflects all three of those places, both the breadth and tranquility of the Rocky Mountains and the chaos and excitement of those two great cities.”

Stylistically, the work is “a hybrid of many different styles. Some passages are quite lyrical and romantic, and others are extremely chaotic, and I think most listeners would find them very modern.

“But I think they all contribute to a clear sense of structure.” Ordway says the piece consists of a single, 25-minute movement.

The piece is scored for strings, brass, tympani, harp and woodwinds. The orchestra will number about 35 and will incorporate ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students, community members and two professional musicians.

Among the brass players are Kirk Read, a professor of French and francophone studies, who plays tuba, and politics professor James Richter, a trombonist. “They’re both really excellent brass players,” Ordway says.

The symphony is technically challenging for the players, and is also challenging for younger musicians with less experience of tracking the overall development of a longer piece. “It requires a long-term focus and understanding of how each section fits into a larger whole.”

“But the students have really risen to the challenge, and it’s been a tremendous experience for everyone involved.”

Ordway structured the program with a continuum of moods in mind. The opener is the Beethoven overture, one of that composer’s lesser-heard works, which is “heavy and high-energy.” The Wagner, while varied, tends to be calmer, more lyrical.

And Ordway’s symphony, which constitutes the second half of the program, starts out tranquilly and builds from there.

Ordway notes that he is teaching a course this term on the history of the symphonic form and will invite his students in that course “to attend the premiere and hear the new work in the context of the last two centuries of symphonic music that they’ve studied.”

The orchestra of the Curtis Institute, in Philadelphia, where Ordway studied conducting, will record the symphony in December.

Ordway has also composed two full settings of the Mass, and numerous chamber, solo and choral works, many of which have been performed, recorded and broadcast by top ensembles throughout the United States and in Europe.

As a conductor, he has held posts with New York’s Syzygy New Music Ensemble and the Eugene (Oregon) Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, and was in residence at the Boston Conservatory as associate conductor of the Juventas New Music Ensemble. In 2010-11 he was composer-in-residence and director of contemporary music at St. Maryís Episcopal Church in Philadelphia.

He earned his doctorate in 2013 from the University of Pennsylvania, and holds degrees from the University of Oregon and the University of Puget Sound.