"As is the Inward Suspicious Mind" is taken from the last verse of Elizabeth I's French Psalter poem "No Crooked Leg, No Blearéd Eye", and was written for solo soprano, loop station, digital delay processing pedal, and various plugin effects. This poem was written when Elizabeth I (then Princess) was taken prisoner at the Tower of London by her half sister Queen Mary Tudor, in fear that the young Princess was supporting Protestant rebels in England. "As is the Inward Suspicious Mind" musically quotes "Dansereye (1551) - Den I Ronde 'Pour Quoy" (Tielman Susato), which was also used as source music in the 1998 motion picture film "Elizabeth".

"As is the Inward Suspicious Mind" was recorded in Notting Hill, London, with Soprano Emily Thorner on 28 December, 2021.

As is the Inward Suspicious Mind

Impenetrable is a work for solo harp and digital delay processing pedal, based on Mona Hatoum’s sculptural installation of the same title that I had the chance to explore at the Guggenheim Museum in November of 2013. After viewing this work I was initially drawn to its hypnotic charge from its geometrical grid like form, entailing a beautiful cube with hundreds of barbed wire rods dangling from a fishing wire. I was also taken back by its minimalistic approach, as I instantly thought a piece could be written based on this work, using the digital delay processing pedal to depict the blended shades between each wire. I then decided to use a harp, as the cliché association of this instrument would be an interesting irony for Impenetrable, giving that this cube is an ethereal space partitioned by wire, where spectators may view but never walk through, due to its delicate yet threatening psychological charge. This work also features an accompanied video installation, illustrating the architectural forms of Hatoum’s work that alludes to various images of conflict, violence, state authority, fences, and prisons, which are all designed to confine and repel. Impenetrable was completed in November of 2021, recorded by Bay Area harpist Jennifer Ellis, with myself creating a video installation.

Impenetrable

"You may say I’m a Dreamer" is written for solo trombone, delay pedal, and pre-recorded narration of the late John Lennon, featuring snippets of recorded interviews of the singer and musical quotations from iconic Beatles songs as source material. This piece focuses around Lennon's political engagements, peace activism, and fight for civil rights. 

The work includes musical quotations of 2 iconic Beatles songs: “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “I am the Walrus” (both written by John Lennon and credited to John Lennon and Paul McCartney), and the other 2 works featured are from Lennon’s solo years: “Give Peace a Chance” and “Imagine".  

The title of this piece comes from a verse of Lennon’s famous signature song (“Imagine”).  After my collaboration with Cole from a previous composition involving delay pedal, the trombonist requested I write a similar type of work using spoken narration for a grant he was eligible for.  As my 2021 Christmas holiday to England was approaching, we agreed to work with speeches from this British legend, and create a composition in a surrealist landscape, which eventually led to our live collaboration for a thematic concert.  More specifically, I had chosen these two Beatles songs since they have always inspired me during my early years when exploring the psychedelic era of the 1960s.  In addition, I have selected these 2 widely known solo works by John Lennon due to the political messages that were carried out from these songs. 

"You may say I’m a Dreamer" was commissioned by Madison based trombonist Cole Bartels, and was made possible for a grant that Cole was awarded by the UW Madison Division of the Arts. This work was premiered on 8 May, 2022 in Madison, WI, as part of Ensemble in Process Midwest debut concert “Ensemble in Process: Surrealist Dreamscapes.”

You may say I'm a Dreamer

Commissioned by Madison based trombonist Cole Bartels, Golconda is based on the painting by René Magritte, and was made possible by a grant awarded from the UW Madison Division of the Arts. Golcanda was premiered by the Beltline Bones Quartet on 8 May, 2022 in Madison, WI, as part of Ensemble in Process Midwest debut concert “Ensemble in Process: Surrealist Dreamscapes.”

Golconda

Harlem (A Dream Deferred), is based on the poem of Langston Hughes, and was commissioned by the Astoria Music Project. As it was requested to write a piece based on my own experience as a New Yorker, this work from Hughes immediately stuck out to me, since I was a Harlem resident from 2008-2010. Although I was living in London from 2011-2017, I still always had a nostalgia for the "old world" of New  York City, when life was more grittier, creative, vibrant, communal, and at times angry from a sense of yearning for freedom of spirit. The civil rights movement of African Americans has always resonated with me, as today I still witness the struggle and pains that this community fights for from which Hughes addresses in this work, in addition to what I experienced when living in this NYC neighborhood at the time.

