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Piano Quintet No 1

Composed during my third year of university, this piece is dedicated to a fellow student, Lori Muñoz, who had earlier premiered two of my "Four Preludes" (1998). I had originally planned for this work to be the first movement of a piano sonata. However, my time was taken up working on "Two Pieces for Orchestra" (2002) and I never finished the rest of this sonata. Later I renamed the piece to its current title as I found it descriptive of the "pressure" I felt during that time.

Live Recording: Michael Maw, Piano

“Pressure” for Piano (2001)

Beethaphase for orchestra

Lady Dark takes its title from a set of sonnets (sonnets 127–152) by William Shakespeare that are known as The Dark Lady Sonnets. Unlike Shakespeare’s Fair Youth sonnets, the Dark Lady sonnets are much more sexual and passionate. They are so named The Dark Lady because the poems portray a female figure with black hair and shadowy skin. The work is cast into three continuous movements. Each movement explores the myriad of complex emotions of desire, lust and forbidden love that are expressed in Shakespeare’s sonnets. 

The chamber orchestra version was composed for the Chamber Orchestra at the Wellesley Composers Conference.

www.michaelfoumai.com

LADY DARK (Excerpt)

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When Evening Comes

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Rain, Rain (Don't Go Away)

Thinking
(for Mixed Chamber Sextet: Clarinet – Bassoon – Trumpet – Piano – Violin – Cello)

http://stephensonmusic.com/product/thinking-trumpet/

duration: 18.5 minutes

I. Outside the Box – II. It Over – III. About What Was – IV. Twice – V. Out Loud

Written for Laura Garwin and the Salmagundi Ensemble Made possible by a generous gift from the Charles Schlueter Foundation. 

Thinking:

In the fall of 2007, I was contacted by Laura Garwin about composing a new piece for her chamber group, the Salmagundi Ensemble, at the Royal College of Music in London. There have been few pieces written for the instrumentation of their group (Martinu’s La Revue de Cuisine being the best-known) and the idea was to add to the repertoire. Laura, also a trumpet player, was a student of Jeff Work’s when I wrote the trumpet concerto for him, and we met a few years later at a trumpet conference outside Boston.

The piece began with the last movement, as many of my compositions do. I needed to just get some ideas down on paper, and so I began to “think out loud” – not withholding any ideas that popped into my head. These ideas soon began to gel into cohesive phrases, and the movement took shape. It then occurred to me to keep the “Thinking” theme going, and soon titles for the rest of the movements began to creep in and stimulate compositional ideas.

The first movement – Outside the Box – represents a compositional stretch for me. My music generally comes out pretty tonal (with added spice) – but in this case, I decided to go ‘outside’ my comfort zone and write something without a defined tonal center. The movement then relies on rhythmic pulses and a “cool” jazz groove in the middle.

The three middle movements feature the sextet in pairs. “It Over” showcases mainly the clarinet and piano. The main theme gets repeated over and over, as the title would suggest – but gets a little more frantic upon each repetition. “About What Was” is a trumpet/cello feature, and anchors the five- movement work. I wanted to make sure to feature Laura on trumpet, as she is the sole reason this piece exists! The movement is decidedly reflective, depicting sorrowful thoughts about a time gone by. (The sorrow has nothing to do with my thoughts about Laura!). The last of this middle triplet is a quirky take on thinking twice. I often have been amused at the sound of a skipping record, or even CD. The skip sometime sounds more interesting than the original – and so I have composed an intended “skip” in the music. This may cause the listener to think “twice” as they try to determine where the beat falls in the music. The melody, here featuring the bassoon and violin, is played exactly twice.

The last movement puts the entire group on display, with rhythmic vitality and technical virtuosity. The commission for this work came from a generous grant from the Charles Schlueter Foundation, and the premiere took place at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on July 4, 2008.

Jim Stephenson, 2008

Thinking - Outside The Box

(2017) This is a prayer based on the text "Mitis mater, conplectere pace. Solacium noctis silentio".  It's a reflection back to the moment of my mothers' passing.

Mater mitis

Mitis Mater

I'm a life-long Connecticut resident.  I received my degree in Composition from the University of Bridgeport where I studied with David Barnett and Michael Linton.  My instrument is the accordion ---- yes, the accordion.  

My compositional style follows no particular school of writing.  During my college years, if asked, I would quickly and proudly say that my music was atonal.  Now, with the wisdom of age, and the benefit of much more study, I know how wrong that was.  Much of my music is far from atonal in the Schoenberg, Webern, Berg sense.  I believe very strongly in melody and the subsequent development of melopy as a compositional force.  Though my melodic ideas are rarely hummable tunes,  I still maintain a commitment to the ideas and to their development as a unifying tool in my works.  I also strive for a harmonic consistency throughout a given piece.  With dissonance being a common link in most of my harmonic structures, the degree of dissonance will change from piece to piece depending on the topic.  In laymen's terms, some pieces are uglier than others.  Of course ugliness, beauty, like, dislike --- these are very subjective concepts which I try to eliminate from my thinking when composing.  My music lives in the world of tritones and augmented fifths, using "less dissonant" as my points of relaxation.  But I still try to strike a balance between tension and resolution towards the goal of creating an emotion, a picture, an idea or a feeling through the music.  In the end, I wish only to touch the soul of the listener; to make them feel something through the music.  

I hope you listen and  enjoy.

Many of the works I will post here are "Orchestral Respresentations"; that is, they were produced by synthetic means via computer.  Though at the core I believe nothing replaces a real instrument and more importantly the real musician playing that instrument, computers have afforded me the opportunity to hear my music close to my original intentions. 30 years ago, my composition teacher (Dr. David Barnett) foretold the impact of computers on composers.  His words have proven prophetic to me.  It's certainly not my aim to to replace "live" performance", nor do I make the claim that these tracks sound "real".  The virtual orchestra is merely the tool I have available to me to hear my music and to get my music heard.

Mitis Mater

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