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The Light is Always Changing

The Light is Always Changing was initially inspired by the experience of looking at clouds moving against the snow-covered mountains during my first visit to Alaska in late April and May of 2025. I wrote the piece for Wild Shore New Music, and it was premiered and toured in Homer, Anchorage, and Fairbanks, Alaska as part of Wild Shore’s festival in the fall of 2025.

Two early chants are embedded in the piece: the first phrase of the 10th century Veni creator spiritus gives the harmonic structure, and the 9th century Christe qui lux es et dies supplies melodic material. My hope is that it is as mysterious to distinguish melody versus accompaniment in the music as it is to distinguish clouds versus snow in the right conditions.

The title comes from Nothing Personal, an essay written by James Baldwin in the midst of our country’s turmoil in 1964.

For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.

The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

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You can hear Wild Shore’s live performance of the piece by visiting 27 April in A Book of Days.

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

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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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We will sing one song

In 2020, as I was beginning to think about writing a piece for duduk, string quartet, and percussion, I happened to read The Human Comedy, by Armenian-American writer William Saroyan, one of those books I’ve had on my shelf forever, but hadn’t gotten around to reading until then. There is a beautiful small scene where a young boy, four years old, named Ulysses, waves at a passing train, and no-one waves back at him until finally at the end of the train there is a black man singing a song, My Old Kentucky Home. The man and the boy wave to one another, and the boy carries the memory of the singing man waving to him, he remembers it for the rest of his life.

Given that the man is singing about returning to a much-loved place that is also the scene of many violent and difficult events for him and for people like him, I imagine the author is intimating how for people like Saroyan and me, singing about going home to, say, Van, for example, is similarly fraught. It is undeniably a beloved and longed-for home on an ancestral level, but it is at the same time a very difficult home to actually embrace.

(My grandparents were born and raised in Van, a town in what is now eastern Turkey. My father never saw the place; as he was dying, he asked me to go there. I finally visited eastern Anatolia, and Van in particular, with my friends Burak Çevik and Dil?ad Alada?, in September 2024. The photograph above gives a sense of what Van looked like before 1915, when the old city was razed as part of the Armenian Genocide.)

The music of We Will Sing One Song starts with an exploration of the melody of those five words in the Stephen Foster original, and grows into a curious, deeply un-traditional dance, which releases into a percussion solo that resolves into an Armenian version of My Old Kentucky Home.

We Will Sing One Song was composed for Apollo Chamber Players’ 20×2020 project, generously underwritten by Pamela Auburn. Many thanks to the Apollo players, Matthew Dedrick in particular; and to Arsen Petrosyan (duduk), and Pejman Hadadi (percussion), for their generous and thoughtful ideas and advice as we built the piece together.

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You can hear the premiere recording of the piece by visiting 24 June in A Book of Days.

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And you can download the performing materials 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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As Syllable from Sound

As Syllable from Sound was commissioned by Donald Berman as one of a set of new pieces from four different composers, meant to serve as companions and expansions of Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata. After spending quite a bit of time thinking about how Ives manifested the thinking of Emerson, Hawthorne, Alcott, and Thoreau in his music, I felt that to embody Emily Dickinson in music, as Don had requested, I needed to make the simplest thing I could, sitting very near the edge of nothing, but somehow allowing everything to be inside it. Did I succeed at that? Only the listener can decide.

Quotations that are at the center of what I have made:

I play the old, odd tunes yet, which used to flit about your head after honest hours–and wake dear Sue, and madden me, with their grief and fun– (Emily Dickinson, Letter 184, late April 1856)

We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can use them yet with a terrible simplicity. It does not need that a poem be long. Every word was once a poem. (Emerson: The Poet, 1844)

Harmony [Charles Ives’ wife] had heard Edie [their daughter, age 4] playing out on the porch in Redding. [She] was picking up her doll and chanting, “Come right up, Dollie, come right up into heaven. I’m an angel — I’m the only angel here — come right in & see me. For God’s dead and I’m lonesome.” (Jan Swafford, Charles Ives: A Life with Music, p. 283)

The Brain — is wider than the Sky —
For — put them side by side —
The one the other will contain
With ease — and You — beside —
The Brain is deeper than the sea —
For — hold them — Blue to Blue —
The one the other will absorb —
As Sponges — Buckets — do —
The Brain is just the weight of God —
For — Heft them — Pound for Pound —
And they will differ — if they do —
As Syllable from Sound —

line 3: contain) include

Emily Dickinson J632

There is also a half-secret reference to Aaron Copland, something singers and pianists are likely to recognize.

