Quartet
Flowers (2012)
String Quartet 20' 00" - 3 Movements Flowers from the Fray is the third and last movement of a string quartet (Where Have They Gone, Pressed Flowers, and Flowers from the Fray). When left to their own devices plants, and the flowers they produce, run amok, climbing over each other to reach the sun, grasping for room to expand, and strangling their neighbors and themselves in the process. Metaphors abound! Each movement draws on aspects of the Pete Seeger tune ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”
Gathering (2012)
Clarinet, Violin, Viola, Cello 20' 20" - 3 Movements The three movements of Gathering are 'gathered' together by means of an essential bass line that moves downward by half step with each new movement. In the first movement, an insistent underlying tone anchors and eventually pulls down the lines rising above it. The second movement is full of rhythmic and metrical diversity, with outer sections alternating between an asymmetrical meter (12 345) and a chorale-style passage. A distinct middle section plays with the accent tension between 3/4 and 6/8 (12 23 56 vs. 123 456), sometimes one after the other, sometimes simultaneously. The third movement draws on traditional tonality as a way to establish a sense of both unresolved longing and of remembrance.
Hanging onto the Vine (2012)
Saxophone Quartet 10' 00" Hanging Onto the Vine, for saxophone quartet, was commissioned by Kelland Thomas and was composed in 2000. It was premiered by the Indiana University Student Saxophone Quartet in 2001. The title draws on several obliquely related images of vines and hanging: images in the Book of John of branches abiding in the vine and bearing fruit, the psychological state of "hanging by a thread," and Tarzan swinging from a vine. Published by JOMAR Press.
The Old Songs (2012)
Scena for Soprano, Clarinet, Alto Saxophone, Contrabass 10'00" Coming Soon
Our Hands were Tightly Clenched (2012)
String Quartet 6' 30" Our Hands Were Tightly Clenched was written in 2003 for La Catrina String Quartet, a graduate student quartet from Western Michigan University. The phrase "our hands were tightly clenched" is for me metaphor for sustained, embedded tension and anger, and the material of the piece explores the rise of this tension and ways in which its persistence might be diffused or relaxed. Published by Arsis Press.
Quartet Ablaze (2012)
Clarinet, Violin, Cello, Piano 8' 00" Quartet Ablaze has two structural features in common with my experience of Facebook, the social networking site: the sense that a posting is rarely static, because over time it becomes embellished by comments of increasingly greater separation from the original; and the notion that seemingly unrelated steps on a Facebook “path” are, in fact, related by the intervening series of clicks, however tangential and numerous, that connect them. In Quartet Ablaze, there is a significant number of musical themes or characters linked into larger musical units. These themes return multiple times, but always in a new guise—a new order of connection (thus reconfiguring the unit of which they are a part), more embellished, re-orchestrated, and so forth. Although Quartet Ablaze is like Facebook in interesting ways, it is not, in fact, inspired by it--they have analogous features. But the title was inspired by a friend’s Facebook status: imagine your first name followed by Ablaze, as in Zae Ablaze, or Astrid Ablaze. It suggests that you are inspired, on fire, motivated, on the move. Insert Quartet in that space, for obvious reasons, and you have the title. The metaphorical fire/energy/direction builds, roars, dies down, smolders, crackles again.