Duration: <5 minutes

Forest of Wires

Forest of Wires is a song for voice and two pianos, one tuned in conventional equal temperament, and the other in a modified version of La Monte Young’s Well-Tuned piano. It sets the first section of a poem by John Haines called “In the Forest Without Leaves.”

In the forest without leaves:

forest of wires and twisted steel…

The seasons are of rust

and renewal,

or there are no seasons at all,

only shadows that lengthen

and grow small —

sunlight on the edge of a blade.

Nothing that thrives, but metal

feeding on itself —

cables for roots,

thickets of knotted iron,

and hard knots of rivets

swelling in the rain.

Not the shadows of leaves,

but shadows where the leaves might be.

The piece was written in response to a newspaper story about a young dairy farming couple in Tunbridge, Vermont, whose cows started dying mysteriously in July 2021. It turned out the cows were being killed by ingesting hay that had been contaminated by a spool of stainless steel wire that had been discarded in a field, part of a rural broadband expansion project. The cows are dying one by one from ingesting the (non-magnetic) wire, the hayfield may never be usable again, and neither the broadband installer or the telecom who hired the installer has yet paid damages to the farmers.

Forest of Wires was written for Jeff Gavett, who along with many other gifts, knows about hardware disease and the magnets that sit in cows’ stomachs to protect them from stray bits of metal. We talked about these things in the summer of 2021, soon after I had read the newspaper story and also come across the John Haines’ poem. When Jeff was putting together a program for voice and two microtonally tuned pianos, it was clear I needed to make the piece for these forces. You can imagine the conflicting tunings as needles in the hay.

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You can hear Devony Smith’s awesome 2026 demo recording of the piece by visiting 18 July in A Book of Days.

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The piece can be played by one pianist on equal-tempered piano, with the La Monte Young-inspired tuned piano on a pre-recorded track, or by a second live pianist. The easiest way to implement the tuning is in Modartt’s software Pianoteq but of course there are other ways you can do it. You can download all the necessary performing materials for voice and one or two pianos by clicking below, with my thanks for supporting this informal way of publishing:

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Solitude

Solitude was inspired by a poem in the Chansons de Bilitis by Pierre Louÿs, a fin-de- siècle French poet who claimed to be translating ancient Greek lesbian poetry. (In fact, he made it all up himself.) Composer and lyricist Phil Kline and I collaborated on an evening-length song cycle based on these Chansons called The Story of B.  Everything is another song in the cycle, that one for voice and bass flute.

Solitude was originally written to be sung down an octave from where it is notated, and for most singers, male or female, that is likely to be the best place for it. Because the pre-recorded track can’t effectively be transposed, the hope is that you can make one or the other octave work well for your performance.

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You can hear a recording of the piece by Ruthie Stephens by visiting 10 November in A Book of Days.

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And you can download the performing score by clicking the paypal button below, with my thanks for supporting this informal way of publishing:

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Picnic

Picnic is a song for voice and piano, setting a 1967 poem by Adrienne Rich.

Sunday in Inwood Park

            the picnic eaten

the chicken bones scattered

                      for the fox we’ll never see

the children playing in the caves

My death is folded in my pocket

                        like a nylon raincoat

What kind of sunlight is it

                         that leaves the rocks so cold?

Rich wrote this poem towards the end of her marriage to Alfred Haskell Conrad, when she was raising three sons under the age of 12. She wrote about foxes, seen and unseen, many times over the succeeding years.

In An Atlas of the Difficult World, in 1991, she also said: “All picnics are eaten on the grave.”

Picnic is part of my song cycle finish what I haven’t started, about mid-century middle class female unhappiness. The other poets whose words are set in the cycle are Jane Bowles, Lucille Clifton, Anne Sexton, and June Jordan. Picnic is dedicated to Devony Smith and Danny Zelibor, who premiered the cycle under the auspices of the Brooklyn Art Song Society, with immense gratitude for their artistry and sensitivity.

