Commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble/The Walden School Faculty Commissioning Project

Premiered by Ryan Muncy (saxophone) and Bridget Kibbey (harp) of the International Contemporary Ensemble
Louise Shonk Kelly Recital Hall, Dublin, NH, 13 July 2018

Steps, for soprano saxophone and harp (2018)

Stereo JrF contact mics with impedance adapters, taped to my bedroom window during a storm in New Orleans, recording into a TASCAM DR-100MKIII. 

Recorded 8 March 2024 in the evening.

Contact Mics: https://jezrileyfrench.co.uk/contact-microphones.php

contact mics on window during new orleans storm [stereo]

Over the last six years or so, I have re-embraced working with hardware modular synthesizers, especially those whose design reflects the work of West Coast synth pioneer Donald Buchla.  "No Margarine for Error" was written to be performed on a MakeNoise-based Eurorack system, using musíque concréte, tape, and granular techniques, along with sequenced loops and knob-twisting.

The whole of it can become quite silly.

The title refers to the knife's edge danger that all live performances contain, expressed in the near homophone-esque pun, a favorite device seen in other titles of pieces of mine such as "Sleight of Band," "Ecstatic Cling," and others.  this wordplay also extends to the subtitle "an olio in five parts;" olio is oil in Italian (and so is not margarine nor butter), but in theatre or vaudeville it refers to a collection of musical numbers as an encore.  In plain English it is a hodgepodge.  Spelled slightly differently, it is of course, another name for margarine.  Slick, ain't it!?

No Margarine for Error

Cecily Terhune, who plays on this recording, is an incredible saxophonist who has embraced a wide variety of music, including works for live electronics using guitar effects pedals.  We were finally able to collaborate on this piece, which employs delay, a digital whammy, reverb, a freeze pedal, an octave pedal and something really cool called the Rainbow Machine......

The piece reflects the search proposed by Jesus in the book of Matthew (7:7) "Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you." This music is yearning, restless, impatient, pushing forward and falling back - 

Commissioned by and composed for Cecily Terhune

ask, seek, knock

Michael Schelle

SUMMIT AT SAN QUENTIN (2019)
- for chamber orchestra

Commissioned and premiered by
The Indiana University New Music Ensemble
David Dzubay, music director and conductor
5 March 2020

SUMMIT AT SAN QUENTIN (2019) - by Michael Schelle
San Quentin State Prison, located north of San Francisco, opened in 1852. The oldest prison in California, it is also the state's only death row. It has a gas chamber, gallows, and an electric chair, but since 1996 most executions at the prison have been carried out by lethal injection. Throughout its long history San Quentin has been “home” to dozens of high-profile bad guys—murderers, politicians, drug peddlers—and musicians.

Among the many infamous inmates: Henry Cowell (famous experimental composer who did time as the prison’s band leader), Eldridge Cleaver (noted author and early leader of the Black Panthers), Merle Haggard (country music legend), Stanley “Tookie” Williams (a founder of the L.A. Crips gang), Charles Manson (cult leader and mastermind of the “Helter Skelter” murders), Sirhan Sirhan (assassin of Robert F. Kennedy), Danny Trejo (movie star, boxer, restauranteur), and Richard Ramirez (serial murderer-rapist known as the “Night Stalker”).

Before those folk called Quentin home it housed the likes of Earl “Black Bart” Boles (1829-1888), a notably well-mannered poet-stagecoach robber known as the “gentleman bandit,” and “The Duchess,” Evelita Juanita Spinelli (1889-1941)—gangster, pro wrestler, brothel madame, and the first woman to be executed in the state of California.

If one looks for an upside to San Quentin’s rouges gallery it would have to be the San Quentin Jazz Band, a group of talented inmates (most of them in for robbery and/or drug-related charges) made up of both professional and amateur musicians. Its members included saxophonist Art Pepper (one of the 1950’s most celebrated and visible proponents of “West Coast Jazz”), pianist Jimmy Bunn (who performed and recorded with Charlie Parker and Charles Mingus), trumpeters Nathaniel Meeks (who worked with the Gerald Wilson and Johnny Otis bands) and Dupree Bolton (who played with Jay McShann, Harold Land, Bobby Hutcherson, and Dexter Gordon), saxophonists Earl Anderza, and Frank Morgan (who worked with Lionel Hampton, Wild Bill Davis, and Leroy Vinnegar before his drug habit led him into spending nearly 30 years bouncing in and out of prison, after which he enjoyed a successful 20-year comeback career). Locked up in the overcrowded San Quentin—a few yards from the gas chamber, and amid dire prison violence—the San Quentin Jazz Band played strikingly original, vibrant, life-affirming music every weekend in the “Big House.”

Summit at San Quentin, commissioned by the Indiana University New Music Ensemble, David Dzubay, director/conductor, is a fictional gathering of various inmates (including some of those noted above) under the watchful eyes of the prison guards. The cinematic “form” of the piece is freely episodic—as various participants interact, interject, interfere, intervene and improvise. An oft-recurring rhythmic pulse—a musical reference to the inescapable confines of prison life—surrounds the entire piece.

www.schellemusic.com
.

SUMMIT AT SAN QUENTIN (2019)

Mellow Medley of a Melody (updated)

Sinfonie Nr. 2 "the immaculate sands" (2004)
iv. lucifer
hamburger sinfoniker
christoph eggen, dirigent

Sinfonie Nr. 2 "the immacuate sands" iv. lucifer

String Quartet no. 1 - Shades Of Green

The music of Cara Haxo juxtaposes delicate, sparkly textures with the gritty and the grotesque. Haxo is the winner of the 2022 NWMF Emerging Women Composers Competition. Other awards include the IAWM Libby Larsen and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich Prizes and the NFMC Young Composers Award. She has received commissions from the May Festival Youth Chorus, Quince Ensemble, and Splinter Reeds. Haxo is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at The College of Wooster and an Academic Dean and faculty member for The Walden School Young Musicians Program.

Steps, for soprano saxophone and harp (2018)

Cara Haxo

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