Publishing a Trio for Alto Saxophone, Flute, and Piano

      Today, I finished the last editorial touches on a trio for Alto Saxophone, flute, and piano. I was excited to package it up, along with some recordings my friends Mike Sakash and Julia Hendrickson and John Cotter helped with. I'll be mailing it to Cincinnati tomorrow to be part of the National contest for "Distinguished Composer of the Year,"  a program of the Music Teachers' National Association. I am also posting it here, in case there are other trios like ours out there who want to play it.
      Now some of you may ask whether I have copy-righted the music. Well, I do have my name clearly emblazoned on the scores. But I do want to share the experience of my music. That is I want people to hear it. To be living music, it needs players and an audience.
      So if you would like to play this music, please do. All I ask is that you credit me with its composition in your performance and let me know if you plan to perform it. I'd like to know that my music is being played and (I hope) enjoyed in different places. Beyond those two things, I'd like you to you think a bit about how it might be possible to compensate me. I have considered putting a donate button on this site, but I haven't done that yet, nor am I convinced it's the right thing to do. I compose because I must. I earn my living as a music teacher (which occupation I dearly love). But more economic freedom would certainly buy me more time for composing. So if you like the music, think about this issue a bit and let me know what you think. What would be a convenient way for you to express your valuation of it? What would be fair? What would help more art flourish in the world?

     Please follow this link to the folder with the sheet music in it

   Files for Trio for Alto Saxophone, Flute, and Piano

This posting is for my orchestra friends. You can now download audio files for the piece "Vignettes From the Life of John Brown" that you are helping me premiere on October 28th. There are two types of files: midi and .wav. Both types play the tunes. The midi files do not use correct instruments. The .wav files are more accurate (but still a bit computery). The midi files are much smaller than the .wav files, so pick whichever makes sense on your machine.

Let me know if this process works for you!

Here's the link the the folder where the files are.
Click here for audio files of Vignettes from the Life of John Brown

Happy practicing.

A New Trio for Flute Saxophone and Piano

       Thanks to the generosity of New Hampshire's chapter of Music Teacher's National Association, a piece of mine will be premiered on Saturday, October 6^th at 3:30 PM at Keene State College. I was selected as the commisioned composer of the year by NHMTA. I've written a trio for flute, saxophone and piano. Mike Sakash and Julia Hendrickson will be performing with me. We hope to record the piece and perform it in the Conway area sometime in the next year, so if you can't make it to Keene, you still may have a chance to hear it performed.

      The piece is largely tonal, but it employs some stealthy elements of bitonality. The result is much more consonant than Kodaly's duo for violin and viola, but much more spicy than Robert Schumann's chamber works (to whom the piece owes a lot of inspiration.). Germaine Tailleferre and Bohuslav Martinu, two composer's whose work I've studied over the last couple of years, also influenced this work.

There are four movements, a romantic adagio, a jolly romp through the statements and developments of three themes, a fugue based on computational trees, and a motile allegro with a lyrical melody. I think the work is quite listenable despite my indulgence of academic compositional techniques.  

Syzygy--The Fourth Dimension

     Along with my regular Syzygy partners Mary Edes and Dana Cunningham, I have lately been contemplating time. Our next show, scheduled for the auspicious date of Wednesday, December 21, at 7:00 PM at Salyards Center for the Arts on Main Street in Conway Village to reflect on the nature of time. We regulars will be joined by Jed Wilson, cast as the immortal man.

     What is time, anyway? How does it impinge on us? How does it order our lives? Why does our experience of it vary? How do we find it? How do we lose it? How do we save it? These questions and more inchoate ones have inspired vignettes, musical selections, and poems. It's about time. Admission is $10 at the door or $5 for students.

     The Syzygy performance series takes its name from a term denoting the alignment of three or more celestial bodies in a straight line. Used in the fields of astrology, philosophy, psychology, mathematics, biology, and even poetry, syzygy denotes the coming together of disparate parts—however briefly—to form some new thing. The shows seek to use art to create a new and meaningful (if not entirely serious) experience. For more information about this show or about the series, ask Ellen at ellen.m.schwindt@gmail.com.

