I first heard the Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time) by French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908 – 1992, in my late teens, as I was beginning my education as a composer. The music was so moving, so powerful and mystical, and seemed such a clear and true picture of something beyond this reality that I was immediately transfixed. The story of the quartet—Messiaen composed it when he was interned in a German prison camp during World War II—made it even more profound. I began to study his music and his writings-- Technique de mon langage musical (The Technique of My Musical Language)— and discovered a profound affinity; our mutual love of birdsong, of extended harmony, of rhythmic vitality and even of palindrome. While I did not use Messiaen’s techniques directly, they showed me potentials that I had not previously conceived.

A chrysalis is the hard shell surrounding a pupa formed as a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly. In this piece I use short quotations from the solo movements of Quatuor pour la fin du temps, especially Abîme des oiseaux (Abyss of the birds) but also fragments from Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus (Praise to the eternity of Jesus) and Louange à l'Immortalité de Jésus (Praise to the immortality of Jesus) to generate a prolonged organic climb toward transcendence. I imagine Messiaen’s human body, encased in earth, gradually metamorphosing into pure, luminous, transcendent spirit.

chrysalis was commissioned by the Hong Kong Composers’ Guild for the Hong Kong Wind Kamerata.

Hong Kong Wind Kamerata

chrysalis: in memoriam Olivier Messiaen

dedicated to Philip Jameson and the Interlochen Arts Academy Trombone Choir.  Published by Nichols Music: http://www.enspub.com/nmc.htm

Reflections

Recognizing the Angel (2020)
for soprano voice and alto flute

April: Recognizing the Angel
 
The sharpness I note in others
makes more sense than my own distances
                  --Charles Olson
 
As I read on the porch in April,
words slip from the page's corner:
a wedge of grackles.
 
Tumult of voices: cries that filter
through the wateroaks.
Feathers thrash and lengthen. Fuse.
Plate glass windows shudder
in a sudden wind.
 
Two great wings rise
as an angel bends
near my wrought-iron chair.
 
Dogwood blossoms
malingering near my shoulder,
a moving current of white tongues,
bridge the space
between my body, my distances
                                              and this spring.
 
Pollen yellows a neighbor's pickup
                             a haze
                                              a sunlit sheen.
 
Clouds gust overhead
while I sit in flying shadows,
the sun breaks through, intense
as the wild light in the dogwood's blossom
or the high music flowing from the angel
through the dark roadways of my blood.
 
I listen.            
 
                  --Mary Ann Coleman

poem from Recognizing the Angel by Mary Ann Coleman
used with permission of the estate of Mary Ann Coleman
originally published by the Press of the Night Owl, Athens, GA

Recognizing The Angel

The third movement from Christopher Coleman's The Autumnal Mountain, for solo harp.

Autumnal Mountain iii. Falling Leaves

The second movement, śūnyatā (emptiness), from Triptych III: The Caves of Dunhuang, by Christopher Coleman, for erhu, cello, xiao/dizi, clarinet/bass clarinet, yang qin, harpsichord, temple bells, and fixed media.

ii. śūnyatā (emptiness) from The Caves of Dunhuang .wav

A bitter wind blows though our lives: our humanity is increasingly being taken from us.  We work more hours than ever before, and are less satisfied.  The people who would control our lives seek to do so only for their own benefit.  Altruism and compassion are rapidly disappearing, teaching and learning are being replaced by manipulation and marketing. Lies go unquestioned and truths are attacked.  Independent thought is discouraged in favor of dogma and catch-phrases.  Diversity and originality are publicly praised but not valued; conformity is king.  Quantity reigns supreme over quality.  We are being turned not into machines—which would at least require an effort to replace—but into leaves of a diseased tree whose individual lives and deaths seem of no consequence whatsoever.   Only through a difficult but vital appraisal of our true situation and our real needs can we fight the bitter wind which otherwise promises catastrophe.

Bitter Wind was originally commissioned by Kiyonori Sokabe for his newly created Zephyros trumpet—a trumpet with both valves and a trombone-like slide. The version in this recording is a new revision--significantly rewritten for standard trumpet in C.