You can listen to Devony and Danny’s premiere performance of Picnic on 19 February in my ongoing project A Book of Days.

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my dream about time

my dream about time is a song for voice and piano, setting Lucille Clifton’s poem by the same name.

a woman unlike myself is running

down the long hall of a lifeless house

with too many windows which open on

a world she has no language for,

running and running until she reaches

at last the one and only door

which she pulls open to find each wall

is faced with clocks and as she watches

all of the clocks strike

                                             NO

my dream about time was written as part of a song cycle called finish what I haven’t started, about mid-century middle class female unhappiness. Other songs in the cycle set poems by Anne Sexton, Jane Bowles, June Jordan, and Adrienne Rich. finish what I haven’t started was commissioned by the Brooklyn Art Song Society, and premiered by Devony Smith and Danny Zelibor in April 2022.

You can listen to Devony and Danny’s April 2025 performance of my dream about time on 20 December in my ongoing project A Book of Days.

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For performing materials, please click the donation link below, with my thanks for your support of this very low-key way of publishing:

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A question rather

A question rather is one section of I am writing to you from a far-off country, a piece for speaking cellist I wrote for Maya Beiser in 2005. All the music for the piece makes use of traditional Armenian music, both sacred and secular, as its inspiration.

This section is based on a traditional crucifixion chant Our es myer im | Where are you, my mother. I was introduced to the piece by Artsvik Demourchian’s beautiful recording made in the 1990s in Prince Papak’s tomb in Geghard Monastery.

You can listen to my original demo recording of A question rather on 7 July in my ongoing project A Book of Days. You can listen to Maya’s recording in all the usual places including here.

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While the piece was originally written for cello, it can be performed on a number of different solo strings, or even winds or solo voice, if you have someone else perform the optional text. Experimentation will be necessary to find the precise processing that will be right for your instrument. We can work this out together. For performing materials, please click the donation link below, with my thanks for your support of this very low-key way of publishing:

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aRound advent

I made aRound Advent for Rodney Lister’s students at New England Conservatory Preparatory Division. It is meant as a sort of companion piece to Maxwell Davies’ piece Long Hope. The original orchestration for aRound Advent  is flute, oboe, and piano. I’m imagining the oboe plays the line that begins in bar 1; the piano plays the bottom line, with or without the lower fifth, as desired. The flute takes the melody that begins in bar 9, and the piano can add the optional fifth below the flute line that begins at bar 17.

You are welcome to make your own arrangement (and transposition) for the forces you have available; I can also send an xml file for you to make whatever parts you might need.

aRound Advent is dedicated to Rodney Lister, with thanks for his many years of friendship and collegiality.

Since Advent is the beginning of the church year in Western Christianity, I chose the first half of Psalm 1 as the text that joins the piece on 8 December in my ongoing project A Book of Days.

Happy are those
who do not follow the advice of the wicked,
or take the path that sinners tread,
or sit in the seat of scoffers;
but their delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law they meditate day and night.

They are like trees
planted by streams of water,
which yield their fruit in its season,
and their leaves do not wither.
In all that they do, they prosper.

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wait till tonight

Wait Till Tonight is a song for solo voice, setting a poem by Bill Knott.

Sometimes a dream will show me
the words I need to begin and end and
then take them away and leave just one
word or, like last night, three or four:
“the arms of care.” That’s all. There
were lots more but they vanished when
my eyes opened; they were of course
the words I need here now to justify
this. How can I forgive myself for
forgetting them, forgetting that which
might have made me whole for a while
holding you all in my arms of care?

Wait Till Tonight was written in December 2023 at the MacDowell Colony as the closing number in a song cycle of the same name, setting poems of Bill Knott, The cycle was commissioned by the Copland House, with support from the New York State Council on the Arts and Frederick and Alexandra Peters, and premiered by Lucy Fitz-Gibbon, soprano, and Michael Boriskin, piano.

