Cycle of Friends consists of five movements, with settings of texts from various parts of the world and moments in history, each using various combinations of chorus, soprano solo and orchestra.  This movement is only for soprano and orchestra without chorus.  Here it is superbly performed by soprano Janice Fiore and Orchestra 2001, conducted by Music Group Artistic Director Seán Deibler. The text is a poem by Li Po (701-762), translated by Innes Herdan.

More information about Cycle of Friends

You may also wish to view a similar video of the one a cappella movement, “Are Friends Delight or Pain?“

“Are Friends Delight or Pain” is now available as a stand-alone piece in octavo format from Swirly Music.

Among the people I did send it to, all those years ago, was Magen Solomon, conductor of the award-winning and extremely capable San Francisco Choral Artists.  This year, out of the blue, the piece was added to their “Poetry on Musical Wings” program.  Delighted by this unlikely stroke of luck, I quickly revised the piece to make it more suitable for performance, and they gave this wonderful, nuanced  premiere performance.

My approach to this surreal and brilliantly goofy poem was to treat it as if it were Shakespeare and treat the musical setting with utmost, deadpan seriousness.  I hope you enjoy hearing the piece with the appropriately silly video montage below!

In the “video perusal score” below, you can follow the score as you hear its premiere performance by the 2011 Kodály Summer Institute Chorus at Holy Names University, conducted by László Matos.

“Roll the Tide” is available in octavo format from Swirly Music.

June 9, 10 and 16 - San Francisco Choral Artists

The SF Choral Artists, conducted by Magen Solomon, will give the world premiere of my very short (and very, very silly) a cappella madrigal Ducks in the Garden, which was composed in 1991. Details…

July 27 – Kodály Summer Institute, Holy Names University, Oakland

The chorus of the Kodály Summer Institute Chorus, conducted by visiting professor Judit Hartyányi, will give the premiere of a new, commissioned work.  The a cappella piece is based on John Milton’s poem “Surge, age surge“.  (Did you know he’d written in Latin?  I didn’t.)

August 5 – HellHot Festival, Hong Kong

Details are sketchy, but my string quartet City Walks will be performed at this summer’s HellHot festival in Hong Kong. (Last year’s info still on that site.)

What is so wonderful about for me about my poetic “thought music” is that while it can have specific meaning for me, it doesn’t have to have a specific meaning for anyone else.

— poet Elisabeth T. Eliassen

My new choral work Waiting… is built around a hand-picked group of poems by Bay Area poet Elisabeth T. Eliassen, who is not only singing in the upcoming premiere, but has been very supportive and accessible during my process of composing the piece.

Owing to the unique aspects of this particular collaboration, we thought it would be interesting and edifying, to say nothing of fun, to share a bit of our ongoing email discussion about the creative process as it relates to music and poetry.

You can read the piece here, on Elisabeth’s blog Songs of a Soul Journey, where a great deal more of her work can also be read.

The Sanford Dole Ensemble will give the premiere performance Waiting…, for chorus, string quartet and piano, at the San Francisco Conservatory on February 4th at 8:00pm.  Tickets will be available at the door or directly from the Sanford Dole Ensemble for $30.

Update: (1/31/12) Elisabeth has posted an additional installment of our conversation.  You can read that here.

This “All New, All Local” program also includes new works by San Francisco composers David Conte and Peter Scott Lewis, as well as Sanford Dole himself. All of the pieces use various combinations of chorus, strings, piano and percussion.

Like my earlier large choral work Cycle of Friends, Waiting…, is imagined in the tradition of my favorite non-liturgical choral masterpieces, ranging from Brahms to Vaughan-Williams to John Adams.  The text is chosen from among the beautiful works of Bay Area poet Elisabeth Eliassen.

Unlike most such choral works and song cycles, where the work is organized around a sequence of poems,  Waiting… is cast in one movement, and is based on one large poem with a few smaller poems nested among the stanzas.  The work is dominated by Elisabeth’s masterful poem, “Come again”, whose relentless use of the word “waiting” in stanza after stanza provides something like a dramatic framework, taking us from urgency to desperation to resolution.

The stanzas of “Come again” are set in a fast-paced, narrative style, occasionally exposing my musical theater roots, whereas the other poems are treated in more relaxed settings.  Here’s an excerpt from “Come again”.