Bitter Wind for trumpet and piano

I.     Night Creatures
II.   Skittering Nightmares
III.  Frozen Flowers
IV.   November Things
V.    Cry Carefully
​
duration ca. 23:30
available from the composer
​
Instrumentation
for 17 Winds
2 oboes, Eb clarinet, 2 Bb clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons,
4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones​
​
Program Note
The emotional world of Dark Gardens has its genesis in a series of extremely difficult personal events, especially my parents' illnesses and my father's eventual death. I remember being wracked with sadness at his impending loss, and yet, while driving in the early morning through the Georgia countryside, when seeing the morning mists rising through the pine forests, I was awakened to their fragile beauty.  For his last Christmas, we bought and decorated a tree, but the room was too narrow for both his wheelchair and the tree, so we put the tree outside where we could see it through the plate-glass door.  Christmas eve brought a freezing rain, and we woke to find the tree and all the ornaments and lights covered with ice, more glorious than they ever would have been safe inside.  Although a pervasive sense of deep sorrow lingers and will never leave, I discovered that the loss of a parent somehow unites us with others in one of the few almost universal experiences. Fragments of half-forgotten dreams still haunt me: night birds, fluttering, panicked...revelations, hopelessness, grief, and despair grow in the dark gardens of the heart, but so too do beauty and wonder.
​
Dark Gardens was commissioned by  Jerome Hoberman, conductor​​ of the Hong Kong Bach Choir, and premiered by the Winds of The Hong Kong Bach Orchestra​ under his direction on June 22, 1999 at the City Hall Concert Hall, Hong Kong.  Its unique instrumentation arises from the combined instrumental forces of the other two works on the programme; the Mozart Serenade in Bb and the Bruckner E minor Mass, with Eb and bass clarinet substituting for the two bassett horns of the Mozart.

Dark Gardens

This thirteen-minute tone poem is based on a short story of the same title by the American master of horror and suspense Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849).  Rather than the mere slaughter-fests so popular today, his works are psychological thrillers, studies in the conflict between the power of fear and that of reason.  This theme led Poe to create the first detective story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, in which keen observation and deduction are used to uncover a most unlikely solution.  In Poe’s short story of 1841, A Descent into the Maelström, so too are the emotional world and the intellectual world pitted against one another.  Set in flashback, it is a tale of three brothers whose fishing boat is caught in a monstrous whirlpool off the Norwegian coast.  The youngest is immediately killed when the mast to which he has lashed himself breaks and is thrown overboard.  The boat is drawn relentlessly into the whirlpool, and one brother can do nothing but panic.  The other observes the flotsam nearby and observes that cylindrical objects are drawn into the abyss more slowly than other shapes.  Unable to attract his brother’s attention, he lashes himself to a barrel and leaps out of the boat shortly before it is dragged to destruction.  The cylindrical barrel’s shape saves him, and eventually the maelström subsides. 
 
My tone poem consists of two large sections that attempt to reflect the story and also the style, pacing and tone of the original.  The first part depicts the opening scene in which the maelström appears in the distance, seen from a mountaintop where the unnamed narrator begins his tale.  Following a brief transition, the second section consists of a series of variations, not of a theme, but of the musical depiction of the whirlpool itself.  Throughout the work, allusions emerge and submerge in a sort of stylistic whirlpool.  Poe himself often used allusion and quotation in his own writing, particularly to the classics, and so too I have alluded to famous programmatic classical music that seemed appropriate—among others, there are references (but not literal quotations) to pieces about water (Smetana’s The Moldau and Debussy’s La Mer), ships (Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman), Fate (Liszt’s Les Preludes) and death (Mahler’s 10th Symphony).

A Descent Into The Maelstrom

"among the empty places" composition for fixed media
i.  distance
ii.  greater than
iii.  "...the liquid mountains of the sky..."

among the empty places is a triptych of related but independent pieces. All three of the works share not only a compositional and aesthetic approach, but also a sense of loss and of our insignificance in the face of a vast and uncaring universe.   Technically, the pieces all develop my technique of massively replicating--sometimes into the hundred thousands--and time-shifting recordings of purely acoustic sounds.  There are no synthesized or computer-generated sounds in any of the pieces.
 
distance
In a 16 hour train ride from Lanzhou to Dunhuang in Northwest China I was enormously impressed by the landscape: mile after mile of arid countryside with ochre hills, red cliffs and craggy, broken mountains.  The land is ancient, barely touched by humans and indifferent to our existence. The original source material is a traditional Uyghur song of longing for an absent love: ‘Yaru’, (Yearning)  The original was performed by Sanubar Tursun,  who both sings and plays dutar—a two stringed, long necked lute.  I greatly time-stretched this recording, more than doubling it and then massively replicated it.  The 'machine sounds' are the plucked dutar, time-stretched and transposed downward an octave or more.  The result retains vestiges of the original but becomes far distant from it, creating a sense of timelessness and isolation.
 
greater than
A meditation on transformation, greater than is generated from only two original sound sources—a temple bell with cello, and a marimba.  Massive layering and time-shifting these sounds creates two barely recognizable transformations; they are further transformed with a slow timbral modulation between the two sonic poles.
 
