Three autumn portraits composed to poetry by my friend Tara Ericksen Smith - all with a bit of yearning and sleepiness built in


Autumn Portraits

Three dances from some incidental music for Romeo and Juliet, composed for Dianne Timmerman and the Butler University Department of Theatre - this music is sly, slightly sarcastic, and a bit jaded

Three Dances from "Romeo and Juliet"

Earthworks was commissioned and composed by Indianapolis dance company Dance Kaleidoscope to be part of a full evening set of modern dance pieces titled 'The Four Elements."  My portion was to be the 'earth' segment, composed using electronic means.  The separate pieces are by turns volcanic, massive, intimate, yearning, celebratory, humorous, quiet, dark, obdurate, and victorious.  A video of the danced production by Dance Kaleidoscope can be found on YouTube.

Earthworks

Moog modular synthesizer-based set pieces - fashioned after classic 1960's tape pieces, using simple editing techniques -- these pieces are available on the album "Sidewalk Music" from Ravello Records on both iTunes and Amazon.com

Retrogressions

A minimalist duo for Tenor Saxophone and Bass Clarinet composed for Demetra Cristos and Emma Remley - this piece was composed for the Annual Butler University 24-hour concert, where players and composers come together to pick player, compose, rehearse, and put on a concert of works all within a single 24-hour period.

The title is a pun based on the amount of hours, and the subtitle of " a pie of blackbirds" of course refers to the nursery rhyme "Sing a Song of Sixpence."

This performance is marvelously played by Heidi Radtke(tenor saxophone) and Trina Gross (bass clarinet)

Foreign 20

During my teaching career in the Butler University School of Music, I have greatly enjoyed the concerts of the Wind Ensemble and other bands, first under Dr. Robert Grechesky, and now under Col. Michael Colburn.  Its performers are marvelous, and the range of music they play is far-reaching, both in style as well as difficulty.  Sunrise at Angler’s Roost was composed to honor the Butler Bands on its 100th Anniversary, but takes a different approach for this celebration, rather than using more obvious Butler-related music or subjects.  Both of the aforementioned directors, Dr. Grechesky and Col. Colburn both are euphonium players, as was my high school band director, Scott Southwick (who also taught me to play euphonium as my primary “band” instrument).  Consequently, I wanted to write a piece featuring our instrument in a solo capacity, as part of an uncomplicated, lyrical, accessible work that celebrates not only these wonderful colleagues and friends but also hearkens back to the beginning of my musical journey in the Bitterroot Valley of Western Montana.

Angler’s Roost is located south of Hamilton, Montana where US Highway 93 crosses over to the west side of the Bitterroot River.  While there are cabins and a bait and tackle shop there, it is also a pretty typical but very beautiful part of the river bottoms: cottonwoods, birches, willows, firs, and pine trees crowd its banks, and water-rounded rocky beaches and downed trees surfacing in the many channels of the river.  This river system never fails to move me when I am there, and I greatly miss it when I am away.

commissioned by the Butler University Wind Ensemble and composed for them and their director, 
Col. Michael Colburn in honor of the band's 100th Anniversary
dedicated to Scott and Colleen Southwick

Sunrise At Angler's Roost

Prague Interlude (Third Impression)

I was very fortunate to hear Karel Husa's music as an undergraduate student at Concordia College, when the Fargo-Moorhead Symphony played his most famous work, Music for Prague 1968.​  He was in residence at Concordia as a part of that concert weekend, and I was able to hear him speak about music, his life, and the politics of (then) Czechoslovakia.  His passion and fierce, dedicated craftsmanship made a great impression on me, and helped influence me to begin writing contemporary music in earnest.  Prague Interlude (Third Impression)​ is a percussion ensemble work, written as part of a Karel Husa festschrift project organized by the Christian Fellowship of Art Music Composers and designed like the third movement of Music for Prague: a percussion interlude through which the listener moves, awakening to the bells of the surrounding city/countryside.

Prague Interlude (Third Impression)

Postcards from Garfield Park

I.  Busking
II.  At Play Amidst the Fountains and Flowers
III.  Westward Late Afternoon (Garden Heat Blues)
IV.  Evening Games (with Busking Reprise)

performed live at the Night Annex Studio, Indianapolis by Jenna Page (piccolo, flute), Eric Salazar (clarinet, bass clarinet), Heidi Radtke (soprano and alto saxophones), and Kelly Swenson (bassoon, contrabasson)

