melody

Frank Felic2

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


Autumn Portraits

Choral Music by Frank Felice

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 Matthew Tresler and the Irvine Valley College Choir, this piece is related to the piece "Bitterroot Homecoming," in which the mountains of my home valley speak to me.

Voice of the Mountains

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

Tango from Romeo and Juliet

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

듣는편지

Song by CY

저 별을 가져다 너의 두 눈에 선물하고 싶어

내 모든 걸 다 담아서 전해주고파
Sometimes I cry 널 잃을까
Sometimes I feel 내 품에 잠들어 있는 너

I promise you 첫눈이 오는 날에
I promise you 너와 함께
두 손을 마주잡고 그날을 거닐며 외쳐
I love you 잡은 두 손은 흐르는 세월 모르길


듣는편지

"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)

Preserve Me, O God is a piece that I promised to write for my wife shortly after hearing her sing as a soloist for the first time at the University of Minnesota.  It had a long gestation, and I wrote nearly ten other false starts before completing this piece.  I had asked her what her favorite sacred text was, and she replied that it was the sixteenth psalm.  She liked one translation of this text, and I liked another, and so eventually I went back to the original Hebrew and with a dozen English translations and Strong’s Bible Dictionary before me produced the paraphrase for this piece.  The Good News Bible lists this a “prayer of confidence,” and my setting of the text reflects that along with my reading that David is claiming the Lord for his own throughout (“You are MY Lord”). This psalm also enumerates a number of the excellent things that God has given the psalmist (as well as mentioning the less-than-excellent sorrows that come to those who chase after other ‘gods.’).  The text is set largely syllabically for the soloist, accompanied by contrapuntal backgrounds and a bit of pedal-based tintinnabulation underneath them, utilizing a modal, accessible musical language.  This seems to illustrate a kind of dialogue between soloist and quartet, somewhat like a congregation engaging in active, vocal participation with the preacher’s reading. This exaltation, while restrained, is both emotional and reverent.
 
composed for Mitzi Westra
performed by Mitzi Westra and the New Century String Quartet 
November 2016

Preserve Me, O God

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.

Crisp and Crisp

FRANK FELICE, composer