"...the liquid mountains of the sky..."
In March 2016 my brother passed away, far too soon.  We had been emotionally close, although physically distant—he lived in America and I am in Hong Kong.  Oddly, the extent of my love and respect for him only became clear to me after he had died.  I have a sense of loss that I doubt will ever heal.  This piece is dedicated to his memory.  The title is taken from a quote of Helen Keller, "It's wonderful to climb the liquid mountains of the sky. Behind me and before me is God and I have no fears."
 
‘...the liquid mountains of the sky...’ uses selections from a recording of my harp solo The Autumnal Mountain recorded by Kateřina Englichová.  The selections are replicated into the thousands and each replication is time-shifted by various amounts.  These massive replications are often superimposed on sections that are far less extensively replicated.  At the beginning, the replications are a background accompaniment to the original solo line, and later, two-, three- and six- replications weave in and out of a much thicker background. 
​
among the empty places (Triptych 2) was funded by a grant from the University Grants Committee of Hong Kong.  distance was premiered at the concert Traces of Silk Road III - Convergence & Extrapolation on November 1, 2015, at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre Studio Theatre.  greater than was premiered at Musinfo-Opus Centrum's Art and Science Days in Bourges, France, at the Cinéma de la Maison de la Culture de Bourges on June 2-3, 2016. "...the liquid mountains of the sky..." was premiered at Lewis University in Romeoville, Illinois, on MusicBYTES: Electroacoustic music of Christopher Coleman, March 24, 2017.

among the empty places

This nine minute work was written upon my departure from the University of Pennsylvania, after completing the coursework for my Master's degree in composition.  While there, I studied with George Rochberg, the composer arguably most associated with Neo-Romanticism and the return to tonality of academically-based composers. My composition lessons with him were steeped in the language of the late Romantic period--I not only composed short pieces in the style of composers such as Brahms and Mahler, but I also made transcriptions of selections of Mahler symphonies.  Abschiedslied (Song of Farewell) came out of work I composed in my final semester and is dedicated to my fellow survivor of various graduate school travails and dear friend Ingrid Arauco, who I have not seen since.  The musical language is that of the composers I studied, with an additional nod to Beethoven and his late string quartets. Structurally the piece is a large scale ternary form, with the outer sections consisting of a lyric melody in the upper parts accompanied by rapid arpeggiations throughout the rest of the ensemble. The central section is itself a five-part song form, with a hymn-like melody developed in alternation with a "breathless" solo appearing in the second tenor and first bass trombones.

Published by Ensemble Publications and available here:
http://www.enspub.com/pages/sku21020.htm

Christopher Coleman's Album

Abschiedslied

Lakapati

Divertimento for Woodwind Trio (1978)

I.     Prelude
II.    Rustic Dance
III.   Love Song
IV.    Urban Dance

duration ca. 9:50

 Instrumentation:  oboe, Bb clarinet, bassoon

Program note​
A light-hearted four-movement suite, my Divertimento came upon its title through sheer popular acclaim--while researching woodwind trios of earlier composers, I noticed that the vast majority were divertimenti, and thought I would stick with a good thing.  The Prelude begins with a doubly dotted rhythm alluding to the historical French Overture, then introduces a short chromatically twisting figure and finally superimposes the two ideas.  Inspired by Bartok, my Rustic Dance takes a simple tune in 7/8 through its paces.  The Love Song counterpoints a lyric song with a rising chromatic line, and is dedicated to my wife (then girlfriend) Lorrie.  Finally, the highly syncopated Urban Dance converts a 12-tone melody into a jazzy fugato.  The Divertimento for Woodwind Trio was premiered by Karen Bradley, oboe​; Patricia Ewing, clarinet​; and Sandra Howard, bassoon​​ on May 8, 1979 at the University of Georgia.  This performance is by I fiatti dolci in Hong Kong.

Divertimento for woodwind trio

What's That Noise?  A Listener's Guide to Contemporary Music: Timbre. A programme written and presented by Christopher Coleman for RTHK Radio 4 in 2012 explaining contemporary classical music.

What's That Noise?  A Listener's Guide to Contemporary Music: Timbre

What's That Noise? A Listener's Guide to Contemporary Music: Episode 4: Pitch (Part 1).  A programme written and presented by Christopher Coleman for RTHK Radio 4 in 2012 explaining contemporary classical music.

What's that Noise?  A Listener's Guide to Contemporary Music: Episode 4: Pitch (Part1)

What's That Noise? A Listener's Guide to Contemporary Music: Gesture. A programme written and presented by Christopher Coleman on RTHK Radio 4 in 2012 explaining contemporary classical music.

