TRACING MY PERSONAL MUSICAL EVOLUTION (Backwards)

MULHOLLAND FANTASIES PIANO QUARTET, OP. 32

By Mulholland Fantasies, the integration of contemporary sonorities and textures with my tonal Romantic language felt more assured, more “my voice.” I’ve certainly gone my own way. I’m not “in step” with contemporary trends—not minimal, microtonal, experimental, electronic, spectral, etc. That said, I think you’ll feel a genuine expressivity when you listen to these selections.

Mulholland Fantasies will be the concluding work on my June 14, 2025 Music Catalog Release Concert. It was originally commissioned by Pacific Serenades and performed by Joanne Pearce Martin (piano), Roger Wilkie (violin), Roland Kato (viola), and David Speltz (cello). Dedicated to Mark Carlson, composer and founder of Pacific Serenades. The piece is an interior journey inspired by Mulholland Drive and the way it divides through the city of Los Angeles. The fourth slow movement features a high expressive cello solo and luminous, meditative harmony. The finale is an exuberant piece reflecting my love for the lyricism in Schubert's chamber music. It’s also probably the most joyful piece I’ve composed.

TWO TRIOS—EARLY EXPERIMENTS TO FUSE CONTEMPORARY ELEMENTS INTO ROMANTIC TONALITY

Rings of Saturn op. 15
Trio for Flute, Violin, and Piano

Influenced by impressionism and a growing fascination with delicate tone colors, Rings of Saturn is a gentle, introspective work written for the rather unusual combination of flute, violin, and piano. Composer Donald Martino once remarked about a special aural haze that seems to hover throughout the piece, partially due to the piano's use of pedal and plucking inside the instrument. The title is reference to photos taken by the Voyager spacecraft revealing an almost infinite series of colorful rings surrounding Saturn. This trio was an early exploration to fuse the contemporary sonorities and textures I had discovered writing atonal music with a more Romantic tonal language.

CLARINET TRIO OP. 16

While Rings of Saturn comes from the “Debussy” side of Romanticism to modernity, my Clarinet Trio comes from the “Schoenberg” side of modernity to ultimately embrace Romanticism. Scored for clarinet, cello, and piano, my Clarinet Trio is a one movement work with three distinct sections. A high, furious trill initiates and propels the energetic first section. As the pace becomes more frenzied, the instruments race out of control and abruptly rest. The following middle section, at a slower tempo, reviews previous ideas in a distant and fragmented context. The instruments use special effects (key clicking, multiphonics, bowing behind the bridge, string plucking, etc.) and play out of time with each other. A cello cadenza connects the material to a quiet recapitulation which is more a remembrance than a restatement of the opening textures. The primary theme now is reflective and lyrical (it was harsh and jagged initially). The piece ends distantly with a high trill-like figuration in the piano.

MY ATONAL STYLE IN MY FIRST YEARS OF GRADUATE STUDY IN BOSTON

PRELUDE AND SCHERZO FOR WOODWIND QUARTET, OP. 7

I composed this quartet while studying with Arthur Berger at the New England Conservatory in Boston. Berger himself composed a gorgeous woodwind quartet earlier in his American neoclassic style. By the time I was studying with him, he was a resolute atonal composer, enthralled with the aesthetic of serial composer Milton Babbitt. Berger insisted I compose in his atonal style that spread out 12 tone sets across multiple registers. My Woodwind Quartet is probably the most successful of my atonal pieces. The Prelude translates my expressive bent into this new idiom, while the Scherzo opened me up to compose a lighter, whimsical ambience.

MY EARLY ROMANTIC STYLE…

Violin Sonata op. 1

My op. 1 Violin Sonata is an extended single movement, full of passion and virtuosic writing, all in the late Romantic style. You can readily hear my love for the music of Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, even Rachmaninoff. The different sections of the piece ascend chromatically from G minor all the way up to D minor. Richard Buell from the Boston Globe observed:  

To be present was to be reminded again that today's music speaks in many different voices, some of them intent on sounding like yesterday's. Russell Steinberg's lush and warmly romantic Violin Sonata could have come right out of the mid to late-19th century; its expressive vocabulary, which manages to avoid anachronism or camp, might have appealed to such virtuosi as Jan Kubelik or Eugene Ysaye.

This recording was from the premiere in Boston at the first NuClassix concert in the 1980s, when I was studying for my Masters degree at the New England Conservatory. Jennifer Moreau was a talented violinist from New Zealand studying Violin Performance at NEC at the same time.