As Harlem is famous for the renaissance jazz movement, I resorted back to my years of studying at the Berklee College of Music, where jazz permeated my musical life as a student. Although I am not a jazz composer in the academic sense, the language of this musical aesthetic, combined with the creative spirit in Harlem from the 1920s and 30s, has always made me feel at home, since I have roots in this magical city. By an interesting twist of fate, I finished the majority of this work in West London around the Christmas holidays, in an apartment (flat) building where Ghandi was a law student in Britain before taking on his iconic role as a fighter for civil rights, not only in India, but across the globe.

Harlem (A Dream Deferred) was premiered at the Art House Astoria by the Astoria Music Project on 9 February, 2019.

This particular performance is from members of Fresh Squeezed Opera's "Antidote to Failure" Showcase event from The Cell Theatre, NYC on 3 December, 2021.

Victoria Davis, voice
Candace Chien, piano
John Gattis, horn
Victoria Lewis, violin

Harlem (A Dream Deferred) FSO

What you Seek: A Song Cycle based on 3 Rumi Texts was written in partnership with Rose Hegele and Keri Lee Pierson, two soprano vocalists who I have collaborated on previous projects. The song cycle is based on 3 texts from Jalāl al-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, a Sufi mystic and a famous poet from the 13th century who was considered to have an enormous influence on readers and religious scholars throughout history: What you Seek is Seeking You, One Song and Why Cling. Rose, Keri Lee and I had discussed this project for two years, as I was instantly drawn to this short quote of the first movement, due to its simplicity yet deeply profound spiritual message.

We decided to build upon What you Seek with two other poems that would complete a balanced song cycle with concepts pertaining to openness, exploration, meditation, discovery, conflict, and resolution. What you Seek: A Song Cycle is written for two soprano vocalists, singing bowls, delay pedal and multi-effects processing, and was premiered at the 44th Annual Bowling Green New Music Festival on October 21, 2023, performed by Keri Lee Pierson and Carolyn Ashley Anderson.

What you Seek was professionally recorded by Rose Hegele and Keri Lee Pierson in late November/early December of 2023, and was released to the general public on December 25, 2023.

Movement I: What you Seek is Seeking You

What you Seek is Seeking You

Movement II: One Song

Every war and every conflict
between human beings has happened
because of some disagreement about names.

It is such an unnecessary foolishness,
because just beyond the arguing
there is a long table of companionship
set and waiting for us to sit down.

What is praised is one, so the praise is one
too, many jugs being poured into a huge basin.
All religions, all this singing, one song.

The differences are just illusion and vanity.
Sunlight looks a little different
on this wall than it does on that wall
and a lot different on this other one,
but it is still the same light.

We have borrowed these clothes,
these time-and-space personalities,
from a light, and when we praise,
we are pouring them back in.

Translated by Coleman Barks in his book, ‘The Illuminated Prayer’.

Movement III: Why Cling

Why cling to one life
till it is soiled and ragged?

The sun dies and dies
squandering a hundred lives
every instant.

God has decreed life for you
and He will give another
and another and another

Translated by Coleman Barks in his book, ‘The Illuminated Prayer’.

What You Seek: A Song Cycle Based On 3 Rumi Texts

"And now wonder, ye angels, the Infinite has become an infant; he, upon whose shoulders the universe doth hang, hangs at his mother's breast; He who created all things, and bears up the pillars of creation, hath now become so weak, that He must be carried by a woman!"
   -Charles Spurgeon, from the 1857 Sermon “The Condescension of Christ”

Pillars of Creation was commissioned by Oklahoma based percussionist Hunter Gross, as part of a percussion consortium project that Mr. Gross assembled himself.  Hunter and I first met at the 2020 Sō Percussion Summer (Online) Institute, as we have collaborated on future projects since then.  Pillars of Creation was created as a request from Hunter for a large-scale type of work in the percussion medium.  Entranced by the iconic James Webb Space and Hubble Space Telescope images of the elephant trunks of interstellar gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula, Pillars of Creation is a 14.5 minute work for either percussion quartet with delay pedal, electronic sound design, or solo percussion with delay pedal and backing track.  This creation depicts the three main “pillars” with almost identical sections of exuberance, energy, and fast motion, surrounded by slow movement textures of spatial atmospheres, the formatting of stars and dwindling supernovas, cloud formations, and all cosmic sound particles that could symbolically exist in our universe.   Furthermore, the opening and closing delay infused sections with a mystical presence represents the vestige of the space’s past, given that the actual pillars no longer exist today, due to the pillars that once existed is 7,000 light years away from earth.

