All Categories - hand2ear: music, etc.

March 16 "A Lowell Symphony" performance

3/2/2024

The Lowell Philharmonic Orchestra, with Marshunda Smith, music director, will give my new symphony its premiere. The performance will be at 2:00 PM at Fusion Church, 125 Hope Street, Lowell.

When Ms Smith became music director, I had the idea to write a piece celebrating the city of Lowell, Massachusetts. I did some research into Lowell History and discovered that the 19th Century "mill girls" had published stories, poems, essays, and songs in a magazine which now exists in an online archive. I picked out three songs and derived almost all of the melodic material for the symphony from them.

The symphony begins with a kind of picture of the two rivers that converge in Lowell and provided water power. The middle of the piece sort of charts the growth of the mills (with evocations of machinery), and then their decline. At the lowest point of the decline, two sopranos impersonate the ghosts of the mill girls. From that point on, things begin to improve again, and I pay tribute to the prominent Cambodian community with some music influenced by Khmer traditional music. The piece ends with a burst of optimism, celebrating the city as a vibrant multicultural, educational, and tech hub.

See the website below for more information and tickets.
www.lowellphilharmonic.org

Works that I composed in 2023

1/15/2024

These are the major pieces that I composed in 2023:

Cortege for string orchestra, bass drum and tam-tam
5’ 15”
Ut Queant Laxis for 6 flutes
for Cinzia Romeo and her students, performed in a competition
2’ 00”
Strade Bolognesi 13 preludes for piano named for streets in Bologna
premiere 11-06-2023 by Lynn Rice-See, Accademia Filarmonica, Bologna
26’ 00”
What Carnival for choir or soli SSATBB and djembe or small drum
16’ 00”
under the fountain the water is calm for piano
2’ 51”
the end of all our kingdoms for SSSAABarB soli or choir
12’ 00”
Ariette Nuove e Migliorate for piano 4-hands
6’ 45”
Fantasy: Goblin Apples for piano 4-hands
6’ 53”
A Desert Journey, an operatic fable
for 6 sopranos, bass-baritone, clarinet, French horn, piano, violin, and cello
commissioned by Walnut Hill School, my own concept and libretto
ca. 65 minutes
A Lowell Symphony for orchestra with 2 women's voices or women's choir
commissioned by Marshunda Smith for the Lowell Philharmonic Orchestra
ca. 20’ 00”

Another online gallery

12/22/2022

I am posting a slightly different bunch of artworks in a different online gallery, posting fewer piece and trying to be more focused.

www.vsual.co/shop/hand-2-ear-his-artworks

This site has a different group of artists and allows me to create a gallery of selections from their artworks.

In Italy

12/13/2022

We have come to Italy for three months, ending in mid-February. For news and posts about our experiences here, please go to the /Italyblog section of this web site.

My online art gallery

10/29/2022

I have recently begun to post artworks of mine on ArtPal.com.

Here is the link: www.artpal.com/hand2ear/

ArtPal is a much better place to organize my visual artworks than here. And, you can order a coffee cup with one of my paintings on it. Exciting stuff.

'Cliff House,' a chamber opera

4/19/2022

I recently completed a draft of a new chamber opera, which runs about an hour and 45 minutes. It is a kind of 'book of the dead' of an opera singer, Melina, who (after her death) finds herself in the house that she grew up in, with her grandmother. She moves through the rooms of the house, encountering situations and people from her past life, and demons who mock and impede her. By the end, she has made it to the beach in front of Cliff House, and there is a final reckoning.

The piece requires a cast of about 12 singers (some parts can be doubled) and an instrumental group of 4 players: cor anglais, trombone, piano, and violin. The music is full of stylistic references to Italian opera; sometimes ironic and sometimes sincere. There is a lot of humor in the music, but it is quite serious, ultimately.

Moving to Italy is the plan

4/19/2022

We are packing up the house in preparation to selling it, because we plan to move to Italy some time this year. We needed to downsize anyway, because we don't want to saddle other family members with the detritus of our lives, and I really needed to organize my hundreds of compositions and digitize everything. That is mostly done, at least.

We hope to move to Ravenna, a medium-sized city about 100 miles south of Venice. It is on the Adriatic coast and is bounded by flat farm land. It is famous for the mosaics in its churches; also there is a music festival every year, a great library, and a branch of the University of Bologna.

Of course there are a number of things that could derail our plans; the war in Ukraine, Italian bureaucracy, black swans of other kinds.

As I said, it's a plan.

Pastoral Dances for woodwind quartet

11/10/2021

I just finished a new piece for woodwind quartet (flute, oboe, Bb clarinet, bassoon), called 'Pastoral Dances'. It is relatively short (4' 20") and sounds a lot like a gentle imitation of the later, serial Stravinsky; music that I have always admired. There are four sections played continuously, slow, fast, slow, fast.

pastoral_dances_for_wind_quartet_-_score_and_parts.pdf
File Size:	284 kb
File Type:	pdf

Danvers Harmony performance Oct 23, 2021

10/18/2021

The Cherry Hill Chamber Orchestra, Marshunda Smith conducting, will perform my piece 'Danvers Harmony' on October 23, 2021 at 3:00 PM at Beverly Second Congregational Church in North Beverly, MA.

Here are some program notes that I wrote for the occasion:

   At the behest of conductor Marshunda Smith, I composed Danvers Harmonies in 2019 as part of a group of six pieces for chamber orchestra, collectively titled Sinfonietta. Three of the pieces are based on British and American folk tunes. One of the other pieces is written in the form and style of ragtime, an American genre that I am fond of. Marshunda Smith and her orchestra performed a selection of the pieces in 2019, including Danvers Harmonies.
  I recently arranged the piece for strings; that is what you will hear tonight.
   Danvers Harmonies is made up of melodies and variations of melodies, some related, and some contrasting. Many of the melodies begin the same way (with a skip and then a step), but then they branch out in different ways. Perhaps I was thinking of John Dunstable, a medieval English composer who used a similar pattern (or ‘head-motif’) in several of his works. The form of the piece is episodic and intuitive, a fantasia. I think you will hear a variety of moods and ‘tones of voice’ in the music; tentative, lyrical, and humorous. There is even a little bit of burlesque.
   Why the title? On one hand, I was thinking about some of the early American music books, like Southern Harmony, Kentucky Harmony, and others. On the other hand, I thought it might be appropriate to name a piece after the town where I have lived for over 30 years. Let there be music FOR Danvers FROM Danvers!

'Sing Child' performance on June 3, 2018

5/29/2018

My choral piece 'Sing Child' will be performed by Triad: Boston's Choral Collective on June 3 at Church on the Hill, 140 Bowdoin Street, Boston, at 8:00 PM. The program includes pieces by Karl Henning, Thomas Stumpf, Jeremy Faust, Bruce Sled, Harry Einhorn, Oznat Netzer, and Julian Bryson.

'Sing Child' was written for a concert whose theme was 'birth-to-death', and its text begins "birth brightness hunger warmth", and continues with a list of sensations, objects (books, dogs), and activities (running, falling, swimming) that would occupy the mind of a child.

The music is written in a synthetic mode throughout, using melodic cells (like Terry Riley's 'In C') and canons at the unison or octave. The piece has a hazy, dream-like quality, which feels like my hazy memories of childhood.