Peter Furniss (clarinet) and David Leiher Jones (piano) will be holding a recital to celebrate the recent Clarinet Classics CD release, Time Pieces, 60 years of American music for clarinet and piano. The recital will take place on Wednesday, 24th October at 7:30pm. The Warehouse, 13 Theed Street, London, SE1 8ST.

This song is probably the most Sondheim-derivative thing I’ve ever written. When I was a student, all of my music was completely derivative, and over the years I learned how to avoid that to some degree. This is a rare case where I was not only being openly derivative, but I actually knew what I was doing. If you know your Sondheim, you will surely recognize the influence.

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The lyrics are mine too, by the way. You can follow them and the score if you’d like on this dedicated page.

By the way, there’s a running index of all the songs I’ve posted so far on this page.

Later today I’m shlepping my family to Budapest for three weeks of fun, cake and eccentric conveyances. Someone recently asked if this trip has anything to do with my turning 40. I hadn’t made the connection, but since then my explanation as to why we’re going has been “mid-life crisis”. I can’t afford a motorcycle. And they scare me.

As of yesterday, a new draft of the libretto for Eros at Breakfast is complete. As lyricist, I’ve been the one holding it up. Contact me privately if you’re a theater person and would like to read it. It’s been interesting: I’ve discovered that one of the nice things about doing my own lyrics is that a big part of the composing takes place at the same time. I get rhythms in my head, and can sort of already hear the music in most cases. So I hope that will mean that the composing part will go quickly. (Yeah, right.)

The new CD containing my clarinet/piano piece American Standard has been out in the U.K. for a while and is inching toward release in the U.S. Amazon says it will by July 24th. Meanwhile, it’s now showing up (at a better price) for order direct from the distributor Qualiton. Also, I’m trying something new and have made the score and part of the piece available through the nifty distribution service from Subito Music.

Maybe I’ll do some blogging from Budapest. We’ll see.

For starters, here’s my favorite cue from a film score I did a few years ago. This is the very end of Shakespeare’s Merchant. I can’t give you a whole synopsis of The Merchant of Venice here, but for this cue it helps to know that in our version, Antonio is in love with Bassanio. Bassanio has just pledged fidelity to his wife Portia, and that sucks for Antionio. In the second half of the cue, we see Shylock, having been rendered penniless and yarmulke-less due to a court-ordered punishment for his crediting practices. I love the way this cue came together for a lot of reasons.

I will sheepishly mention that this score is an electronic rendering of what is/was hoped to be recorded properly. Also, due to the rather severe letterboxing, I recommend the “full screen” option, which is the square icon to the right of the timeline.

By the way, the this score is available from CD Baby, iTunes and Amazon.

Composed in the summer or fall of 2002, Welcome Home is probably my favorite song from Wu; certainly the one I’m most proud of for both music and lyrics. It’s an ensemble number for womens chorus.

Following a tumultuous journey from her village to the Emperor’s court, Wu is met by gentle chorus of concubines welcoming her into the Emperor’s harem. During the course of the song, they transform her from a simple country girl into an elegant member of their circle.

Performing on the recording are clarinettist Peter Furniss and pianist David Leiher Jones, both good friends since our Budapest Liszt Academy days a really long time ago. (They taught me all about Marmite and how to curse properly in English.) American Standard was originally written for Peter, who’s performed it numerous times around the world.

The disc also includes a magnificent performance of the Bernstein Sonata as well as works by Victor Babin, James Cohn, Robert Muczynski and Richard Dudas, another Budapest cohort.

The release is scheduled for June, and I will, no doubt, crow about it again here at that time.

By early in Act II of The Ghost of Wu, Wu Chao has succeeded in becoming Empress, having removed the Emperor’s first wife from the picture. But she is not satisfied. She’s been trying to convince her husband to decree that upon his death, Wu will assume the powers of the Emperor herself, instead of their son.

Kaozong insists on checking with his Confucian advisors, whom Wu views as stuffy and out of touch. In “The Ways of the Young”, we see the Confucians from Wu’s point of view: as foolish old men with nothing useful to say, and certainly no solutions.

Between verses of the song the Confucians toss coins and consult the I Ching for guidance in this matter. The answer, it turns out, isn’t particularly helpful.”

A word about the lyrics. This song, written in 2001 or so, marks the beginning of my journey from fixing other people’s lyrics out of sheer necessity (usually for musical reasons) to actually calling myself a lyricist and taking it on myself, which is a fairly recent development. In this case, a lot of the best material is from the original given to me by my playwright collaborator Donna Kaulkin, but that version lacked formal cohesion that I needed, so I fleshed it out a bit. Mainly, I claim the final verse, which I wrote because I felt the song needed a coda. It’s pretty flawed, but I like the way it ties everything up. I’ve gotten better since then.

The lyrics and MP3 can be found on the song’s own page. Check it out here.

Having never paid any attention to Hanson before, I listened to it for the first time with great interest. About two thirds of the way through the final movement of Symphony No. 1, I heard something that made me stop and rewind.

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Keep in mind that I’ve never heard this Hanson symphony before in my life, and check this out. It’s an excerpt from my 2000 orchestra piece Misterium Tremendum.

