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Choral scores available on JWPepper

5/29/2025

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I am now self-publishing some of my scores on the JWPepper website. I have many more scores to post, but I started with choral music, because you have to start somewhere!

Use the link below to go to the JWPepper website, then type 'Charles Turner' into the Search bar. A list of my pieces will come up.

https://www.jwpepper.com/
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March 16 "A Lowell Symphony" performance

3/2/2024

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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
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Works that I composed in 2023

1/15/2024

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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”
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Another online gallery

12/22/2022

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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.
​
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In Italy

12/13/2022

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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.
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My online art gallery

10/29/2022

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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.
​
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'Cliff House,' a chamber opera

4/19/2022

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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.

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Moving to Italy is the plan

4/19/2022

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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.

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Pastoral Dances for woodwind quartet

11/10/2021

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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
Download File

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Danvers Harmony performance Oct 23, 2021

10/18/2021

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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!
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