Pillars of Creation

We Interrupt this Broadcast 1936-69’ was commissioned by the “i equals u” Festival, and premiered at Guests Projects Residency on 13 September, 2013. It calls for flute, clarinet in Bb, piano, violin, electronic sound design, and pre-recorded narration, with a duration of 11’30. The requested commission was an improvised type of work set to narration. From the announcement of King Edward VIII’s abdication speech to the Woodstock news footages, I decided to combine various historical US and UK broadcasts, along with other documented recordings from Argentina, India, and Germany. Each section weaves into another as vintage artifacts from earlier generations, somewhat representing the recorded verbatim text art that looms through hollow walls of contemporary museum exhibits. Combined with word painting and music quotation techniques, the ensemble and sound design creates atmospheric “Ivesian” textures of haunted iconic voices, which has shaped societies perception of the world, all based on the various news broadcasts from its time. This work will eventually be compiled with a second movement: We Interrupt this Broadcast 1970-2013. This commission is also dedicated to composer, colleague, and friend Alex Temple.

We Interrupt this Broadcast: 1936-69′ was very highly commended for the 2016 Alan Bush Prize.

Piano: Brian Mark
Flute/Alto Flute: Helen Vidovich
Violin: Fra Rustumji
Clarinet/Bass Clarinet: Jon Russell
Conductor: Noam Faingold

We Interrupt this Broadcast: 1936-69'

Instrumentation: flute, oboe/english horn, clarinet, alto saxophone, bassoon, horn in F, trumpet, trombone, 2 percussion, piano, 2 violins, viola, violoncello, contrabass

Construction STILL in Process… is somewhat of a sequel to my piece for Small Chamber Ensemble “Construction in Process…” which had its premiere at the Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn from 2011, before having a performance at the 2011 June in Buffalo Festival. Ken Thompson, who conducted this premiere, also performed in the Buffalo performance of this predecessor, so I felt a composition in its earlier style would be appropriate. I incorporate similar cells, motives, and textures from the 2011 piece, including forms with overlapping textures and sections. From my 2011 programme notes, I was very intrigued by the “process in itself concept” as it pertains to the act of composing: the “process” of constructing a piece of music is an art in and of itself, rather than the finished product per se. Construction STILL in Process… continues in this tradition, as blocks of parallel fifth motives climbs and builds as a thematic foreground throughout the whole work, but never arrives at a final ending point. As this energetic fast piece is also an embracement to my New York roots, I include the tongue and cheek musical cliché insert “Take the T Train”, which is symbolic to the Second Avenue Local Subway infrastructure that has been in the process of construction for almost a century, though the final result of MTA service STILL remains in limbo. Construction STILL in Process…was premiered at MASS MoCA for the 2016 Bang on a Can Festival on July 25, 2016.

Construction STILL in Process...

Instrumentation: Orchestra 3-3-3-3, 4-3-3-1, timpani, 3 percussion, harp, piano, and strings

Commissioned by the Chelsea Symphony
Ankush Kumar Bahl, Conductor

I began working on The Persistence of Time in August of 2005.  Originally I had intended to write a programmatic piece for orchestra, based on Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory.  However, half way through the composition, I felt stuck and was not sure where the piece was going.  A day later, I was thinking about a live performance I then attended of the fifth movement from Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the end of time (“In praise of the eternity of Jesus”), and discovered that the two works have often been linked together. For instance, Dali’s Persistence represents the illusion of time, while Messiaen’s Quartet refers to The Revelation of St. John, chapter 10, dedicated to the angel “who lifts his hand towards the heaven saying, ‘There shall be no more time.’”  I decided that the piece would pay an hommage to the composer himself.

The Persistence of Time is in A B A form.  The piece begins with a simple foreground melody in the flute(s), which is the main theme of the piece.  This motive represents the “melting watches” in Dali’s painting, as the melody ascends before arriving at a static conclusion.  In addition, it is also juxtaposed with descending chromatic clusters in the strings, also representing the melting watches.  The theme is further restated in a lyrical augmented form by the violins, before coming to a full textural climax.  The section then introduces an energetic orchestral fanfare before closing with echoes of the theme.

The B section begins with a haunting chordal progression from the fifth movement of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time (“In praise of the eternity of Jesus”) and the descending clusters heard earlier in the piece.  This section depicts the dream-like state associated with the notion of time found in Dali’s painting.  These two ideas form a dialogue between different groups of the orchestra, supported by a variation of the main theme in the English horn and clarinet.  A new theme is introduced in two solo violins.  The texture then slowly builds into a pulsating, ostinato climax before coming to a complete halt.