Why — do they shut Me out of Heaven?
Did I sing — too loud?

As Syllable from Sound is dedicated to Donald Berman with great affection and respect.

You can listen to one of Don’s performances of As Syllable from Sound on 20 October (Charles Ives’ birthday) 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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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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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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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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Inundated By Night

Inundated By Night is a piece written in memory of the beautiful artist and human being Robert Black, a long-standing performing artist at the Moab Music Festival, who loved Moab very deeply. The piece is inspired by the description of a desert stream that flows only at night because it gives all its water to the trees that line its banks every day, a quotidian cycle that I read about in a wonderful book MMF artistic director Michael Barrett gave me, Craig Childs’ The Secret Knowledge of Water. The pre-recorded track is built from recordings I made in April 2024 at the four sites in Moab where Robert recorded his CD, Possessed. The canyon wren call is the sound of daytime, and it was recorded in Day Canyon. The water was flowing in Hunter Canyon when I visited, so I was able to record it there to represent the nighttime stream. My vocals were recorded in Dragonfly and in Pritchard Culverts, on opposite sides of the Colorado River as it flows through Moab.

I have also incorporated the harmonics Robert played in A Murmur in the Trees, which was my response to Robert’s idea in 2021 that I write a piece for 24 basses in a grove of trees. The piece begins with the live player shadowing Robert’s playing, but Robert is gone by the end of the piece. (You will be able to hear Robert’s  multichannel surround sound recording of that piece on Cantaloupe Records very soon.)

Inundated By Night was commissioned for the 32nd Annual Moab Music Festival and premiered on 7 September 2024 on a concert in memory of Robert Black.

“For love is what holds us upright in this life inundated by night until it no longer belongs to any possible horizon, any human word.”  Anne DuFourmantelle, In Praise of Risk

You can listen to the premiere recording of Inundated By Night on 22 June 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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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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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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Unearthly Booty

Unearthly Booty is a solo piano piece that I wrote as a gift for my dear friend and collaborator, Thomas Feng. It was inspired by a whole network of associations, which I’ll try to outline reasonably compactly for you here…

One summer, on a hike in the Vermont woods, Thomas and I came across a patch of ghostly white flowers, which we learned are called “ghost pipes.” They are plants, but they don’t have chlorophyll and can’t photosynthesize; instead, they feed parasitically on fungi. Scientists call these plants “mycorrhizal cheaters”.

It happens that ghost pipes were the favorite flower of Emily Dickinson, with whom I spent a great deal of time during the pandemic, finding her to be an excellent role model for life during lockdown. By chance, Emily’s brother’s mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd, sent Emily a drawing of ghost pipes, and Emily’s thank you note to her is a sly masterpiece.

Upon reading Emily’s letter, I knew I needed to make Unearthly Booty for Thomas. Having the title in hand, I began to look for the right flower from which to steal chlorophyll.

Thomas and I share a love for the music of Milton Babbitt. Thomas plays several of Milton’s quicksilver piano pieces really beautifully, even hungrily. I studied with Milton as a student at Princeton many years ago, and his omnivorous playfulness had a huge influence on my development.

Around the same time that I read Emily’s letter to her brother’s mistress, the violinist and composer Erik Carlson contacted me about a long-lost little piece Milton had written for my about-to-be husband and me, which inspired me to find it in my files. (You can hear Chris Gross’ recording of Eppesithalamium here.)

I decided to make use of Milton’s small cello piece as inspiration for Unearthly Booty. I spent some time relearning 12-tone technique as it was practiced in central New Jersey in the late 1970s in order to reverse-engineer (decompose? metabolize?) Milton’s piece and re-form it as a set of fantasy variations in the form of a diptych that ranges ever further from the source.

Making this piece was deeply enjoyable. I am so grateful to Thomas, to Emily and Mabel, to Milton, to Erik and Chris, and also to my long-ex-husband Frank Brickle, without whom Eppesithalamium and also Unearthly Booty would not exist.