Wait Till Tonight is 22 December in my ongoing project A Book of Days, and you can hear my own recording of the piece there. Plunge, Peace,  Dream Amid Bed-woods, and First Sight are the other songs in the cycle.

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We call them clouds

We call them clouds sets a mysterious poem by Henri Michaux for a solo cellist who also recites the text. The piece can be played on its own, or as part of a larger piece for cello and pre-recorded sound called I am writing to you from a far-off country, which was commissioned and recorded by Maya Beiser in 2005.

We call them clouds is 24 November in my ongoing project A Book of Days, and you can hear Maya’s recording of the piece there.

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First Sight

First Sight is a song for voice and piano. It is the fourth song in a cycle called Wait Till Tonight, setting five poems of Bill Knott. The piece was written in December 2023 at the MacDowell Colony and is dedicated to Leanh Nguyen, who showed me how to open the door to summer in the midst of a New Hampshire winter.

Summer is entered through screendoors,
and therefore seems unclear
at first sight, when it is in fact
a mesh of fine wires
suspended panewise
whose haze has confused the eyes …

What if we never entered then—
what if the days remained like this,
a hesitation at the threshold of itself,
expectant, tense, tensile
as lines that crisscross each other
in a space forever latent
where we wait, pressed up against
something trying to retain its vagueness.

First Sight is 24 June in my ongoing project A Book of Days, and you can hear my own recording of the piece there. Plunge, Peace, Dream Amid Bed-woods, and Wait Till Tonight are the other songs in the cycle.

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Dream Amid Bed-woods

Dream Amid Bed-woods is a song for voice and piano. It is the third song in a cycle called Wait Till Tonight, setting five poems of Bill Knott.

You must pull down sheets from these linen trees,
Blankets too, a pillowcase in full leaf,
But can’t: to snooze amongst their fruits, beneath
The sheath of that composite canopy’s
Roost, you must raise yourself past hammock heights—
Up where its deepest roots feel doubly sapped,
That orchard dormitory might lie wrapped
And ripe with you, whose foliage still invites
>More lure of surface sleep. But must you trust
The ease in these boughs, the sway of whose loft
So often now wakes vows to never rest,
To somehow remain alow, to resist
All berth above: you must push off this soft
Palleted grove, this tall, forest mattress.

Dream Amid Bed-woods is 29 August in my ongoing project A Book of Days, and you can hear my own recording of the piece there. Plunge,  Peace,  and First Sight are also songs in the cycle; the title song will be available soon.

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Prelude (1979)

This Prelude from 1979 might be the first piece of music I’ve written that still exists. I came across the hand-copied page in the summer of 2023. I made a live recording in Chapman Studio at MacDowell in December, 44 years almost to the day from when I wrote the piece.

Do you maybe recognize in this little apprentice piece something of the person I am now?

I hope so.

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Prelude (1979) is part of my ongoing project A Book of Days. You can hear my original demo of the piece by visiting 11 December.

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For a performing score, please click one of the buttons below, with my thanks for your support of this very low-key way of publishing:

 

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Ay mi!

Ay mi! (Machaut in the Machine Age IV) is one of a number of pieces I’ve been making since the 1980s responding to the delightful secular music of the 14th century French composer Guillaume de Machaut.

This one was made for a 1960s era Magnus electric chord organ given to me by the composer Art Jarvinen. The instrument is about the size of a toy piano and has a two octave range. I made a piece for twisted tutu, my duo at the time with Kathleen Supové, where she played the chord organ’s keyboard while I played the percussion part on the plastic case of the organ. We attached contact mics to the instrument and doubled the pitch down a fifth, as well as applying a delay at the beginning and the end of the piece.

TO THE PERFORMERS

If you have access to a chord organ, that’s the ideal instrument for performing the piece. But of course, you can play the chord organ part on a synthesizer, which you should set up with an organ patch and a pitch shifter that gives you both the notated pitch and the fifth below (i.e. transpose by -7 semitones).

