Month: January 2018

Mozart’s Birthday

Camerata Philadelphia celebrated Mozart’s birthday with exquisite performances of one of his Haydn quartets (G major) and his first piano quartet. I was fortunate to be included in that good company – with a performance of my quartet “Afterwards, there were no more wars” in between the two Mozart works. As a composer of string quartets, it feels rather daunting to have one of mine presented immediately following a Mozart masterpiece – but was thrilled to see the reception it got.

“Afterwards” is one of my many works intended to encourage in the minds and hearts of the audience the idea that peace is possible. The title came first, driving the composition of the music, offering the hope, however unlikely given human history, that someday in our future, someone will be able to pick up a history book and read this sentence – and, afterwards, there were no more wars.

It was not lost on me that, coincidentally, this work was programmed on a day that, in addition to celebrating the birthday of one of history’s greatest musicians, was a day of remembrance of one of history’s most horrifying events – the holocaust. In our present time, when neo-Nazism in various guises seems to be again on the rise, I hope the intent of this music, at least for those who heard it, will be fulfilled.

Thanks to Luigi Mazzocchi, Blake Espy, Jonathan Kim and Stephen Framil for their beautiful and expressive performance.

Federico Garcia Lorca

The opening paragraph to the preface of the Collected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca succinctly summarizes his extraordinary versatility – and his depth.

“Federico Garcia Lorca was a charismatic and complicated figure: preeminent poet of absence; renewer, with Miguel de Unamuno and Ramon del Valle-Inclan, of the modern Spanish stage: stern, inspired mediator – perhaps the most successful in modern Europe – of poetry and theatre. And he was much else besides: pianist, actor, director, lecturer, conversationalist, and make of unforgettable drawings. Some of his friends thought of him as a creative force of almost “cosmic” dimensions. There is something elemental about Lorca. He seems to lead us urgently and directly to the central mysteries of human existence. In the thirteen plays and nine books of verse he was able to complete between 1917 and 1936 – an amazingly short career – he spoke unforgettably of all that most interests us: the otherness of nature, the demons of personal identify and artistic creation, sex, childhood, and death.”

As a great example of a multi-faceted artist, Lorca has long appealed to me. His death, however, serves as a lasting reminder (as if any should be needed) of why Fascism must be stamped out, without mercy, whenever and wherever it attempts to revive itself. These days, unfortunately, that reminder is needed again. One reason, among many, for me to set his words to music.

La selva de los relojes

Jumping from one thing to the next, I think I’m finished, for now, with choral settings of villanelles – and onto a project I’ve had in the back of my mind since finding a volume of Garcia Lorca’s collected poems while vacationing on Cape Cod some months back. Setting his “La selva de los relojes” for mezzo, cello and piano. First poem down as of this morning. On a roll…

More Villanelles

Copying from Wikipedia, a villanelle is a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third line of the first tercet repeated alternately until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines. The villanelle is an example of a fixed verse form. The word derives from Latin, then Italian, and is related to the initial subject of the form being the pastoral.

The form started as a simple ballad-like song with no fixed form; this fixed quality would only come much later, from the poem “Villanelle (J’ay perdu ma Tourterelle)” (1606) by Jean Passerat. From this point, its evolution into the “fixed form” used in the present day is debated. Despite its French origins, the majority of villanelles have been written in English, a trend which began in the late nineteenth century. The villanelle has been noted as a form that frequently treats the subject of obsessions, and one which appeals to outsiders; its defining feature of repetition prevents it from having a conventional tone.

So much for the history and origins of the villanelle. Having learned all this after researching the background of Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking,” I went on to discover numerous poems, by poets both well known and little known, in this form – one so apt for music given its repeated refrains. In addition to “The Waking,” as of this writing, I’ve set “Roses?” by Harvey Stanbrough, “Mad Girl’s Love Song” by Sylvia Plath, and “The House on the Hill” by Edward Arlington Robinson. The Plath poem is set for women’s voice only, and the others for SATB.

Given what is going on in the world these days, writing these has been a happy reprieve from all that.

Eight Strings & A Whistle

I am so pleased to have been invited to compose a trio for ESW. The trio popped out quickly! Entitled Melville’s Dream, it is inspired by Hart Crane’s remarkable poem, “At Melville’s Tomb.” The first movement is, with lots of revisions, a resetting of my song for voice and piano. The following movements are all intended to similarly evoke images of the sea, and drowning sailors, and tides and stars…

New CD of art songs in progress

The recording of my next CD is making good progress. As of this writing, all of the songs for voice & piano are a wrap! My great appreciation to pianist Stephen Gosling for his wonderful musicianship! It was such a great pleasure to work on this project with him. All that remains is for Nancy Allen Lundy and Ralph Farris to record my cycle of songs for soprano & violin. Hopefully, warmer weather by the time we get back into the studio!

The CD will include a cycle of seven songs setting poems by the South African poet Charl Cilliers – someone whose wonderful work I discovered on FB and who is now a FB pen pal (the up side of this sometimes intrusive technology). We also recorded my “4 Songs to Poems by Hart Crane” and “6 Songs” setting various poems by W.B. Yeats. The latter is the one very early work on the CD, composed while I was in between my undergraduate and graduate studies at the Manhattan School of Music. While my style has changed over the years, I was happy while recording these that I still like them!

The music of Heinrich Gernsheim

Among some of my new FB friends, one (Anna Gann) performs with the Gernsheim Duo. Curious as to the name, I started looking on-line, and (one of my favorite things) discovered yet another wonderful composer entirely new to me. It always makes me wonder how someone who was widely performed and whose great musicianship was highly admired in their own time, disappears. In this case, it seems one reason for that (at least according to one writer) was that Friedrich Gernsheim was Jewish and his music was prohibited from performance in Nazi Germany. That’s a wrong that will hopefully, in time, be corrected. I have found a performance on YouTube of his four symphonies, and as is my habit when up in the middle of the night, I listened to several last night. To my mind, as a symphonist, he can hold his ground with any of the great Romantic symphonists. Now listening to one of his string quartets (link below) – also first rate. I have to find time to follow down this path, as he wrote many piano quartets and quintets, a large body of art songs, and other works. It remains a mystery, at least to me, how a composer of his skill and depth, can wind up side-lined by history, while on radio and in the concert hall, we listen to the same small, albeit great, list of composers over and over and over again.