What's That Noise?  A Listener's Guide to Contemporary Music: Gesture

The first movement, Toccata, from Christopher Coleman's Triptych #1 for marimba, almglocken, and fixed media

Toccata From Triptych 1

Program Note
We suffer a crisis of truth and rationality; trapped in a catastrophe of vindictiveness and partisanship where hidden corporate and political interests dictate the words of the media. Catch phrases and talking points loop mindlessly, drowning the aether with static and suffocating reasoned discourse. Newsreaders seeming to present their own thoughts and opinions, instead all read from a single script prepared by unknown parties to advance dark agendas. Dishonest actors, trolls, and bots manipulate social media for nefarious means or mere laughs. The thrill of celebrity drives influencers to heights of inanity and insanity that would be absurd if only they weren’t taken seriously. Our minds are perpetually submitted to an unending barrage of hypocrisy in which any action, no matter how unimportant or innocent, becomes a locus for the fury of those who would incite us. Conspiracies are touted on every breath of wind while truths are engulfed within the festering morass of connectivity as we try desperately to claw our way back to sanity.
​
Performance Notes
One of the most important inspirations for The Outrage Machine was a collection of clips from dozens of newsreaders across the US reciting, word-for-word, the same editorial as though it were their own; the only differences were in individual inflections. I’ve adapted this idea by permuting a single motive with different accentuations; it is vital for the performer to emphasize these far beyond the norm. Every accent mark throughout the entire piece should stand out as dramatically as possible from the surrounding dynamic. Where that dynamic is already loud, the distinction cannot be as great, of course, but in a passage like the opening, every accented note (in one hand) is to be played fortissimo and the unaccented notes all to be played mezzo piano.
Pedalling is at the discretion of the performer but the faster music, on the whole, should be rather dry. Accidentals carry throughout the measure but do not transpose octaves.

The Outrage Machine

Disappearances (Part I: Thoughts in a Jewellery Store, After Seeing Lucia di Lammermore, The Witness) was premiered by Janice Kestler, mezzo soprano​, and the Penn Chamber Players​, conducted by Christopher Coleman, on June 6, 1982 at the University of Pennsylvania Department of Music.  Disappearances (Part II: Focal Point, Descent) was premiered by Jean Waller, mezzo soprano, and the University of Chicago New Music Ensemble​, Barbara Schubert, director on May 5, 1985 at the University of Chicago's Goodspeed Recital Hall.  These are the performances heard here.  Music by Christopher Coleman, Poems by Mary Ann Coleman.

Disappearances (complete)

A Jazz Funeral

The funeral processions of New Orleans are accompanied by a jazz band that usually consists of a couple of saxophones, perhaps a clarinet, a trumpet, a trombone, a sousaphone, and snare and bass drums. On the outward journey, these musicians render slow and mournful Dixieland versions of traditional hymns like Amazing Grace. But on the return journey, sorrow is left behind and the band strikes a celebratory note, picking up the tempo and kicking in syncopations in an affirmation of life, and of the Afterlife. The true Christian belief is that death is merely a journey to heaven, and so rather than grieving over our loss, we should celebrate the eternal happiness of the deceased, who is released from worldly woes and is sitting with Jesus in God's eternal love. In A Jazz Funeral I've tried to capture this spirit. The opening trumpet solo is based on a slave song from the sea islands of my home state of Georgia. Byum By-E, was recorded by Lydia Parrish in the early 1900's with no accompaniment or harmonization provided. It is an extraordinarily touching lament for Shisha Shalum, in which at one point all rhythmic and melodic motion ceases entirely to the words "Lord, Shisha"--the grief of loss completely overwhelms the song. My original idea was to present the song without ornamentation, strictly as Parrish recorded it but with my own accompaniment. As I worked on the piece, I realised that Parrish's notation was surely influenced by her Classical training, and that she'd notated only what she knew how to notate. I came to believe that treating the song much more freely was completely within the tradition from which it came. Other melodies in the piece are inspired by the New Orleans tradition, but are of my own composition. I've tried to do more than just compose my own piece in the New Orleans style by adding a little extra flavor, as though the procession passes rooms where other bands are playing, where doors open and close and music floats in unexpectedly. The procession might even be visited by the spirits of past musicians, who improvise from another, unworldly plane.

A Jazz Funeral was commissioned by the Hong Kong Wind Philharmonia for their 2005 concert at the World Association of Symphonic Bands and Ensembles (WASBE) conference in Singapore, and was premiered under the direction of Jerry Junkin by that group on July 7, 2005, in Hong Kong.

Christopher Coleman, HK

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