In addition, you want to set up a delay that captures both the percussion and the keyboard. Set the delay to repeat at the interval of one bar of 6/8 in whatever tempo you’re playing the piece. It will be 2000 ms if you’re playing the piece at the tempo I’ve specified. The feedback/regen should give you between seven and eight reps before it fades to zero. The score indicates where to turn on and off the delay; you’ll want to put it on a switch you can activate or bypass easily.

If you don’t have a chord organ, but you happen to have a harmonium, an accordion or another suitable instrument available, please feel free to perform it on your instrument, I’d love that!

And of course the percussion part can be done by clapping or patting your own body if tapping the keyboard player’s instrument isn’t the right thing. And if you have other ideas for the percussion part, I’m very flexible about it!

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Ay mi! (Machaut in the Machine Age IV) is part of my ongoing project A Book of Days. You can hear my synth version by visiting 17 July.

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For performing materials, please click one of the buttons below, with my thanks for your support of this very low-key way of publishing:

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Peggy in the Twilight

Peggy in the Twilight is one of a set of songs I’ve been making with James Moore, Andie Tanning, and Jim Fletcher, based on the poetry of James Tate. This one is for speaking violinist and guitar. We’re calling the project What are the Chances?, which is the last line James Tate wrote. I don’t think we know yet whether that’s the name of the band as well.

Here’s the text of Peggy in the Twilight.

Peggy spent half of each day trying to wake up, and the other half preparing for sleep. Around five, she would mix herself something preposterous and ’40s-ish like a Grasshopper or a Brass Monkey, adding a note of gaiety to her defeat. This shadowlife became her. She always had a glow on; that is, she carried an aura of innocence as well as death with her.

I first met her at a party almost thirty years ago. Even then it was too late for tragic women, tragic anything. Still, when she was curled up and fell asleep in the corner, I was overwhelmed with feelings of love. Petite black and gold angels sat on her slumped shoulders and sang lullabies to her.

I walked into another room and asked our host for a blanket for Peggy.

“Peggy?” he said. “There’s no one here by that name.” And so my lovelife began.

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Peggy in the Twilight is part of my ongoing project A Book of Days. You can hear a demo recording of the piece by visiting 25 October.

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For a performing materials, please click the buy button below.

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CALLING ON ALL SILENT MINORITIES

CALLING ON ALL SILENT MINORITIES is a song for voice and piano, setting a poem by June Jordan.

HEY

C’MON
COME OUT

WHEREVER YOU ARE

WE NEED TO HAVE THIS MEETING
AT THIS TREE

AIN’ EVEN BEEN
PLANTED
YET

CALLING ON ALL SILENT MINORITIES was written as the closing song in a cycle called finish what I haven’t started, about mid-century middle class female unhappiness. Other songs in the cycle set poems by Anne Sexton, Jane Bowles, and Lucille Clifton. finish what I haven’t started was commissioned by the Brooklyn Art Song Society with partial funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, and premiered by Devony Smith and Danny Zelibor in April 2022.

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CALLING ON ALL SILENT MINORITIES is part of my ongoing project A Book of Days, and you can hear my recording of the piece by visiting 7 March.

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For performing materials, please click one of the buttons below, with my thanks for your support of this very low-key way of publishing:

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Circumference

Circumference is a small piano etude written for my friend Ryan McMasters as I am beginning work on a larger piano piece about Emily Dickinson for Donald Berman. I was practicing the Major 7th exercises in Patterns for Jazz at the time. Each hand of this little etude is not difficult, but putting them together will keep you engaged for a while!

Emily Dickinson wrote to Thomas Higginson in 1862, “My Business is Circumference.”

Circumference is 26 July in my ongoing project A Book of Days, and you can hear a recording of the piece there.