The opening melody returns, once again played by a solo flute.  The texture changes into a set of variations and colorful ornaments of the main theme before the piano enters as an imitative ostinato taken from the eighth and final movement of Quartet for the End of Time (“In praise of the immortality of Jesus”).  As this hommage to Messiaen is carried out by the piano, the chordal progression from the quartet’s fifth movement serves as a pedal point for a canonic texture (the lyrical material from the exposition) in the violins.  Echoes of the first theme are heard from the clarinets combined with two solo violins playing a repeated variation of the second theme.  The piece closes with a gradual decrescendo of an E major chord in the lower strings against the piano ostinato E (add 6) chord, which is associated with the ending of Messiaen’s eighth movement.  Quoting Messiaen’s conclusion, The Persistence of Time fades off into an eternal distance as we are reminded that an ethereal concept of time is far above any mortal’s interpretation.

–The Persistence of Time received honorable mention from the 2015 American Prize in Orchestral Composition.

Brian's Compositions

The Persistence of Time

Sliding Doors

Limberlost

Still Debussy

the Facts they deserve to know (electr only)

Narration: Virginia Woolf, from BBC radio broadcast (“Craftmanship”), 29 April 1937

Duration: 9:50

Instrumentation: chamber orchestra (1-1-1-1, horn, harp,
piano, 2-2-2-2-1), tape, and electronics

Written for Royal Academy of Music Performers
Michael Alexander Young, Conductor

A Eulogy to Words is a multi-media composition for chamber orchestra, pre-recorded electronics, and tape, featuring the audio document of Virginia Woolf’s BBC Broadcast from 29 April 1937 (“Craftmanship” from a part of series called “Words Fail Me”). The Society of Authors in London, who hold rights and ownership of this document, had granted permission for me to use this recording in my composition. A Eulogy to Words was premiered at the Royal Academy of Music’s Composers Platform concert on 21 November, 2012. Below is the transcript from the surviving audio file:

…Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today – that they are stored with other meanings, with other memories, and they have contracted so many famous marriages in the past. The splendid word “incarnadine,” for example – who can use that without remembering “multitudinous seas”? In the old days, of course, when English was a new language, writers could invent new words and use them. Nowadays it is easy enough to invent new words – they spring to the lips whenever we see a new sight or feel a new sensation – but we cannot use them because the English language is old.

You cannot use a brand new word in an old language because of the very obvious yet always mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate entity, but part of other words. Indeed it is not a word until it is part of a sentence. Words belong to each other, although, of course, only a great poet knows that the word “incarnadine” belongs to “multitudinous seas.” To combine new words with old words is fatal to the constitution of the sentence. In order to use new words properly you would have to invent a whole new language; and that, though no doubt we shall come to it, is not at the moment our business. Our business is to see what we can do with the old English language as it is. How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth? That is the question.

And the person who could answer that question would deserve whatever crown of glory the world has to offer. Think what it would mean if you could teach, or if you could learn the art of writing. Why, every book, every newspaper you’d pick up, would tell the truth, or create beauty. But there is, it would appear, some obstacle in the way, some hindrance to the teaching of words. For though at this moment at least a hundred professors are lecturing on the literature of the past, at least a thousand critics are reviewing the literature of the present, and hundreds upon hundreds of young men and women are passing examinations in English literature with the utmost credit, still – do we write better, do we read better than we read and wrote four hundred years ago when we were un-‐lectured, un-‐criticized, untaught? Is our modern Georgian literature a patch on the Elizabethan? Well, where then are we to lay the blame? Not on our professors; not on our reviewers; not on our writers; but on words. It is words that are to blame. They are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most un-‐teachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind.

If you want proof of this, consider how often in moments of emotion when we most need words we find none. Yet there is the dictionary; there at our disposal are some half-‐a-‐million words all in alphabetical order. But can we use them? No, because words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind. Look once more at the dictionary. There beyond a doubt lie plays more splendid than Antony and Cleopatra; poems lovelier than the Ode to a Nightingale; novels beside which Pride
and Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude bunglings of amateurs. It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order. But we cannot do it because they do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, ranging hither and thither, falling in love, and mating together. It is true that they are much less bound by ceremony and convention than we are. Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry French words, German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy. Indeed, the less we enquire into the past of our dear Mother English the better it will be for that lady’s reputation. For she has gone a-‐roving, a-‐roving fair maid.

