Composed for the Carnegie Hall debut of the Los Angeles Youth Orchestra February 25, 2013. This high-energy overture lasts four and a half minutes. It features a timpani and percussion cadenza.
Scored for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 French horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, bass drum, snare drum, suspended cymbal, wood block, glockenspiel, strings
Written in memory of Eve Cohen, Program Director for the Los Angeles Youth Orchestra, violist, and genius. Eve passed away from cancer October 2012 before she could join the orchestra in its Carnegie Hall Debut the following February. I composed this piece to make sure her presence was felt at Carnegie Hall in spirit by the musicians and the audience. Appropriately, the piece ends with the violas having the final note.
Complete recording available on Centaur Records. This sonata was commissioned by flutist Sheridon Stokes. The first movement makes use of the beautiful multiphonics that Sheridon demonstrated for me.
Reflecting the gift the city has given all us Los Angeles commuters with its many-year extended San Diego Freeway 405 project, my 405:8AM for Youth Orchestra seeks to capture in just 2 minutes the serenity and glory we experience on our daily drives. :-)
This performance by the Los Angeles Youth Orchestra includes several original sonic contributions from students, all adding to the fun.
Reflecting the gift the city has given all us Los Angeles commuters with its many-year extended San Diego Freeway 405 project, my 405:8AM for Youth Orchestra seeks to capture in just 2 minutes the serenity and glory we experience on our daily drives. :-)
This performance by the Los Angeles Youth Orchestra includes several original sonic contributions from students, all adding to the fun.
Responding artistically to a recent national or cultural trauma is problematic. In seeking to commemorate, the result often diminishes rather than augments our experience, simply because it can't answer to the scale and intensity of such fresh memories of the actual event.
That being said, I was moved to respond to 9/11 by focusing on a diminished image itself, the tattered 9/11 flag from the collapsing twin towers. The music is a meditation on "The Star Spangled Banner" in a kind of tattered state, falling apart, combining with "America the Beautful," collapsing in descent, yet finally rebuilding in fireworks and strong affirmation. The coda is an intentional reference/reinterpretation of the magical "Fairy Garden" from Ravel's Mother Goose Suite.
My tango scored for violin and orchestra from my Daniel Pearl commission "Stories From My Favorite Planet." The music is inspired by Danny's hilarious story of a stolen Stradivarius violin and the new owner who refuses to give it up because it lets her "play in tune." (note my use of scales in a kind of Looney Toons parody).
This piece was as much fun to perform with full orchestra as with just violin and piano. You can hear Mitch having a blast on the violin.
Orchestrated movement from my Daniel Pearl commission "Stories From My Favorite Planet." This soliloquy for violin and orchestra is a meditation on the struggle between Serbs and Albanians that Danny wrote about so eloquently in the Wall Street Journal.
My string quartet was premiered by the New World String Quartet in Boston and ultimately became my doctoral thesis at Harvard University. Though written as only a single movement, the quartet journeys and converses together through many different worlds of texture and tempo. I remember at the time being particularly influenced by the sonorities of Alban Berg’s string quartet op. 3 and Lyric Suite. My original title was “Nightmares,” but several professors protested saying the music was far too sweet for such a description. You be the judge.
This Lullaby is from Brim A Brew, a song cycle to poetry by Ray Underwood. Russell Steinberg writes:
"These songs speak of simple things: the magic of wind whistling through empty glass bottles, an aged maid representing the harvest of a simple bountiful life, a lullaby to ward off the great darkness, and winter galloping on a stallion followed by snowy hosts. Juliana Gondek sent me home one day with an extensive folder filled to the brim with poetry of her belated friend Ray Underwood. Ray’s poems got under my skin with their simplicity, elegance, Americana quality—and beneath all that, a mighty darkness. This collection sets five of his poems in musical language that tries to tap into that sense of simple and elegant American identity, with resonances of Copland and Barber."
Ray Underwood
Raised in the colorado Rocky Mountains, Ray Underwood was an actor and poet. He studied at the Juilliard School of Performing Arts Drama Division, run by John Houseman. For 15 years he had a successful career and starred on many television shows. Ann Sexton described his writing "not as the work of one who writes poems, but of a poet." Peggy Lee influenced him toward song lyric writing and he collaborated with Maurice Jarre on the theme song for Paramount Pictures' ALMOST AN ANGEL starring Paul Hogan. He eventually compiled a body of work ranging from pop sungs sung by Bette Midler and Vanessa Williams, to folk and art songs sung by opera singers such as Juliana Gondek.
LULLABY
Strings are running through you
You're a button on a thread
And you traverse the nighttime
Through the stories of your head
Rhemes and rhemes of colored dreams
Vibrate from the strings
Scents and songs and pictures
Unborn lakes and secret streams.
Goodnight, goodnight, my baby
Pay attention while you fly,
For somewhere while you glide the night
Are the reasons that you cry.
Falling through the darkness,
Like a red coal in a rage
Burning, as you fall,
Through paper page and paper page.
For every voice that's in the world
There is one inside your head
And God must hush them all with peace.
Before you rise from bed.
This scratch MIDI realization of The Net of Indra is a draft for conductors. The balances are not optimal but it will give an idea of the music.
World Premiere of The Net of Indra performed by the Pasadena Young Musician's Orchestra, Verdugo Youth Orchestra, Olympia Youth Orchestra, and Los Angeles Youth Orchestra.
Balance is skewed because the recording was made from the balcony where the brass were standing.
A melancholy violin soliloquy inspired by a powerful Wall Street Journal story set in Kosovo where Daniel Pearl tries to discover if any Serb and Albanian friendships still remain amidst the war.
Performed by the Sonora Chamber Ensemble directed by Michelle Stanley with pianist Russell Steinberg at Colorado State University in Boulder, CO
scored for flute, clarinet in B flat, cello, and piano
Performed by the Sonora Chamber Ensemble, Michelle Stanley director, with pianist Russell Steinberg at Colorado State University, Boulder, CO.
scored for flute, clarinet in B flat, cello, and piano