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For a performing score of the piece, please click the donation link below, with my thanks for your support of this very low-key way of publishing:

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Plunge

Plunge is a song for voice and piano, setting a poem by Bill Knott. It is part of a cycle based on his poetry, commissioned by Frederick Peters and Music from the Copland House for Lucy Fitz Gibbon and Michael Boriskin. Other songs in the cycle include Peace (Pascal) and Dream Amid Bed-woods; more will be available soon!

at night one drop of rain
falls from each star
as if it were being lowered
on a string

and yet that storm of plummets
is never enough
to wet any of the planets
that pass through it

only the blackness the space
between us is washed
away by these singular
lettings-down of water

distance is washed away
all the worlds merge
for a liquid moment
our island eyes

and suddenly we understand
why umbrellas love
to dive
into clouds

Plunge was written in July 2022, when the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope were being shared. Written for AddieRose Brown and Claire Forstman, it is dedicated to them with great affection.

Plunge is 12 July in my ongoing project A Book of Days, and you can hear my original composer demo of the piece there.

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Peace (Pascal)

Peace (Pascal) is a song for voice and piano. It is the opening song in a cycle called Wait Till Tonight, setting five poems of Bill Knott.

There is a valley
Is the oldest story.

Its temperate qualities
Make us descend the trees
To settle down beside
Fruits and fields.

By its river content
To sit quietly in a small tent
To fashion fishing spears
From fallen limbs.

No need to climb its hills
No need to go up there
To look to see
Another valley.

Note:
“Most of our problems proceed from our inability to sit quietly in a small room.” –Pascal

The piece was written in slightly belated honor of Fred Peters on his 70th birthday, and is dedicated to him with vast affection. Despite Fred’s boundless energy and love of ALL the valleys, he is also quite able to sit quietly in a small room, which might be the best combination of personal qualities there is!

Peace (Pascal) was premiered on September 15, 2022 at The Century Club, New York City, by Music from Copland House (Lucy Fitz Gibbon, soprano and Michael Boriskin, pianist) at the celebration honoring Fred’s many years of service to NMUSA.

Peace (Pascal) is 28 December in my ongoing project A Book of Days, and you can hear my own recording of the piece there. Plunge, Dream Amid Bed-woods, and First Sight are also songs in the cycle; the others will be available soon.

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For performing materials, please click the donation link below, with my thanks for your support of this very low-key way of publishing:

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See Right Through Me (Albert’s Confession)

See Right Through Me is a song for a vocalist accompanying themself on cuatro. Originally written for The Vicksburg Project, an evening-length show about the experiences of women and gender-expansive people in Vicksburg, Mississippi, it is the imagined confession of Albert Cashier, an illiterate Irish orphan who enlisted in the Army soon after emigrating to the United States alone.

Albert served the Union for four years, then returned to Illinois to work as a handyman and gardener. Late in life, he was hit by a car and taken to the hospital, where the doctors determined that Albert must have been assigned female at birth. So they dressed him in women’s clothes, and put him in an insane asylum, where he died from a fall he sustained tripping over his unaccustomed skirts.

The song incorporates allusions to Walt Whitman’s early poems about the war, a quotation from a Sean nós song called “Táim curtha ó bheith im’aonair im’lui (I’m weary of lying alone)” and from a then popular poem about dead comrades called “Oft in the Stilly Night.”

See Right Through Me is 9 November in my ongoing project A Book of Days, and you can hear my own recording of the piece there.

TO THE PERFORMER

The song is written for a transgender, genderqueer and/or gender-expansive person who inhabits the masculine. You should transpose the piece so that the first section sits as low as possible in your tessitura, and the last section needs to feel vulnerably high. Easy for an untrained voice, harder for a professionally trained singer. The middle section should be sung without particular regard to the accompaniment: you keep playing the A section chords, but you sing the battle section in a marching 12/8. Please make sure you re-align with the accompaniment correctly before starting the final section “Everyone knows.”