Two Arias

Here are two Arias from The Passion of Drury Doyle—an opera about the more infamous aspects of the career of John Brown. The first is called “Mahala Doyle's Lament” and is based on sworn testimony left by the real Mahala Doyle. In the testimony she describes the murder of her husband and two oldest sons committed by John Brown and his two oldest sons on Pottawattamie creek in the heat of the Kansas Troubles in 1857. The second aria is called “If There are Souls.” The lyrics for this aria come from Stephen Vincent Benet's book “John Brown's Body.”

Mahala Doyle's Lament:

http://www.box.com/s/yhcuhsfz11ls33586dov

If There are Souls

http://www.box.com/s/f8gpvv692ukvcg8ricda

 

If you are interested in more material from this opera for performance, please contact me. I want to share my music but I would like to know when and where it is performed, so please contact me if you would like to use it.

A violin and piano concert on September 25th

Poster for Three Endings

My practice time lately has been devoted to preparations for a concert of violin and piano music planned for Sunday, September 25th at 3:00 PM at Salyards Center for the Arts. The program is devoted to three works which are quite different from each other but have one thing in common, at least as I hear them. I believe they can all function as an exhortation to spend time well. Here are some tidbits about each piece.

Erik Satie's Le Mort de Socrate

In 399 BCE, a court in Athens found the philosopher Socrates guilty of corrupting the youth of Athens with his constant questioning about reality and sentenced him to death. Plato's account of his death has inspired sympathy from those enamored of a rational way of life ever since. Erik Satie, who contemplated the realities of life during the early part of the 20th Century in France, set the drama of Socrates' death to music—music that captures both Socrates' friends' sensations as the hour of his death approached inexhorabley, and Socrates' own peaceful outlook based on his firm faith in the immortality of his soul.

Aaron Copland's Violin Sonata

Aaron Copland dedicated a piece to a man who died too young—one Lieutenant Harry Dunham, a friend killed in the action of  World War II. The piece, a sonata for violin and piano, is a tightly constructed microcosm of many musical moods. The Lyric melodies and bouyant exuberances of the first movement sandwich a slow mournful dance. Copland composed it during 1942 and 1943. He dedicated it to his friend who died just after Copland finished the piece.

Robert Schumann's Violin Sonata in a minor 

 Beside these two musical treatises on noble death we have juxtaposed Robert Schumann's violin Sonata in A minor—composed in1851. This was just three years before Robert Schumann was confined to a mental hospital after attempting suicide by throwing himself into the Rhine. It is a piece full of passionate emotion realized in the most romantic style. 

But do not think, from these descriptions, that the pieces are morbid or dolorous. All three partake of life, indeed have the divine spark evident in them. We hope you will decide to use your time to come and enjoy them with us. The concert takes place at 3:00 PM on Sunday, September 25th at Salyards Center for the Arts. It is a faculty concert for Mountain Top Music Center where both Chris Nourse and I teach. A donation of $10 is suggested. For more information call Mountain Top Music Center at 447-4737.

An oboe concerto in search of a soloist an orchestra and a conductor

Now that summer is here, I finally have time to devote to composition. So at long last I've posted all three movements of the music I composed last summer. The work is a concerto for oboe and small orchestra. Brian Charles, a Julliard-trained oboist and the proprietor of Charles Double Reed Company premiered the piece last October along with the Mountain Top Music Center Community Orchestra under the direction of Christopher Nourse.

Brian is a classical musician with a wide range of musical interests—one of which is improvisation. For this reason, I made room for improvisation in the cadenza section. The motif that runs through the first movement was inspired by a friend of mine's description of water dripping into a bucket on a cool summer morning in Maine. While I don't think of the work as completely programmatic, perhaps that idea gives the listener a place from which to consider the music.

I'm hoping there are other oboists and other orchestras who might like to perform the piece. I'd be happy to supply parts and audio files for musicians to peruse. I also created a piano reduction of the orchestral part to allow for a wider range of performance possibilities. Please contact me by e-mail if you are interested in performing the work.

I. Chanson

II. Chaconne

III. Gigue