PROGRAM NOTE Birkat Haderekh—Hebrew for “Blessing for the Road”—begins its journey as a spacious, gently inflected solo clarinet melody, slowly unfolding as it gathers the other members of this clarinet quartet around itself, carving out a distinctive musical “space.” Looking at this piece in its totality, the opening phrase is, at some level, emblematic of…
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program note Concerto da Camera II is a work for six instruments which may be further grouped into three separate entities: clarinet, string quartet, and piano. In this combination, chosen by the work’s commissioning organizations (the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in conjunction with Mount Holyoke College), lies the work’s first challenge. While pairings…
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PROGRAM NOTE Being commissioned by the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival to create a new work for the major milestone of its 50th anniversary was both an honor and a special delight. My choice of the flute, viola, and harp combination for this composition was reached quickly and almost instinctively, motivated not only because I…
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PROGRAM NOTE Birds of Paradise for flute and piano (2013) intersperses music that is brilliant and energetic with the wondrous and songful. Its title notwithstanding, I did not set out to compose a “bird” piece — Messiaen’s music, which I admire immensely, would seem to render such an effort quite unnecessary. The title does allude,…
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PROGRAM NOTE In the spring of 1984, two happy moments in my life converged together to bring about the creation of Amichai Songs. First, I was commissioned by the Eastman School of Music to write a work for the great mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani (1933–1989). Ms. DeGaetani, as it turned out, had just formed an ensemble…
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Prelude to Contrapunctus X from the Art of the Fugue PROGRAM NOTES While composing BACH-SHARDS I found myself gravitating, intuitively and gradually, toward a dual goal. First, although the tension and dissonance inherent in certain moments of Bach’s own maze-like contrapuntal structures could quite easily and naturally lead one into a pungent contemporary terrain, I…
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ADONAI MALACH (Psalm 93) was commissioned by Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun in Milwaukee, as part of a 1985 conference of composers and cantors, where each composer was paired with a cantor and assigned a text from the Jewish liturgy. The challenge I set for myself was to make this short piece melodically appropriate for Cantor Abraham Lubin’s beautiful cantorial style while, at the same time, at least hinting at a harmonic language more inclusive than what is generally heard in a Shabbat Service setting.
A PRAYER is a short work written in honor of the seventy-fifth birthday of the late Paul Fromm, the great Chicago-based patron of 20th century music, as part of a “bouquet of compositions” especially composed for the occasion and presented in a concert commemorating the event on January 22, 1982, by the Contemporary Chamber Players of the University of Chicago, Ralph Shapey, music director.
The title STREAM encapsulates some of the essential characteristics of this 16-minute long composition for clarinet and string quartet: it suggests flow—whether gentle or forceful; it implies a journey, one that could take us onto unexpected terrains yet is always moving forward; embedded into this word is also the idea of “stream of consciousness,” and with it, free association and unexpected twists of fancy.
A due for violin and cello, a single-movement piece of approximately 12 minutes, is comprised of what may be seen as a series of interconnected ‘terms of engagement’ between its two protagonists. Starting from a state of separation and great distance, expressed by the two instruments playing entirely different music and placed in registral positions that are wide apart, the two gradually come together, in a manner that is more akin to a series of progressive waves than a straight narrative.