If you can’t get hold of a cuatro, you can adapt the piece for ukulele or acoustic guitar.

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For a performing score (along with the optional warped recording of a hermit thrush you can trigger as a momentary underscore), please click one of the buttons below, with my thanks for your support of this very low-key way of publishing:

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Hard4the$

Hard4the$ is a piece for solo flute and pre-recorded track that explores the current gender and racial pay gap in the United States, a pay gap that became particularly glaring in COVID days, because so many black and/or female workers have been both essential and underpaid.

The piece is a set of four abstractions of the 1983 classic Donna Summer/Michael Omartian tune “She Works Hard for the Money” played simultaneously. Each layer has been given the name of a universally known public figure who represents the race and gender of that layer: Michelle Obama, John Lewis, Hillary Clinton, and Brett Kavanaugh.

Michelle’s variation is the only one that is the full length of the four minute piece: the others are shorter (and faster in tempo) in proportion to how much more quickly people of that gender and race are statistically likely to earn the same amount of money. Thus, Brett’s variation is only 2:28.

On the other hand, Brett’s multi-layer variation is played fortissimo on piccolo while Michelle’s is played pianissimo on alto flute, so Michelle is only actually heard when Brett and the others successively finish playing. (Hillary is mezzo forte, and John is mezzo piano.)

It is suggested that the player take on a different role each time he/she/they play the piece. Depending on the role the live player chooses to take, the piece will be a very different experience for both player and listeners.

Hard4the$ is 31 March in my ongoing project A Book of Days, because 31 March was Equal Pay Day 2020 in the United States; that is, how far into the year women had to work to earn what men earned in the previous year. In 2022, Equal Pay Day has moved up to March 15th, seemingly good news that is complicated by the fact that women of color actually lost pay compared to their white male counterparts.

Statistically, the Bretts of America are doing just fine, while the Michelles continue to clean up all our messes. Something is wrong with this picture.

Hard4the$ was commissioned by Hal Ide for Claudia Anderson’s solo show Glass Ceilings, and premiered online at the 2021 National Flute Association convention. Many thanks to Allison Loggins-Hull, Eric Lamb, Claudia Anderson, and Tim Munro, who recorded Michelle Obama, John Lewis, Hillary Clinton, and Brett Kavanaugh (respectively) for the pre-recorded track.

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TO THE PERFORMER

In any given performance, the player can choose which role to play. Brett is piccolo; Hillary is C flute; Michelle is alto flute; John is bass flute. The pre-recorded track will function as an enlarger of your live role, but the overall balances should stay the same. So, for example, Michelle — both live and pre-recorded — will be drowned out until the very end. That’s pretty much true of John as well. Hillary will obscure John and Michelle, but Brett completely takes up all the air in the room as long as he’s around.

I suggest you practice the role you’ve chosen to take on by playing your solo part with the pre-recorded track for JUST your character first: e.g. if you’re doing Hillary live, practice with only the pre-recorded Hillary tracks until you are satisfied with your pitch, timing, and blend.

You should aim to be equal to (NOT louder than) the pre-recorded tracks of your character: the reality is even if you are softer than the pre-recorded tracks, we will hear you better because we are watching you play.

In live performance, you may want to have an in-ear monitor mix of your live character’s pre-recorded tracks and click (set to the correct tempo for your live character’s part, of course.) The total mix then can be routed to the speakers in the hall, but you won’t have to listen to the entire blend, which is kind of overwhelming if you’re not playing Brett.

Depending on what space you are playing in, you may want to add reverb to your playing: you want to match the pre-recorded track of your character: Brett has the least and shortest reverb, and Michelle has the most and longest reverb. (If you haven’t yet decided which role to play and/or you don’t want to process your sound, you should choose the role that best matches the natural sound of your concert space.)

On any given concert, you are welcome to play the piece up to four times, taking on different roles each time.

