I love the longing feel and want my students to study it while we read the Odyssey!  Beautiful

From our forthcoming album MONDEGREEN
Out March 24th 2014
Available from http://peelerrecords.bandcamp.com/

Quinta - Violin, Piano
Rebecca Waterworth - Cello
Caroline Weeks - Flute
Alice Eldridge - Cello

Spell

Written for the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival 2014 
at MASS MoCA, conducted by Brad Lubman and played by Bang on a Can Fellows

Ascension

Ken Thomson, clarinet
Emileigh Vandiver, cello
Stuart Fisher, electric guitar
Jeff Kolega, percussion
Jani Parsons, piano/synthesizer
Tristan Kasten-Krause, double bass

Cirrus (live, Bang On A Can Summer Festival @ Mass MoCA, 2014)

Knotted Silk

A demo in one take. 

voice - Charlotte Mundy
guitar - Jordan Dodson

composed by Charlotte Mundy.

These Fragile Snowflakes is a piece for SATB choir and piano. It is based on the poem "Poetry on Lake Simcoe" by Desi Di Nardo, and was commissioned and premiered by Jubilate Singers of Toronto ON in May 2014. It was the winner of the 2015 U of T Choral Composition Competition.

This recording is sung by the MacMillan Singers on December 6, 2015 in MacMillan Theatre, Toronto ON.

Lara Dodds-Eden, piano. Hilary Apfelstadt, conductor.

These Fragile Snowflakes (MacMillan Singers)

Tookah Sapper, soprano
Kelly Horsted, piano

Coloratura? Scat singing? This companion-piece to 'Penelope' is also an homage to Harold Arlen’s 'Stormy Weather' (lyrics by Ted Koehler), which begins: 

Don't know why there's no sun up in the sky
Stormy weather
Since my man and I ain't together,
Keeps rainin' all of the time

It’s a poignant, yearning love-song, one that Kalypso – the nymph/demi-god of Homer’s Odyssey – could well have sung. After the storm which shipwrecked him on his way home from Troy to Ithaca (and to his waiting wife, Penelope) Odysseus was swept off-course to Kalypso’s island, and she held him there (against his will, but not really) for seven years, with some combination of seduction, timely bad weather that prevented sailing, and general relaxation and good times. Eventually, the greater gods grew frustrated with her and sent him on his way home, to Penelope. I’d imagined Penelope’s experience – her long vigil on the headland, her fierce, tenacious loyalty – as a sort of torch song, a language I explore even further here. Kalypso’s plea-apostrophe is set in a warm, tender, jazz-rich, Chopin-esque language in which the beat is blurred through long, decorative vocal lines and strange Monteverdian speech-stammer word-breakdown – which hints at something stranger and more peculiar in her powers. There are many musical connections here with Penelope, particularly in both pieces’ middle sections, which reach for something more bare and visionary. Each woman calls out to Odysseus, tries to summon him back to her, and in this moment their music speaks in the same tongue. Kalypso (whose name shares its root with "apocalypse": to cover, conceal, hide, deceive) was also a demi-god of death, one who drew the veil between reality and the afterlife.

I don’t know why my skin seems thin, 
or why I’m tired all the time. 
I wish the rain could break this heat; 
there’s not a cloud left in the sky. 
I don’t know why I should repeat 
this sad old fallacy: somehow 
the weather thinks that we should be
together; night comes around, but 
it’s too hot for me to sleep, now 
so much of what we had, you took– 
took with you, when you went away. 
  
I know I sound– I know I look 
like I’ve got something on my mind; 
there’s really nothing left to say 
or raise in vain against the tides. 
It’s nothing– nevermind; it’s just 
a wish, that if it’s not too much, 
if it’s alright, some night I’d like 
to walk out in the rain, again, 
come home, to sleep, to drift, and dream 
off to a world elsewhere, with you, 
where it keeps raining all the time. 

		– Duncan McFarlane

Kalypso (for soprano and piano)

Euphrosine's aria from Star-Shaped Biscuit, a semi-improvised opera conceived by David Toop.

Euphrosine's Aria from Star-Shaped Biscuit, a semi-improvised opera conceived by David Toop.

Composed for and performed by Quartet New Generation - recorder collective 
Susanne Fröhlich, Andrea Guttmann, Heide Schwarz und Petra Wurz (recorders)

Airlines for recorders/four perfromers

Composer-in-residence @ the Canadian Opera Company (2022-)
Composer-in-residence @ Glyndebourne (2019-22)

Photo: Daniel Alexander Denino

Kalypso (for soprano and piano)

Cecilia Livingston

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