North Central Ave

Central Michigan University Symphonic Wind Ensemble
Chris Chapman, Conductor

Program Note
If you walk across the Georgia Rail pedestrian overpass at the Edgewood/Candler Park MARTA station at sunset, you will be graced by one of Atlanta’s more arresting vistas. The setting star colors the sky in rich hues reminiscent of a Rothko painting. Against this matte, downtown’s distant skyscrapers rise serenely; sparks of dying light glint off the well-polished rails below. In my year teaching away from home at Georgia State University, I often took in that view on my way home. The moment unfolded for at a particular nexus of complexity in my life: exhausted, alone in a new city with few friends, away from my spouse, elated about finally working in my field, in love with the vibrancy of the city all around me, lost, found, anxious, ecstatic, here, away, grounded, in mid air… I didn’t set out to write about any of this. But when I was done, and bewildered by what this storm of a composition process had created, I became aware that the memory that most fit the music I had written was the one of stopping on that overpass and looking out over the end of the day as I made my way home, wherever I thought that might be.

This movement is part of a larger work meditating on public transit train stations that have been important in my life. The other movements will be titled:

Place St.-Henri (Montreal metro)
30th Street Station (Philadelphia SEPTA)
Hikifune (Tokyo’s Tôbu)

Station To Station: 1. Edgewood/Candler Park

This piece was written to celebrate the resumption of in-person concerts after a year and a half of remote performing. It is constructed such that the major instrument groups work independently at first, but gradually bring their motives, rhythms, harmonies, and timbres into increasingly simultaneous relation over the course of the piece. The work ends on a complex, resonant chord that resolves many—but not all—of the work’s tensions, a chord made manifest by the artistry, by the dedication of everyone performing. Together.

Ensemble (2022)

For Twelve Female Voices and Chamber Orchestra
Performance by Lorelei Ensemble and Boston Modern Orchestra Project
From the album: 'The Debrecen Passion'
Year of Composition: 2015
Text: poems by Szilárd Borbély in Hungarian; 
Lamentations of Mary in modern Hungarian translation by Ferenc Molnár (fragments); 
Ana B’Choach (in Hebrew); 
Stabat Mater Specioso (fragments, in Latin); 
Thou Art a Vineyard (hymn text in Georgian))
Commissioned by The Jebediah Foundation
Score available at:
www.katiagocs.com

The Debrecen Passion (12 Voices & Orchestra)

cis-[flux] (2015) for sinfonietta

Curtis Symphony Orchestra
Conducted by Joshua Gersen
Recorded at the Curtis Institute of Music, Drew Schlegel, recording engineer
April 10, 2017

These Violent Delights (2017), like its name implies, is full of violent contrasts, both in the way it sounds and circumstances under which it was produced. Written as partial fulfillment of my doctoral dissertation project at the University of Pennsylvania, this ten-minute piece for orchestra is a kaleidoscopic mixture of sensuality and spirituality, brashness and delicacy, rage and delight.

As perhaps a dissertation project should, These Violent Delights serves as both a summary of my previous work and a marker indicating new directions in my musical practice. Beginning with my chamber orchestra piece Signal to Noise (2012), and continuing to other works such as Night the Obscure (2014), Mirroring Sky (2014), and Entanglements (2015), I have explored cyclic composition forms, inspired equally by Western theme-and-variations forms as well as the expandable-frame cyclic forms of Indonesia gamelan music. TVD includes a quasi-tonal cyclic melody, heard most clearly at climactic points, that repeats many times throughout the piece in two different versions (a “Major” and a “Minor” version). Each repeat is stretched or compressed in time from its initial iteration and treated to numerous transformations of “key”, texture, timbre, orchestration, and harmony. The order in which these transformed cycles appear was based on Western sonata form. If you track it closely, you will hear what resemble “Primary” and “Second” themes of an Exposition, a Development section that explores new sounds, and a compressed Recapitulation followed by an intense Coda. 

Augmenting this quasi-cyclic, quasi-sonata form piece are two very slow, lyrical sections—one just after the Development, and one at the end. The material for these sections was drawn from on ongoing opera project, The Minor Passion, and includes some of its most poignant and wrenchingly-emotional music. I regard this as some of the most personally-revealing music I’ve ever written. 

It’s a tenuous proposition to link the aesthetics of a piece of art with the immediate personal and political circumstances of the artist during the time of its creation. Pointing to specific moments of a musical composition and saying, for instance, “That augmented chord in bar 78 there represents her disenchantment with Stalin!”  seems laughable from the composer’s perspective. That chord could very well come from her disenchantment with Stalin, but it also could be a chord she just likes, one that fits the counterpoint surrounding it, a happenstance of some precompositional process, or all of these at once. 

