Memories is, as the title suggests, an introspective reflection on the past. As we experience life on multiple levels simultaneously, so our memories of those experiences exist on multiple planes. We remember the events themselves and how we perceived them through our senses, and we also remember the way they made us feel, the thoughts they prompted us to have, the stabbing pain or the boundless joy they gave us. This piece deals with the second, internal kind of memory, the emotional essence of what we once felt. To that end, it is ethereal and sometimes abstract. Sometimes sad, sometimes longing, sometimes agitated, sometimes joyful, the introspective journey upon which this piece embarks does, in the end, lead it to find peace within itself, as the memories fade into silence.

Winner of Biola University's Composition Competition (2013)

Recorded by Gravity Quartet, with Special Guest Rachel Glazener

Memories | saxophone quartet and piano | 2013

Premiered at Senior Recital at Biola University on December 16, 2016 by Hector Gonzalez and Jonathan Alwine

Poem for Violin and Piano | 2015

I wrote this piece for the 2015 UPBEAT International Summer Music School in Milna, Croatia. In honor of my first visit to Croatia, I wanted to capture some essential element of its native music. I initially intended to have the flute emulate the frula, a nimble Slavic recorder-like instrument, after discovering the wonderful virtuosity of Bora Dugic, but when my mimicry of the frula produced unsatisfying results, I chose instead to focus on incorporating the infections 7/8 rhythms of Dugic's music. 

Milna, Milna was premiered in Croatia on August 5, 2015, with the percussionist striking a bucket with a fork. The percussion part has since been "dressed up"  with a cajón. I named the piece after the small town of Milna, which graciously put up with my bad tourist habits for the better part of two weeks.

U.S. Premiere at Biola University in October 2015 by Elisa Walker, flute, Blake Krammes, piano, and Shane Cook, percussion.

Milna, Milna | flute, piano, percussion | 2015

PROGRAM NOTES:
Amidst a very dark period in my life, my friend and mentor Carlos handed me a copy of Daniel Ladinsky’s Love Poems From God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and the West and told me to read one poem from it every day. I did so religiously over the next few months, thirsty as I was for any indication that God might see me and love me. I was immediately astonished at the candor, beauty, and simplicity of these prayers, translated so winsomely by Ladinsky, and I was touched most of all to find that the poems echoed my own longings–to love and to be loved by God. As I found comfort and solace in these mystical verses, I felt compelled to give them musical utterance. Perhaps the most impactful poem was St. Francis’s “Dear God,” and it is this poem which I set in Song to the Beloved.

Song to the Beloved is a sacred work in two sections: an unsung, fragile beauty that becomes shrouded in darkness, and a sung prayer which cries out to God amidst this darkness. It is a song of despair and hope, grief and longing, darkness and light. It is suffering and a response to suffering. The first section is played by the orchestra only, and the second begins when the solo soprano enters with “Dear God.” It is, in the end, a conscious experience of God that we long for in our suffering: “My divine love, my love/ please let us touch your face.”

AWARDS:
Winner of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (CCM) Orchestral Composition Contest, 2018

PERFORMANCE HISTORY:
Premiered by Shelby Smith and Biola Symphony Orchestra (Marlin Owen, conductor), La Mirada, CA, December 15, 2015

Read by Jackie Stevens and CCM Philharmonia (Dr. Aik Khai Pung, conductor), Cincinnati, OH, November 29, 2017

Read by Jackie Stevens and CCM Philharmonia (Dr. Aik Khai Pung, conductor), Cincinnati, OH, April 11, 2018
__________
Text used is “Dear God,” from Love Poems From God, Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West, by Daniel Ladinsky, 2002, used with permission.

Song To The Beloved

Dance of the Soft Feet is a brief work for clarinet, violin, and piano which captures the lightness and bright wonder that shines in children’s eyes when they dance, as well as the exuberance with which they throw themselves into the air. The piece begins with tender gentleness and slowly transforms into a wild state of frenzied ecstasy, as only children can do.

Premiere Information: Premiered by Zodiac Trio (http://www.zodiactrio.com) at CCM's Werner Hall, October 2017

Dance of the Soft Feet

Premiere performance by Annie Barr and Christina George

In my undergraduate years I had a love-hate relationship with Thomas Traherne, a 17th Century English poet, priest, and mystic. He said some of the most beautiful things about the human condition in relation to God – for instance, "The world is yours" – ideas which seemed to me too impossibly beautiful to be true. I was a Traherne skeptic for a while and have only recently begun opening up to the possibility that he was right. I have long wanted to set Traherne and reveled in the mysticism of these poems.

The cycle is inspired by Gerald Finzi's sublime setting of Traherne in his Dies Natalis. It draws also on Gregorian chant as well as the lieder of Mahler and Schumann.

Traherne Songs Premiere

Traherne Songs: V. This soaring, sacred thirst - Benediction

Traherne Songs: III. Where are the silent streams?

Traherne Songs: I. For giving me desire

Traherne Songs: Invocation

Premiere performance by conductor Jiannen Cheng and the CCM Concert Orchestra at Patricia Corbett Theater, College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati on April 10, 2019. 

Commissioned by the CCM Concert Orchestra for the 2018–2019 season as a result of winning the CCM Orchestral Composition Competition in 2018.

---

PROGRAM NOTES:

For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, 
    and as a root out of a dry ground: 
he hath no form nor comeliness; 
    and when we shall see him,
    there is no beauty that we should desire him.

He is despised and rejected of men; 
    a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: 
and we hid as it were our faces from him;
    he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

Surely he hath borne our griefs, 
    and carried our sorrows:
yet we did esteem him stricken, 
    smitten of God, and afflicted.

But he was wounded for our transgressions, 
    he was bruised for our iniquities: 
the chastisement of our peace was upon him; 
    and with his stripes we are healed.

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, 
    yet he opened not his mouth: 
he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, 
    and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, 
    so he openeth not his mouth.

—Isaiah 53:2-5, 7 (KJV)

Tenebrae for Orchestra is an extended meditation on the above text as well as on the beautiful Gregorian setting of it in the plainchant "Ecce vidimus eum," from the Tenebrae service of Maundy Thursday during Holy Week (listen to the chant here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pMTcwfSa2w). 

The text speaks of a “lamb who opened not his mouth,” which I found evocative musically, and I was particularly drawn to the connection between scourging and healing. The whip strokes violently interrupt the music several times until being subsumed into a slow, upward ascension to heaven. The piece is a long, darkness-to-light sort of journey, the darkest F phrygian eventually to E minor and finally E major. I was captivated by the picture of Jesus still there, innocent, silently enduring the beating and the whipping and the oppression and hatred and scorn, still there despite the worst, never opening His mouth, receiving it all fully, but with an inner light that the darkness can never reach and which eventually triumphs over it.

My grandfather—we called him Nandy— died last year, and his favorite passage was always this one: “and by His stripes, we were healed.” This work is dedicated to his memory.

2019-04-11 CCM Concert Orchestra

Tenebrae

Garrett George is an American composer of concert music. He has written music for orchestra, choir, string quartet, art song, solo piano, chamber ensembles, and electronics.

Garrett George

Popular tracks