I’m not sure any individual performance of the piece is actually satisfying, which is kind of the point.

There might be a better way forward?

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For performing materials, please click one of the buttons below, with my thanks for your support of this very low-key way of publishing:

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Be Like Water

Be Like Water is the ninth piece is a series called Machaut in the Machine Age that I’ve been working on since the 1980s responding to the music and poetry of 14th century composer/poet, Guillaume de Machaut. The piece was commissioned by duoJalal and was originally imagined for viola and hand percussion.

My piece is a response to section four of Le lai de la fonteinne, which having compared the beloved to Mary, and Mary somehow to the Trinity, is now talking about water, which being a fountain, a stream, and a source while remaining water is, like the trinity, three things in one. The descending three note motif in a three-part canon at the unison is text-painting of such simultaneous simplicity and cunning that I had to explore it in this trio between viola, percussion, and pre-recorded track, setting up the piece so that those three become one in yet another way:

There are 21 tracks (3 times 7), each of which can be assigned flexibly to either of the two live players (played acoustically or as triggered samples) or as pre-recorded tracks, so that without seeing a live performance, you can’t tell which of the three is doing what.

The piece can also easily be presented as a multiply overdubbed piece, which may be particularly appropriate during pandemic times, as was the case when Machaut wrote the Lai (during the Black Death), and when I wrote this piece (during COVID-19).

It’s all water. 

Be like water.

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The original version of the piece is for viola, hand percussion, and backing track, which can be a pre-recorded track, or an Ableton session.

You can visit February 16th in my ongoing project A Book of Days to hear a performance of the piece by Tristan Kasten-Krause and Caitlin Cawley on bass and percussion, which might give you some ideas about how you’d like to adapt it for yourselves.

For performing materials, please click one of the buttons below, with my thanks for your support of this very low-key way of publishing:

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All Good is Luck

All Good Is Luck is a piece inspired by something a guy named Kenny Quentin said to me out of the blue one night in December 2009 at the Blue Moon Saloon in Lafayette, Louisiana: “Not all luck is good, but all good is luck.”

I had just finished up a human-powered trip down the Mississippi River, and was very aware of my amazing luck in having done it without major mishaps. But even so, luck (good or bad) is one of those ideas I don’t really know what to do with. 

It was pure random luck that I happened to meet Kenny that night, but I’ve been mulling it over ever since. I’m grateful to Kenny for his gnomic statement, and I’ve come to translate it for myself as:  “Not everything that happens in the world is good, but everything we call “good” is something that happens in the world.”

A further bit of luck is that I was doing a stint teaching beginning electronic music at Middlebury College in January 2014, when a student named Ian Ackerman came up with a very cool lick that inspired this curious new piece for me. Thanks, Ian, for letting me steal your lick! And thanks, too, to Mary Rowell for working with me to develop the violin solo.

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The original version of the piece is for violin and electric guitar. The current revised version is a two-violin version I adapted for Miolina, which requires live processing on both instruments, but guitar-hero-style processing on only one 😉 . I’ve set up an Ableton session with stock plugins to get you started, but you will certainly want to adjust from there.

You can visit December 23rd in my ongoing project, A Book of Days to hear a pre-release version of the recording Miolina will be putting out on their next album.

For performing materials, please click one of the buttons below, with my thanks for your support of this very low-key way of publishing:

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Who Else

I received Crispin Best’s poem from Matthew Ogle’s Pome in the early days of lockdown. I made a piece from it in May 2020.

Who Else

i tell the same stories
again and again
because who else is going to
and what are the builders making

apart from a racket
the black mould in my room makes it feel
like the wall is learning something

i tell my computer i’m not a robot
when it asks
because who else is going to

i can’t believe you thanked me
for sleeping in your bed

if a tree falls in the forest
that’s fine

• Crispin Best (2019)

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You can hear my recording of Who Else by visiting 23 March in A Book of Days.