That said, I will admit that personal and political circumstances at the time I was doing the bulk of the work on These Violent Delights did have a direct impact on its overall sound. In November of 2016, when the piece was in full swing, the United States elected a dangerous megalomaniac into its position of greatest power. The anger, frustration, and fear this election both caused and was a metaphor for filtered into my writing. I had originally planned for the fast sections of TVD to form intricately contrapuntal webs; after the election, those webs became dense clouds of sound that flood the fast music with frustration, fury, and darkness. I can only hope that as the slower, spiritual sections of the piece provide a ray of hope, we too can find hope in dark times. 

These Violent Delights was first read and workshopped by the Curtis Institute of Music Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Joshua Gersen in April 2017.

These Violent Delights - for orchestra

12/12/2018
Rose Recital Hall
Philadelphia, PA

Alize Rosznyai, soprano
Michele Kelly, flute
Tessa Ellis, trumpet
Emma Hey, viola
Allison Herz, bass clarinet

text from "Every Riven Thing" by Christian Wiman. 

"Every riven thing" is the first in an ongoing project of settings of Christian Wiman’s poetry. When I first engaged Wiman’s work, I was struck by how his text resonated with my own concerns: How do I distance myself from the Southern Evangelical church while still engaging with the God they worship? How should I navigate secular culture as a Christian academic? Wiman’s poetry and prose have both severed and sutured these communities and their beliefs in my mind. Now, I am unsure of where that leaves me, other than invigorated to perform the daily task of asking myself: How do I believe?

Every riven thing

What is Written on the Leaves
(symphony for wind ensemble)

Premiere: February 23, 2019 :: Dustin Barr and the California State University, Fullerton Wind Symphony :: 2019 College Band Directors National Association Conference, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ

Program Note:

What is Written on the Leaves was commissioned by a consortium of conductors and ensembles led by Matthew Westgate and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Dustin Barr and California State University, Fullerton, and James Batcheller and Central Michigan University. It is dedicated with gratitude to John E. Williamson, Director of Bands at Central Michigan University from 1979 until his retirement in 2018 and in whose wind ensemble I played euphonium throughout my undergraduate studies. Mr. Williamson had a profound impact on my conception of music; he both pushed my understanding of what is possible and honed my approach to nuance, detail, and expression.

The title What is Written on the Leaves comes from a poem by my friend Robert Fanning (https://www.salmonpoetry.com/audio-and-video-details.php?ID=202&bookcat=408). Robert’s poem is a beautiful reflection on letting go, and, like much of his work, seemed to be the words I needed to hear at that particular moment in my life. As I meditated on Robert’s words, the metaphor of trees seemed to me to be an apt way to describe the relationship students have with their teachers: bold, green branches and leaves sprouting from deeply rooted trunks of wisdom and experience, eventually, new seeds falling to earth and becoming new trees. The next generation of musicians may not have the chance to experience Jack Williamson’s extraordinary perspicuity on the podium, but his words and his passion will continue through the work of his students, in the same way each autumn the ephemeral leaves fall from their branches and eventually become the soil that nourishes the tree itself.

The first movement is entitled I no longer recognize my hands, which is a line from Robert’s poem. For me, John Williamson’s wind ensemble was home. I have been listening to the Central Michigan University Symphonic Wind Ensemble since the beginning of my formal music education. But you have to leave home in order to know it. Graduating from Central Michigan University and heading out into the world was when I truly began to appreciate and understand the music we had all made together. It is also when I began to understand myself and the music I eventually wanted to write. It is a strange but important feeling to realize that you have changed but to also realize that change is an important part of the process of finding yourself.

The second movement stems from a vivid dream my father had and recounted for me and the title, Coming Home, came from an article written by composer Steven Stucky. Steven’s words speak to how everyone—even the most original and innovative artists—come from somewhere. It is a beautiful reflection on how to find your own way while acknowledging the people and the places from which you come, and it has stuck with me for a long time. In many ways, this piece, this metaphor, is a way to say thank you to all of my mentors and teachers.

The last movement, And the trees clap for winter, was inspired by a conversation I had with my son, Izaak, when he was three years old. For the first time, he had noticed the leaves changing colors and falling off the trees, and, in his innocent and somewhat concerned voice, he asked me what was happening. I told him about the change of the seasons and mustered an explanation for how this cycle is all a very natural and important part of life. Izaak paused for a moment and described the movement of the trees as the “trees clapping for winter.” This final movement is a dance, at times dark and earthy and at other times ecstatic and radiant. Ultimately, it is a celebration of the past and those who have set a path before us as well as the future and the change that will come.

What Is Written On The Leaves – 1. I no longer recognize my hands

What Is Written On The Leaves – 2. Coming Home

What Is Written On The Leaves – 3. and the trees clap for winter

Demo recording Dec. 12 2019
Curtis Orchestra

On remembering, ceasing to be- I. Look back

Composer and Person
Lecturer of Composition and Theory - Georgia State University School of Music
www.marclemaymusic.com

These Violent Delights - for orchestra

Marc LeMay Music

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