Waiting,
beyond waiting, there is nothing waiting,
and no one shall come down from on high, waiting,
as one might be, for a sign that we are ready and waiting,
for, lacking such an offer, still for some reply we are waiting
for something, from what we suppose to be a heavenly realm, waiting
for a new and familiar face to appear, waiting
to be acknowledged, to be loved, to be led.

The smaller poems are set as little diversions from the narrative drive, forming a kind of sub-plot and bringing about a sense of contrast and commentary.

Hear an Excerpt

One of these smaller poems, “Roll the Tide”, is set as a kind of a cappella spiritual. It was performed as an excerpt last year at the Kodály Summer Institute at Holy Names University, conducted by László Matos, and that performance can be heard below.

Download audio file (za4cukgv0zkt6m5v6hot.mp3)

—Roll the tide,
o roll the tide over,
roll the tide over me,
and so hide my tears
in folds of your timelessly flowing,
salty blanket of turbulence
and music.

—Roll the tide
and rock me to a watery sleep,
rock and roll me
until my cares
have worn to sand,
and lay me bare and free
in the bosom of your shore.

The poetry excerpts “Roll the tide” and “Come again”,  the latter from the book Songs of a Soul Journey (2002), are by Elisabeth T. Eliassen, and appear here with the poet’s permission. More of her work can be found on her blog, also called Songs of a Soul Journey.

The intervals of the augmented fourth and diminished fifth indeed sound the same when played out of context on a piano, but they are not the same interval, they are not both the same thing as a tritone, and the tritone is not an inversion of itself.

The word tritone can be broken down to something like “three tones.”  A major second, or whole step, is a tone. In music theory nerd circles, a major third, which is the combination of two whole tones, can be referred to at times as a ditone. So, the word tritone follows this pattern: three whole tones.

Now, is this an augmented fourth, a diminished fifth, or both?

I find it helpful to consider the visual layout of the piano keyboard. There’s no better representation of the arrangement of half steps and whole steps that is the diatonic scale. The two half steps that occur, mi-fa and ti-do, are plainly seen among the white keys. You will notice that the only occurrence of more than two sequential whole steps is between fa and ti, or F and B in C major.

The three whole tones make it kosher to call this a tritone. The four notes from F to B, inclusive, make it an interval of a fourth — an augmented fourth. In order to be a diminished fifth there would have to be five notes from the lower note to the upper one, inclusive. In C major, our white  keys show us that this occurs between B and F.

So, we can correctly refer to the augmented fourth as a tritone, but not a diminished fifth. It’s easy to think the two are the same thing, because they sound the same when plonked on a piano with no context, but intervals have no meaning without context.

The presence of these half steps — mi-fa and ti-do — is what gives our diatonic system balance and drama, and these two intervals behave differently in light of that.  The diminished fifth resolves inward — ti up to do and fa down to mi, while the tritone, or augmented fourth, resolves outward. In other words, these two intervals are as different from each other as, say, a major third and a minor sixth.

David Newman is an accomplished baritone soloist and teacher of voice and musicianship at James Madison University, who apparently knows a thing or two about songwriting as well.  His songs are on YouTube and they speak for themselves. If you are at all concerned with getting students to hear harmonic progressions and intervals, you will be thoroughly entertained by these.

This one is particularly ingenious. Only a solfège nerd would notice this, but most of the syllables in this song correspond to solfège syllables, and they indeed fall where they should melodically.

Sophie lay on my sofa
eating raw dough and drinking tea

…can be heard as

So Fi Le on my So Fa
eating Ra Do and drinking Ti.

(Of course, being Hungarian-trained, I would prefer “LO” instead of “LE” for the lowered “LA”, but that’s neither here nor there.) Go ahead. Listen again, and you’ll see that every syllable lands where it should in the scale.

Here are a few more of these. Again, you’ll notice that anytime there’s a reference in the lyrics to a chord, syllable or interval, it is reflected accurately in the music. Click the links to invoke the video in a popup.

• The Intervals in Inversion Song
• Second Inversions Song
• SO-TI-RE-FA Dominant 7 Song

Now, are these just fun and super clever, or do you think they can really help reinforce a student’s absorption of these concepts?  I’m really asking. Please comment!

More of these can be heard on David’s YouTube channel.

One very nice feature is the use of a full-screen perusal score viewer that I hope will make it easy for people to make buying decisions, and the shopping cart process is as elegant as any I’ve seen.

Composers: The More the Merrier

If you are a self-publishing composer and would like to make your scores available via this site, or if you would like a similar site of your own, please get in touch. It can be accomplished very easily.

See the site in action here.