PROGRAM NOTE As a Jew, I come to the Mass from the perspective of “the Other.” Not musically, of course. With Western Music tradition as my musical foundation since early childhood, the great religious works by composers from the Renaissance and Baroque eras and onwards are at the very heart of what Music means to…
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PROGRAM NOTE The invitation to compose a short work for the Cornell University Glee Club presented some special delights, of which the deep, beautiful sound of an all-male choir ranging from tenor down to low bass was the most immediate and palpable. I selected Shakespeare’s immortal Sonnet 73 in no small part because I found…
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PROGRAM NOTE My four songs were composed in 2004 and 2006, two at a time, for the Bar Mitzvah celebrations of my two sons, David and Yaron Lotan, for Koleynu, the enthusiastic, amateur choir of Beth Shalom Congregation in De Kalb-Sycamore, where our family resided at the time. Koleynu is directed by Harvey Blau, a…
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PROGRAM NOTE The passage “the humble shall inherit the earth” is one of the bible’s most widely recognized and noble teachings, originating in Chapter 37 of the book of Psalms. Using the original Hebrew text, my approach to setting it was to excerpt four other phrases from the same chapter to lead up to this…
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PROGRAM NOTE Tzadik KaTamar for Cantor and Piano is a celebratory piece intended to be performed as part of synagogue services, as well as on other ceremonial occasions. Commissioned by Beth Emet—The Free Synagogue in Evanston, Illinois, to honor Rabbi Peter and Elaine Knobel in commemoration of the Rabbi’s 30 years of service to the…
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PROGRAM NOTE When Bruce Weinberger, tenor saxophonist with the Rascher Saxophone Quartet, first approached me in the spring of 2009 with an invitation to compose a work for the Rascher together with Paul Hillier’s Ars Nova Copenhagen, I was thrilled at the prospect of writing for a group of such stellar musicians — some of…
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PROGRAM NOTE AD SCIENDAM . . . was commissioned in celebration of the University of Chicago’s 500th convocation, with generous funding by Don Michael Randel and Carol Randel. With the intent of providing a grand statement in praise of the pursuit of knowledge, my texts were selected from the first chapter of the book of…
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PROGRAM NOTES SUPPLICATIONS was composed in response to a commission made in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel of a work for chorus and orchestra that would center around texts from the Book of Psalms. To me, one of the striking elements in the Psalms (Tehillim), in addition…
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