Awake, Under A Glass Moon (2004)

Dark Matter

For an hour there is more on earth by one thing.  More by a wreath.  A while ago it was light foliage…I wound it:  
and now this ivy is strangely heavy and as full of dark as though it drank out of my things future nights.I almost shudder now at this next night, alone with this wreath that I made not guessing that something comes about when the tendrils entwine themselves around the hoop wholly needing to understand but this: that something can be no more.  
As though astray in never entered thoughts, in which stand wondrous things I must already once have seen…


Requiem I. For an Hour...

I'll Cast A Shadow In Memoriam "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott

Sarah Bowlin, violin
Jenny Waleczek, piano

Miniatures for Violin and Piano III. Frustration

Sarah Bowlin, violin
Jenny Waleczek, Piano

Miniatures for Violin and Piano II. A Frozen Lake

Miniatures for Violin and Piano I. The Water Torture

Paul Rowe, baritone
Marc Vallon, bassoon
David Alcorn, percussion

Text by Ned Balbo

Warbook I.Holy Wars For Us-text Ned Balbo

My setting of  Ned Balbo's "A Star", found in his amazing book "Lives of the Sleepers".

Yi-Lan Niu, soprano
Chris Cramer, guitar

http://www.amazon.com/Lives-Sleepers-Ernest-Sandeen-Poetry/dp/0268021856/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1347398868&sr=8-1&keywords=lives+of+the+sleepers+balbo

A Star

Movement V from Requiem on a text of Rilke for soprano, flute, clarinet, piano, percussion, and strings.

You know how the almonds bloom, and that lakes are blue.  
Many things felt by the woman who has known first love, 
Nature whispered to you in the South’s late-fading days beauty so endless 
as else only the happy lips of happy people say, 
who, two by two, have one world and one voice,- more gently you sensed all that,-
(o how the unendingly grim touched your unending humility).
Your letters came from the South, warm still with sun, but orphaned,- 
at last you yourself followed after your weary urgent letters;  for you did not like being in the light,
every color lay on you like guilt, and you lived in impatience, for you knew:  This is not the whole.
Living is only a part…what of?  Living is only a tone…what in?
Living has sense only joined with many circles of far-increasing space,-
Living is thus but the dream of a dream, but awakeness is elsewhere.  So you let it go.
Greatly you let it go. And we knew you as small.
So little was yours: a smile, a little one,
always a little melancholy already, very soft
hair and a little room that was wide for you since your sister’s death.
As though everything else were but your dress, so it seems
to me now, you quiet playmate.
But very much you were.  And we knew it sometimes,
when in the evening you came into the room:
knew sometimes: now one should pray;
a crowd has entered, a crowd that follows you
because you know the way.  And you had to know it and did know it
yesterday…youngest of the sisters.

Yi-Lan Niu, soprano
Brian Hughes, director
UW-Madison Chamber Players

Requiem V-You know how the almonds bloom

Mirage (2007) for soprano, flute, guitar, piano, and percussion. Text by Christina Rossetti.

Yi-Lan Niu, soprano 
Chris Cramer, guitar 
Elaine Moss, piano

Michael Rosewall, director

The hope I dreamed of was a dream, 
Was but a dream; and now I wake 
Exceeding comfortless, and worn, and old, 
For a dream's sake. 

I hang my harp upon a tree, 
A weeping willow in a lake; 
I hang my silenced harp there, wrung and snapt 
For a dream's sake. 

Lie still, lie still, my breaking heart; 
My silent heart, lie still and break: 
Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed 
For a dream's sake.

Mirage

In the summer of 2018, I traveled to Gates of the Arctic National Park as part of the Composing in the Wilderness Arctic Adventure. Along with six other composers and our two guides, we canoed 100 miles down the North and Middle Forks of the Koyukuk River. This piece is my response to the trip, which highlighted the pluralism of Alaska-intense, dramatic, and stunningly beautiful. The title is a reference to a quote by Robert Marshall in which he describes the joy and exhilaration of the isolation found when traveling to the most remote and unexplored corners of the world.

Beyond The Ends Of The Earth

I. MONDNACHT
II. Mein scheuer Mondschatten
III. Menschen bei Nacht

Rilke Songs

III. Frustration

II. A Frozen Lake

I. The Water Torture

from Requiem on a text of Rilke, 2006 for soprano and chamber orchestra.

VII
Like rows of nuns, who guide themselves by a black rope,
for it is dark in you, you well.  In the empty corridors
of you blood they push towards your heart; where else your gentle
sorrows met with pale joys and memories, they wander as in prayer
in the heart that,
wholly stilled, dark, to all stands open.
But this wreath is heavy, only in the light, only among living ones,
here with me; and its weight will be no more
when I lay it down by you.  The earth is
full of counterbalance, your earth.  This wreath is heavy with my eyes 
that hang upon it, heavy with the walking I have done for it.
Fears of all who saw it cling to it.  Take it to you, for it is yours
since it is all finished.  Take it from me.
Leave me alone!  It is like a guest… I am almost ashamed of it.
Are you afraid too, Gretel?



Requiem VII. Like rows of nuns...

New York composer Alex Nohai-Seaman’s music has recently been performed by soprano Tony Arnold and soundSCAPE, guitarist Daniel Lippel, The Great Noise Ensemble, the New York and Chicago Miniaturist Ensembles, at the 2012 New Voices Festival, New Music Hartford, the Ball State University New Music Festival, the La Crosse New Music Festival, and in Israel, Italy, Canada, New Zealand, and Taiwan. 

His works are regularly performed by professional and college ensembles, as well as at national and regional conferences of the Society of Composers, the College Music Society and the Long Island Composers’ Alliance. He has received commissions, including those from Voices Up at Fordham University, bassoonist Marc Vallon, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, guitarist Christopher Cramer, and Turning Old Pages, Singing New Notes-a multimedia collaboration at St. Norbert College.  

Alex was a resident fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 2008, 2010, and 2011 and was selected for the 2012 New Voices project at Caltholic University of America. The premiere of his dissertation composition, Requiem on a text of Rilke for soprano and chamber orchestra (2006), served as a fundraiser to build an AIDS clinic in sub-Saharan Africa. Upcoming commissions include a song cycle for soprano Yi-Lan Niu, as well as a works for soprano and guitar, guitar and piano. 

Alex studied composition with Laura Schwendinger, Stephen Dembski, David Brackett, Joel Naumann, and Fred Thayer. Alex is currently an Assistant Professor of Music at Suffolk County Community College on Long Island, where he teaches composition, music theory, piano, and directs the contemporary music ensemble.

Alex Nohai-Seaman

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