The two movements of Unearthly Booty appear in my ongoing project A Book of Days on 10 May (Milton Babbitt’s birthday) and 28 November.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Point.B

Point.B is short for pointillistic Beethoven. Written for the students at Greenwood Music Camp, on a program that included Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, it’s a sort of messed up data visualization that refracts the delightfully lumbering Furtwängler recording through a pointillistic Reichian lens.

Many thanks to the conductor Ben Rous for advice and wisdom while I was making the piece.

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Point.B is part of my ongoing project A Book of Days. You can listen to a recording of the premiere by visiting 8 August.

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I think the piece works best on a program that includes Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, but of course I’m open to you programming it any time you like!

Here’s a score of the piece: for a set of 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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Making Sense of It

Making Sense of It is a chamber piece in three movements for six instruments and pre-recorded sound. It was commissioned and premiered by the New York New Music Ensemble in 1987, and performed extensively by other groups for a few years, but is only now in 2024 available in a newly engraved edition.

The piece was inspired by James Merrill’s amazing book-length poem, The Changing Light at Sandover. When I originally read the book in the mid-80s, I felt it was sort of a 20th century answer to Dante, and absolutely loved it. Re-reading it recently is like re-visiting a lost world, one that had far-reaching impact on my life. It’s deeply queer, and simultaneously optimistic and desolate – a domestic love story used to express an immensely imaginative and ambitious cosmology. Simultaneously camp and utterly heartfelt, there’s a core of loneliness to the vision that all these years later kind of breaks my heart: the God of this universe is Biology, who is directly experienced only through Morse-code-like signals indicating that it does indeed survive, and is looking for confirmation that it is not alone.

Those signals are embedded in the pre-recorded track of last movement of the piece. This is what they say:

IVE BROTHERS HEAR ME BROTHERS SIGNAL ME

ALONE IN MY NIGHT BROTHERS DO YOU WELL

I AND MINE HOLD IT BACK BROTHERS I AND

MINE SURVIVE BROTHERS HEAR ME SIGNAL ME

DO YOU WELL I AND MINE HOLD IT BACK I

ALONE IN MY NIGHT BROTHERS I AND MINE

SURVIVE BROTHERS DO YOU WELL I ALONE

IN MY NIGHT I HOLD IT BACK I AND MINE

SURVIVE BROTHERS SIGNAL ME IN MY NIGHT

I AND MINE HOLD IT BACK AND WE SURVIVE

In addition to the transliterated God B quotation, I chose epigraphs for each movement of the piece. They were originally meant to stand in lieu of conventional program notes, which in the 80s used to be deeply insufferable.

Perhaps these epigraphs tell you something about the music: see what you think.

I. Every modification or tremor enters its own little sensory adequate to itself, and it enters the point adequate to it; thus since all the little sensories are various, all the various things enter. 

Wherefore now in every sensation there are infinite things which concord. 

Emmanuel Swedenborg

II. When they say that heat is merely the movement of certain globules and light the centrifugal force that we feel, we are amazed. What! Is pleasure nothing but a ballet of spirits? We had such a different conception of it, and these feelings seem so far removed from those with which we are comparing them. The feeling of fire, the warmth which affects us in quite a different way from touch, the reception of sound and light, all seem mysterious to us. And yet it is as straightforward as throwing a stone. It is true that the smallness of the spirits entering the pores touches other nerves, but they are still nerves.

Blaise Pascal

III. A- Yes, one could fit in in that way. It’s finally a matter, perhaps, of fit. Appropriateness. Fit in a stately or sometimes hectic dance with nonfit. What we have to worry about.

Q- It seems to me that we have a great deal to worry about. Does the radish worry about itself in this way? Yet the radish is a living thing. Until it’s cooked.

A- Grete is mad for radishes, can’t get enough. I like frozen Mexican dinners, Patio, I have them for breakfast, the freezer is stacked with them–

Q- Transcendence is possible.

A- Yes.

Q- Is it possible?

A- Not out of the question.

Q- Is it really possible?

A- Yes. Believe me.

Donald Barthelme

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The three movements of Making Sense of It are part of my ongoing project, A Book of Days, and recordings can be heard by visiting January 4th, April 2nd, and September 22nd.