Large public parks are one of the best places in cities and urban places throughout the world - regardless of which continent or country you are in, chances are pretty good that the planners of that city (if they’re smart) have set aside a good portion of land to become wonderful spaces for public use.  Indianapolis (and the surrounding communities) have several great public parks, but the one that was first established is Garfield Park, built in the late 19th century.  In researching a bit about this park, I loved coming across older postcards that focused on a wide variety of the park’s features, especially those of the Sunken Gardens.  When approached by Eric Salazar from Classical Music Indy to write a quartet for winds that was place-centric, he suggested we go tour around the park, looking for spots in which to film the quartet playing this piece.  While walking around I kept thinking of those older postcards, and how the park must have been used by fin de siècle Hoosiers – what sort of games would they play?  What sort of music would they hear?  How would children run around the gardens?  "Postcards from Garfield Park" imagines such a day, from late morning into early evening, in a four-movement work that borrows style and genre from ragtime and playful scherzi from early French modernists, as well as reimagining some slow blues (from under the shade of the Garden’s evergreens) for a hot and humid afternoon.

Thanks to Eric Salazar, Mitzi Westra, Heidi Radtke, Trina Gross, Douglas Spaniol, and Scott Joplin

Commissioned by Classical Music Indy and supported by the Indy Arts and Culture 
Restart & Resilience Fund: An Arts Council of Indianapolis program 
made possible by the Lilly Foundation

Postcards from Garfield Park

Five Modular Etudes

1. Reich, Riley & Townsend Mini Storage
2. Deckard's Vacation Modular
3. 2 Fast 2 Danz
4. (D) Press On (2)
5. Man Eye Zeke

Each of these modular synth studies were conceived to explore a small Eurorack system, as well as compose a set of short works that used as many of the modules as possible in one live setting at a time.

Each piece is recorded from a live performance with no overdubs, and then only modified with a 'house/ambient' reverb and some small mastering EQ.  All dynamics, motion, pitch and harmonic content were derived through CV or human knob-twisting, and all sounds (minus the recording of church bells) were made using this Eurorack system.

An interesting challenge!

Five Modular Etudes

Bassoonist Mark Ortwein approached me about five years ago with an idea for writing a piece where he could perform much like a rock guitar player would, sending his amplified bassoon through a number of effects stomp pedals.  Our original plans were for some kind of a solo piece which then morphed into this piece, upping the ante to include amplified CONTRABASSOON as well as adding a complete wind ensemble to accompany and play against the intrepid (mad) bassoonist.  This piece’s title includes some of my typical ‘punishment’ word play (of course) as well as aptly describes a number of musical elements featured throughout the work:  numerous clingy harmonic major/minor seconds in chords and diads, constant drumming, and myriad velcro-cling effects by the soloist all wrapped up in a kind of snarky, quasi-anxiously-stoned-avant-garde-acid-jazz aesthetic.  

Led by a virtuosic, neo-hep-kat bassoonist…. naturally.

commissioned by and composed for that mondo-awesome bassoonist, Mark Ortwein

live performance by Mark Ortwein and the University of Indianapolis Wind Ensemble, cond. by Jon Noworta

Ecstatic Cling

I.  O Virgo Ecclesia
II. Nunc Gaudeunt Materna Viscera Ecclesia
III. O Orzchis Ecclesia
IV. O Choruscans Lux Stellarum

for mezzo-soprano and piano

Mitzi Westra, mezzo-soprano
Greg Martin, piano

These antiphons (in Latin) are by mystic Hildegard of Bingen that were written and set to her on incomparable music for a dedication for a new church and were later gathered together in her Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum. The first of these four antiphons speak a note of mourning and fear, for which sacrifice of Christ, and the marriage of the church and the Lamb will ultimately conquer their enemy and redeem the church. Each successive antiphon becomes more joyful and ecstatic. This setting sets its stage in mourning and anxiety, before moving through an embrace of that coming joy and eventual marriage. Initially, the first of this set was commissioned by soprano Karen Adair which I then transcribed for my wife Mitzi Westra – she then asked for the last three to be written to be included in an upcoming recording project. I have always enjoyed the work of this polymathic Christian mystic, and had wanted to interact with her through her writings for some time.

Four Antiphons of Hildegard of Bingen

During a concert by Butler University's JCA Composers Orchestra concert in the Eidson Duckwall Recital Hall, this ensemble was doing a piece where we had ca. 20 folks onstage, with piano, percussion, chairs, and stands, et al; we fit just fine, but the Indianapolis Fire Marshall made a surprise visit and nearly closed down the concert.  Needless to say, the Butler University Powers-That-Be handed down a new Decree stating that no more than nine persons (9) could appear onstage at one time (with instruments and stands).....

Nine onstage.......  but how many folks playing backstage to the metronomic woodblock........?