For performing materials, please click one of the buttons below, with my thanks for your support of this very low-key way of publishing:

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Fresh Air

Fresh Air is for saxophone quartet, the then-new TR-808, and the Sequential Circuits Pro-One. I made it before the MIDI spec was formalized, so the track had to be spliced together small chunk by small chunk, limited by the twenty-event memory of the Pro-One’s sequencer, which was triggered by CV coming from the 808.

I think this might be the earliest piece I’ve posted here, but I still have a warm space for it in my heart, and would be delighted for some current sax quartets to take it on.

A recording by Relâche is in A Book of Days alongside a pretty great poem by Kenneth Koch that beautifully captures how I was feeling when I made the piece. You can listen and read by visiting March 15th.

I have a copy of the pre-recorded track, and a hand copied score. If you want to play the piece, I’ll arrange to get parts copied for you if playing from score seems too wonky.

Please write to me if you’re up for it, and we’ll figure out how to proceed.

 

 

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Everything

Everything is a song for female voice and bass flute. It is part of a song cycle called The Story of B, the lyrics of which are adapted from the poetry of Pierre Louÿs, a fin-de-siècle French poet who claimed to be translating ancient Greek lesbian poetry, but in fact he made it all up himself.

The original French text that I used to make my adaptation goes like this:

Tout, et ma vie, et le monde, et les hommes, tout ce qui n’est pas elle n’est rien. Tout ce qui n’est pas elle, je te le donne, passant.

Sait-elle que de travaux j’accomplis pour être belle à ses yeux, par ma coiffure et par mes fards, par mes robes et mes parfums?

Aussi longtemps je tournerais la meule, je ferais plonger la rame ou je bêcherais la terre, s’il fallait à ce prix la retenir ici.

Mais faites qu’elle ne l’apprenne jamais, Déesses qui veillez sur nous! Le jour où elle saura que je l’aime elle cherchera une autre femme.

Here’s my version:

Everything: my life,
the world, the men,
everything that is not her
is nothing.

Does she know how hard I work
to be beautiful to her?

I would row to China,
I would build a pyramid,
I would plow the dark earth
with my bare hands.

Goddesses, don’t let her know.
The day she learns I love her
she will look for another.

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You can hear my recording of the piece with my longtime collaborator Margaret Lancaster on bass flute by visiting 10 October in A Book of Days. Another song from The Story of B is Solitude.

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You can download the performing score for Everything by clicking one of the buttons below, with my thanks for supporting this informal way of publishing:

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Ascension

Ascension was written for a production of Part II of Goethe’s Faust, called Faust 2.0 and premiered by Mabou Mines in New York in 2019. The lyricist Matthew Maguire generously agreed to focus on the lines from the Magnificat and the Beatitudes that talk about turning the world upside down — the idea being that those lines manifest the revelation embodied in what we call “feminine energy.”

I am not enough of a Goethe person to be able to say if we successfully mirrored Goethe’s vision, but I really like what Matthew came up with, and really loved writing the music for this lyric.

My broken one, my wayward Faust,
You were the proud one
No more, no more.
You were the mighty one
No more, no more.

I scatter the proud
And topple the mighty
from their thrones

The one who strives will always stray,
So you, the greatest striver,
Became the greatest sinner
Seduced by power’s dark embrace
You turned away from grace

Blessed are the humble,
for they shall inherit the earth.

Broken you finally feel
Blind you finally see
That’s the miracle of Love’s sacrifice
And that is why, my Beloved one
I’m calling you to Paradise

I scatter the proud
And topple the mighty

Blessed are the humble,
for they shall inherit…

The wonderful Andrea Jones Sojola, who played Mary in the Mabou Mines production, recorded a version of the piece that you can hear by visiting August 15th in A Book of Days.

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For performing materials, please click one of the buttons below, with my thanks for your support of this very low-key way of publishing:

 

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