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The instrumentation of Making Sense of It is flute/piccolo, Bb clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and percussion (1 player on vibraphone, xylophone, and mallet percussion controller) along with a pre-recorded track.

Here is the score.

There are three synth sounds needed to perform the piece, which were originally made for the Yamaha DX7. The patches have been ported to Dexed, a free open source multi-platform software synth you can download here.

The patches are the first three in this SysEx file.

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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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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only your dolls

only your dolls is a song for voice and piano, setting a poem by Anne Sexton called Sixth Psalm.

The piece is 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 June Jordan, Jane Bowles, and Lucille Clifton. 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.

The photograph is one of a series of images made by a family friend, Jo Ann Krivin. They have haunted me since childhood.

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For America is a lady rocking on a porch in an unpainted house on an unused road but Anne does not see it.

For America is a librarian in Wichita coughing dust and sharing sourballs with the postman.

For America is Dr. Abraham passing out penicillin and sugar pills to the town of Woolrich, Pennsylvania.

For America is an old man washing his feet in Albion, Michigan. Drying them carefully and then applying Dr. Scholl’s foot powder. But Anne does not see it. Anne is locked in.

For America is a reformed burglar turned locksmith who pulls up the shades of his shop at nine A.M. daily (except Sunday when he leaves his phone number on the shop door).

For America is a fat woman dusting a grand piano in English Creek, New Jersey.

For America is a suede glove manufacturer sitting in his large swivel chair feeling the goods and assessing his assets and debits.

For America is a bus driver in Embarrass, Minnesota, clocking the miles and watching the little cardboard suitcases file by.

For America is a land of Commies and Prohibitionists but Anne does not see it. Anne is locked in. The Trotskyites don’t see her. The Republicans have never tweaked her chin for she is not there. Anne hides inside folding and unfolding rose after rose. She has no one. She has Christopher. They sit in their room pinching the dolls’ noses, poking the doll’s eyes. One time they gave a doll a ride in a fuzzy slipper but that was too far, too far wasn’t it. Anne did not dare. She put the slipper with the doll inside it as in a car right into the closet and pushed the door shut.

For America is the headlight man at the Ford plant in Detroit, Michigan, he of the wires, he of the white globe, all day, all day, all year, all his year’s headlights, seventy a day, improved by automation but Anne does not.

For America is a miner in Ohio, slipping into the dark hole and bringing forth cat’s eyes each night.

For America is only this room… there is no useful activity.

For America only your dolls are cheerful.

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only your dolls is part of my ongoing project A Book of Days. You can hear Devony Smith and Danny Zelibor’s beautiful recording of the piece by visiting 4 October.

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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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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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a murmur in the trees

A Murmur in the Trees is a half hour piece by Eve Beglarian, made in response to Robert Black’s idea to set a piece for twenty-four double basses playing in a grove of trees. The music was created by treating a piece of birch bark as a musical score, where the lines on the birch bark are notes that are read at the rate of one-third inch per minute, said to be the speed at which plant signals travel. The y-axis has been mapped to notes in the overtone series, so the basses are playing open strings and up to seven harmonics above each string, creating a palette of 32 possible pitches. The title is inspired by a poem by Emily Dickinson.

In live performance, audience members are free to move among the players. The sounds of the basses merge with the music of the birds, wind, and trees. The basses are playing in honor of the trees from which they are made, as much as for the humans who experience the music.

For the recording, released on Cantaloupe Music in September 2026, Robert Black tracked each of the twenty-four parts three times. Eve recorded the sounds of early fall twilight on her land in Brandon, Vermont, and we created both a stereo and an immersive mix that emulates the richness of the experience of hearing the piece live. Robert’s recording is the last he made; he died in June of 2023.

Development of A Murmur in the Trees was sponsored by a 2020 grant from the MAP Fund for Eve and Robert to do a project with visual artist Aviva Rahmani and choreographer Yoshiko Chuma, a project that took a different form due to COVID-19.

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There is no score of the piece in standard notation. Performers listen to audio guide tracks that give them the information they need to play the piece. Parts range in difficulty so that even very beginning students and amateur community members can participate alongside professional musicians.

If you are interested in presenting A Murmur in the Trees in your community, please reach out to us here.

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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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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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