This is a bit of silly tweaking-of-the-nose piece that the JCAco revels in -

Revolution No. 9

Soup or Spreader
A pass-along game for purveyors of potage
For 3-7 Treble or alto instruments and single percussionist

This piece was commissioned by Dr. Christopher Gable for his new music ensemble Section 17 at the University of North Dakota - it is something of a game of tag, where each instrument chases others around, exchanging bits of music in a minimalist fashion - the instruments are not specified and so can fit many mixed chamber groups.  This performance is by the JCA Composers

Soup or Spreader

Vanessa Porter, violin
Greg Martin, piano

Vanessa Porter is a violinist who has made her own way in the world of music, rather than only following the usual paths of a performer of concert music.  Consequently, through projects like her Green Dot Journeys and her National Parks commissions, she has forged a unique road as a performer, bringing her playing into a number of concert venues that are off the beaten path: into the homes of music aficionados, into the national parks, and other non-traditional venues.  I had the great privilege to help her with a composition contest for the Green Dot Journeys (named after the roads in Rand McNally maps that are considered very scenic), and I loved the entire process she undertook to make this project work.  As she began to plan her next composition project based on the National Parks of the United States, I hoped that I would be able to write a piece for her based on the park in my home state of Montana: Glacier National Park.

This sonata is a very accessible, single movement, thirteen-episode piece that uses as a framing device the beautiful scenic elements of the park that are close to, viewed from, or a short walk away from the marvelous roadway called the Going to the Sun highway, the only road in the park which crosses the park, west to east.  In a land of wonders, so many of which can only be seen by back country hiking, the amount of stunningly beautiful scenery that can be seen from this road is nearly overwhelming.  Each episode relates to various places along the highway, traveling from Lake McDonald in the west, and moving along the road to Lake St Mary in the east.  Along the way, the traveler rides next to McDonald Creek, by the trail of Cedars, past Heaven’s Peak, the Weeping Wall, up to the top of Logan Pass, past hidden treasures such as the Triple Falls, the Garden of the Gods, moving up and across the Continental Divide, down around Siyeh Bend, past St Mary Falls, Baring Creek, Sunrift Gorge, and then to St Mary’s Lake.  My hope is that the music reflects at least some of the beauty of this part of Montana with its clear, tumbling streams, cloud-crowned mountains, green forests, red and grey rocks, multi-colored meadows of flowers, and its calm, cold lakes.

During the composition of this piece, I was greatly assisted by viewing the photography of many folks, but I would like to single out and thank a friend of mine who regularly photographs the wonders of Glacier National Park, Mr. Blake Passmore.  You may view his photography at FineArt American: https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/blake-passmore.html

Additionally, I was greatly assisted in my writing by a wonderful violinist colleague, Dr. Davis Brooks.  His suggestions and editing of the violin part made this piece better in every way.  Mille grazie, m’amici!

Commissioned by and composed for Vanessa Porter

Violin Sonata No. 2 (Going to the Sun)

Performance by the University of Minnesota Women's Chorus, Kathy Salzman Romey, cond.

A piece for women's choir and English horn composed back in 1992 to a text by Tara Ericksen Smith - this poem was composed by her when she was still in her teens:

I will make a child
And she will be the
I that I remember
and love.

And I will watch myself
Grow up--
My image following her shadow.

She'll dream her dreams
With my passion
And taste her world
With my tongue
And she'll know
And I'll know, too.

And sometimes we'll
Sing together
Her song, and mine,
Then ours

And I'll carry her sadness 
in my Age
And someday she'll
Make me know
That I am of worth.


My Daughter

October

That's How Autumn's Are

Crisp and Crisp

A short acapella choral piece composed to a anonymous 16th century poem about beauty -- composed for the Concordia College Choir

What is Beauty But a Breath

An acapella choral piece composed for the Montana Distract A Western Choral Festival - it is also dedicated to Virginia Vinal, my high school choir director.  The poem is about the passage of the river through the Bitterroot Valley

Bitterroot Homecoming

A partial English translation (by myself) of some of the lines of poetry at the end of the famous Heiligenstadt Testament by Beethoven.

Heiligenstadt, Oct. 6, 1802

Composed for the Ronen Chamber Ensemble, this piece is a mixed quartet (clarinet, saxophone, violoncello, and percussion) that explores my impressions of the Gifts of the Spirit from the First Book of Corinthians from the New Testament - the music is by turns sweet, frantic, soft, acerbic, and insistent.

Charismata

Commissioned a Boston new music ensemble, this piece was spurred on by the notion of the 'equisite corpse" a means by which a poem (or a piece of music) could be written with every word added by someone new, seemingly without regard for the implied meaning of the previous words - here, the madness that results from a similar method as enacted by a small chamber ensemble and pianist.  Thank you to Molly Wood!

le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau

A wild roller coaster ride for younger orchestra - commissioned by the Indianapolis Youth Orchestra

Crack the Whip!