Thus to lay down any laws for such irreclaimable vagabonds is worse than useless. A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling is all the constraint we can put on them. All we can say about them, as we peer at them over the edge of that deep, dark and only fitfully illuminated cavern in which they live – the mind – all we can say about them is that they seem to like people to think before they use them, and to feel before they use them, but to think and feel not about them, but about something different. They are highly sensitive, easily made self-‐conscious. They do not like to have their purity or their impurity discussed. If you start a Society for Pure English, they will show their resentment by starting another for impure English – hence the unnatural violence of much modern speech; it is a protest against the puritans.

They are highly democratic, too; they believe that one word is as good as another; uneducated words are as good as educated words, uncultivated words as good as cultivated words, there are no ranks or titles in their society. Nor do they like being lifted out on the point of a pen and examined separately. They hang together, in sentences, paragraphs, sometimes for whole pages at a time. They hate being useful; they hate making money; they hate being lectured about in public. In short, they hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change.

Perhaps that is their most striking peculiarity – their need of change. It is because the truth they try to catch is many-‐sided, and they convey it by being many-‐sided, flashing first this way, then that. Thus they mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this complexity, this power to mean different things to different people, that they survive.   Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning, the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination…

A Eulogy to Words

New York City based composer, pianist and video artist Brian Mark has been hailed as an "attractive and intelligible" artist (Boston Musical Intelligencer), whose work is "compelling" (London Jazz News), and "preserves the vibrancy and relevance of contemporary art music" (New York Examiner). The American Composers Forum esteemed Brian as an "intelligent, modern composer who employs many media elements and does so with marked idiosyncrasy and depth”, and his concert programming has recently been described as “a fluid approach to presenting new music in fresh contexts and juxtapositions” (The New Yorker).

Brian’s music have been performed by many notable ensembles, such as the BBC Singers, Psappha Ensemble, Chelsea Symphony, Ensemble Signal, Atlas Ensemble, MikroEnsemble, Brave New Works, Choral Chameleon, both the Ligeti and Esterhazy String Quartets, Juventas Ensemble, Dither Quartet, members of the London Symphony Orchestra, among many others. His works have been presented around the world in festivals such as Bang on a Can, MATA, Oregon Bach Festival, London Contemporary Music Festival, Atlas Festival, Spitalfields Music Festival, i=u, June in Buffalo, Tutti Festival, the Bowdoin International Music Festival, and the highSCORE Festival.

Brian has recently been awarded a grant from the Brooklyn Arts Council.  He has also received multiple awards and grants from the Jerome Composers Commissioning Program/Jerome Fund, New Music USA, the Grammy Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, ASCAP and SCI, New London Singers, Ross McKee Foundation, Florence Gould Michael Iovenko Memorial Fellowship, the BMI Henry Warren Film Scoring Award, and was very highly commended for the 2016 Alan Bush Prize.  He has been featured as a composer-in-residence with the Chelsea Symphony, the Bizarre Noir Theatre Company, and was awarded multiple artist residencies at the I-Park Artists’ Enclave, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and the Ucross Foundation.  He has received an Honorable Mention from the 2015 American Prize in Orchestral Composition, and recently was awarded one of the top ten prizes from Mozaik’s Philanthropy’s “Future Art Awards” Competition for works created in response to COVID-19.  In 2019 Brian also received a fellowship to study Korean Music at the National Gugak Centre in Seoul.   

As a composer for film, his music for the Independent Short Film Misunderstood, directed by Pablo Herrán de Viu, was exhibited at the 2009 Screen Loud Film Festival in New York City, and the 2010 Festival Internacional de Cine Pobre de Humberto Solás in Habana City, Cuba. His collaborative work Sublime Oasis, commissioned by the East London Dance Company, was showcased at the 2012 Spitalfields Hidden Gems Dance Festival.

From 2009-2011 Brian was the Co-Artistic Director and Founder for DETOUR, a composer collective and New Music Ensemble, which was featured as “one the top five new music events of 2011" from New York’s Classical WQXR. He has also collaborated with UK’s record label Nonclassical as a concert curator, featuring emerging composers and artists throughout London and abroad. In addition, he was appointed as an Associate Member for the London Symphony Orchestra’s Composer Soundhub Scheme from 2015-2017, which culminated of his first video installation performance comprising of members from the LSO.  His curated concert series Ensemble in Process made its debut at the Iklectik Creative Space in Southeast London on 15 May, 2017.

Brian had completed his PhD at the Royal Academy of Music, studying with Gary Carpenter.  He is also a graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Berklee College of Music, and Boston University.  He has received a graduate certificate in film scoring from the University of Southern California, and has also studied with Philip Cashian, Samuel Adler, David Conte, David Garner, James Russell Smith, and Howard Frazin.

Brian Mark

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