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It’s funny to me, because a review of a 2003 performance of Misterium picked on it for ripping off Sibelius, and I actually wasn’t familiar with Sibelius when I wrote the piece. I eventually got to know and love Sibelius, partly thanks to that review (which was actually quite fair and astute).

Turns out I was ripping off Hanson without realizing it. Hanson, I found out from the liner notes, was a Sibelius fan himself. What’s particularly interesting is the news that one of Hanson’s students was William Bergsma who taught my last teacher, Conrad Susa. I suppose that makes him a musical great-grandfather of sorts.

Turns out to be a pleasant surprise. It’s certainly not flawless, but I’m as pleased with it as I was back in the day. Really, not bad for a 20-year-old with an attention span problem.

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This is taken from Act 3, Scene 3, where Romeo learns that he is to be banished from Verona:

There is no world without Verona walls,
But purgatory, torture, hell itself.

                                        — heaven is here,
Where Juliet lives; and every cat and dog
And little mouse, every unworthy thing,
Live here in heaven and may look on her;
But Romeo may not. More validity,
More honourable state, more courtship lives
In carrion-flies than Romeo: they my seize
On the white wonder of dear Juliet’s hand
And steal immortal blessing from her lips.
But Romeo may not; he is banished:
Flies may do this, but I from this must fly:
They are free men, but I am banished.

There is a companion piece for soprano taken from Juliet’s famous “Come, night” speech. The two were performed together as Two Songs from Romeo and Juliet. I’m still proud of the Juliet song, but from a dramatic point of view it’s completely wrong, so I’m not as eager to crow about it here.

Cycle of Friends, for soprano, chorus and chamber orchestra, was premiered on May 3rd, 1996 by the Music Group of Philadelphia. Artistic Director Sean Deibler had been one of my undergraduate teachers, and has been a mentor and all-around guru ever since. I was very lucky to be one of three composers he chose for a three-year commissioning binge he was on at the time, thanks to a special grant. The commission came through as I was finishing my master’s degree at the S.F. Conservatory. (I was studying with Conrad Susa when I wrote this piece; it doesn’t get better than that for choral music.)

This was a dream come true at the time. I had sung in Sean’s choruses at the University of the Arts as well as his Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia, which was then the Philadelphia Orchestra’s chorus of choice. So, thanks to Sean, I was intimately familiar choral music from a cappella gems like the Ravel Trois Chansons, Hindemith’s Six Chansons and Barber’s Reincarnations to massive symphonic masterworks including The Damnation of Faust and John Adams’ Harmonium. (I should post a complete list, just for fun someday. It’s pretty amazing.) So, I was chomping at the bit to write a big choral piece myself.

About Cycle of Friends
No guidelines were given, except that I could use any number of the four soloists who were called for in another piece on the program, and the orchestral forces, which included single winds, one trumpet, harp, percussion and strings. The rest was up to me.

After a period of agonizing over what texts to use, I settled on some things I’d found in a small anthology called Friendship Poems. This little book included a variety of poems from all over the world and from all eras. I liked the idea of taking poetry from very different times and places, and combining them to illustrate a universal theme, in this case, that of friendship.

There were a lot of poems in the book that I wanted to set, but eventually I winnowed it down to five very short ones that I arranged in such a way as to create an emotional narrative.

I. “Tell Everyone” (Sappho)

I chose this very short fragment from Sappho as an opener. The text is simply:

Tell everyone. Now, today I shall sing beautifully for my friends’ pleasure.

Here’s an excerpt:

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II. “My Old Friend Prepared a Chicken With Millet”
Meng Hao-Jan (Tang Dynasty era)

This is one of two Chinese poems I used, both in shimmering translation by Innes Herdan. This one is a lilting account of a meeting between two friends.

Wait until the Autumn Festival:
I shall come again,
To enjoy your chrysanthemums.

The musical treatment is bittersweet. Will these two friends really meet again?

Have a listen:

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III. “Are Friends Delight Or Pain?” (Emily Dickinson)

This is the one a cappella movement. In fact, here the chorus is divided into two discrete SATB groups for an interesting texture. The entire movement, you may notice, is on an E pedal, which I thought was fun.

Are friends delight or pain?
Could Bounty but remain
Riches were good —

But if they only stay
Ampler to fly away
Riches were sad.

Listen:

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IV. “Blue Hills Over the North Wall” Li Po (Tang Era)

This movement is for soprano and orchestra with no chorus. This is a particularly moving poem, again translated by Innes Herdan, and functions as a sort of denouement in my view. It’s the emotional core of the piece. Quite simply, two friends are parting ways. We don’t know why.

Blue hills over the north wall
White water swirling to the east of the city:
This is where you must leave me —

Here’s an excerpt:

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V. Friendship Aztec (Traditional)

I used this is a lush folk poem to close the piece.

Our song is bird calling out like a jingle:
how beautiful you make it sound!

The soprano emerges after a choral outburst with an extremely lyrical setting of these lines. The chorus creeps in gradually as the climax of the work approaches.

See what I mean…

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