Tango from Romeo and Juliet

Spinning Waltz from Romeo and Juliet

Meeting Dance from Romeo and Juliet

A suite of music from the ballet "The Willow Maiden," on a story by Ellen Denham, commissioned by the Butler University Ballet. This music was a chance to write orchestral pieces like the ones written by the French and Russian orchestral composers of the early 20th century.

Third Suite from "The Willow Maiden"

A one-player multi-percussion piece that is by turns ambient, meditative, turbulent, prayerful, and forceful -- an 'aftermath' of Paul the apostle's experience on the road to Damascus  - Commissioned by percussionist Marc Wooldridge

Road to Damascus

A fast mischievous two-mallet piece for marimba - "Basta" translates to 'enough!" in English, is often shouted at young Italian rapscallions - a good image for this piece!  Commissioned by percussionist John Reed.

Basta!

Composed for Jeffery Holston, this piece was written to appeal to a young high school cello student, while using modal melodic resources, and a Americanesque folk rhythmic palette.  It is rhythmically vibrant and very very accessible.

Simple Suite for Violoncello

Of Wood & Bone

Metalworkz

Stomp

Earth Yearn

Core

Retrogressions III

Retrogressions II

Retrogressions I

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

Another one of the James Whitcomb Riley Tryptich;  the original poem is very long, so I pulled this brief section from the longer poem:

"O my maiden autumn
You have filled me through and through
with a passion so intense
and of earthly eloquence
that fails and falls
and swoons away

that fills me
(and fails and falls)'

The music displays a kind of yearning and restlessness that for me can be quite romantic - a feeling that comes around each autumn.

from an Autumnal Extravaganza

"A Liturgy of the Hours" is essentially a singular, personal musical impression of the liturgical hours -  a period of time defined by the individual hours of prayer and worship over the course of a day.  Typically, during the course of a day’s liturgy, the prayers begin at midnight, with Matins -- dawn begins with Lauds, moving through the morning and afternoon with Prime, Terce, Sext, None, and moving into the evening with Vespers and finally, Compline.  Each prayer is about three hours apart from each other, and depending on which church’s tradition you follow, will have a set of readings, hymns, psalms, and prayers which are read, sung, or prayed.  This sonata is loosely based on some of those readings. psalms, and prayers, with a verse or fragment of those hours listed below.  The individual movements contain some shared musical material between movements, but is unlike a typical violin sonata in that the violin is not always the principal instrumentalist – indeed, most of the time, the foregrounded music is an amalgamation of both instruments.  The musical language, while accessible, is contemporary to the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and takes advantage of scordatura violin writing, modes of limited transposition, and inside the piano work popularized by Olivier Messiaen, George Crumb, Henry Cowell, Charles Ives and others.  This piece is not a straight programmatical work – rather, the work reflects the impressions made upon me while working on it, and when reading/praying the liturgical hours, I made similar connections between the texts below (taken from a single day’s breviary texts) and the music as it was being written.

It is here performed by the violin-piano duo "Ascending," by whom the piece was commissioned

A Liturgy of the Hours (Violin Sonata No. 1)

"Bí Thusa mo shúile" was commissioned by amateur violinist Danny Frasure as a piece that he that would be able to play with his significant other, pianist Caitlin Foster.  He asked that the piece would include a number of different elements: based on the hymn “Be Thou My Vision,” be similar to how Charles Ives included hymn tunes in his violin sonatas, and the resulting piece would need to be short (less than four minutes) enough to be recorded on an Edison cylinder recording machine.

What!  Edison recording machine?  Okay, I’m in.

As a result of these requests, this piece became a simple, heartfelt piece, in which hints of the hymn surface during the first two sections of the work, and then is simply stated in the solo part for the last third.  Its emotional character moves from quietly reverent to joyous, underscoring the plea of the Irish hymn’s texts (translated by Eleanor Hull in 1912): 

“Be Thou my Vision, O Lord of my heart, 
Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art 
Thou my best Thought, by day or by night, 
Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light.”

commissioned by Danny Frasure and composed for Caitlin Foster and Danny Frasure

Bí Thusa mo shúile

Written in 2017, this work is for electric violin and real-time Logic-based effects.  The title include a bit of word-play and homáge to French electronic music pioneer Jean Michael Jarre, as well as the kind of inward looking self-investigation as described in Sylvia Plath's novel.  The music may be described as beautiful, but occasionally unsettling, and somewhat feline in some of its curiosity and reflection.

This live performance is by Davis Brooks, for whom the piece was composed, and recorded in Voxman Concert Hall at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa.

Quatre Regards dans la Belle Jarre

I am an eclectic composer who writes with a postmodern mischievousness: my pieces can be comedic/ironic, simple/complex, or humble/reverent. My recent projects have taken a turn toward turn towards the sweeter side, exploring a consonant adiatonicism.

FRANK FELICE, composer

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