Fisherman Songs is a song cycle of seven eclectic songs about fishing using the following texts: 
The Fisherman's Prayer (Anon.)
from "Halieutica" (Oppian of Corycus)
The Fisherman (W. B. Yeats)
Nighttime (Ken Abrames)
The Baite (John Donne)
The Fishing Rod (Shen Yüeh)
As Above, So Below (Henry David Thoreau)

featuring Christopher Herbert, baritone and Timothy Long, piano

Fisherman Songs

"Two of Cups" is a duo for clarinet and viola with a duration of approximately 8:30. It was composed in Manhattan in 1999.

The Two of Cups is one of fourteen cards from the Suit of Cups from the 78-card Tarot deck. Cups correspond to the Hearts of everyday playing cards. In general, Cups represent love, happiness, gaiety and joy. The Two of Cups specifically stands for love, passion, understanding, cooperation and partnership. Pictured on the 15th century Visconti-Sforza deck are two golden goblets entwined in flowering vines. There is an inscription on a banner that reads, "amor mio." 

The form of the piece is the alternation between an A and B section. The A section is always monophonic and the B section is always polyphonic. With each cycle, the A and B sections expand in time, pitch and rhythm.

Mark Gustavson, Clarinet and Boris Deviatov, viola

Two of Cuups

Two of Cups by Mark Gustavson

Techno Parade is a virtuosic trio for flute, clarinet, and piano. 
Flute, Bonnie McCabe; Mark Gustavson, clarinet; Jad Bernardo, piano. This a performance from Adelphi Performing Arts Center.

Techno Parade

Techno Parade by Guillaume Connesson

Lord, suffer me to catch a fish so large that
even I in talking of it afterward shall have no
need to lie.
—Anonymous


Fisherman's Prayer

A bite, hurrah! the length'ning of the line extends,
Above the tugging fish the arch'd reed bends:
He struggles hard, and noble sport will yield
My leige, ere wearied out he quits the field.
See how he swims up, down, and now athwart
The rapid stream—now pausing as in thought;
And now you force him from the azure deep:
He mounts, he bends, and with resilient leap
Bounds into air!
—Oppian of Corycus


Halieutica

Although I can see him still,
The freckled man who goes
To a grey place on a hill
In grey Connemara clothes
At dawn to cast his flies,
It's long since I began
To call up to the eyes
This wise and simple man.
All day I'd looked in the face
What I had hoped 'twould be
To write for my own race
And the reality;
The living men that I hate,

The dead man that I loved,
The craven man in his seat,
The insolent unreproved,
And no knave brought to book
Who has won a drunken cheer,
The witty man and his joke
Aimed at the commonest ear,
The clever man who cries
The catch cries of the clown,
The beating down of the wise
And great Art beaten down.

Maybe a twelvemonth since
Suddenly I began,
In scorn of this audience,
Imagining a man,
And his sunfreckled face,
And grey Connemara cloth,
Climbing up to a place
Where stone is dark under froth,
And the downturn of his wrist
When the flies drop in the stream;
A man who does not exist,
A man who is but a dream;
And cried, 'Before I am old
I shall have written him one
poem maybe as cold
And passionate as the dawn.'
—W. B. Yeats


The Fisherman

Nighttime is a time when being alone on the shoreline on the rocks or beach with the stars or grey clouds, or blackness of clouds with no moon, can bring you so very close to awareness of the mystery of life that we are witness to. I don't know why this is so and I never will know. I feel it though I feel it so strongly when I walk in those places where no one is except me and other nocturnal beings.

I find the stars on those starry nights speak to me in a place where there are no words, yet I feel an ache to know each of them, a yearning to touch them somehow and there is a strange emptiness in my stomach, a vibration that isn't there and is nonetheless. Then I see a familiar star and the mind grabs my awareness and fixes it on the known. And a voice, I think it's mine, says to no one in particular and me, "The Big Dipper! And where is the North Star? Oh! There it is." And at that moment I spin around and view another star that I do not know and welcome my deliverance from that interruptive voice and renew my wonder at it all again.

Some nights the clouds are strong and black and the blackness of the sky and sea envelope me. In truth I am blind to light for there is none but there is blackness and it is not all the same, and somehow, I do not know why or how, I know where I am and where a fish may be. And I know this is true. I know by the gentle tap he sends to me, to the hand I have that he touches in response to my reaching out to where he lays through my cast. This fish's touch makes it true. In the blackness I see but not light, I see some other way that no one, only nature, teaches and you can touch with this seeing which cannot be described in words but can be felt somehow by all.

Gray nights are very different. They seem joyous late at night. The eyes delight in night skies that are gray, not more than stars though. All the same, gray skies at night are not like nights alone in blackness or under starlight. They are kin to the day, to dawn and dusk and are extensions of them in a way. The light lingers in them. It does, although I do not know how this is true, but it is somehow. And the fish are seen in grayskied nights and the feel of them is different than in blackness or in starlight. For fishing, I'll take the night. It is so very much alive, I'll take the night and the awareness of the mystery of all life and my life it brings. It's the feel of it, just the feel of it and nothing more.
—Ken Abrames


Nighttime

Come live with mee, and bee my love,
And wee will some new pleasures prove
Of golden sands, and christall brookes,
With silken lines, and silver hookes.

There will the river whispering runne
Warm'd by thy eyes, more than the Sunne.
And there the 'inamor'd fish will stay,
Begging themselves they may betray.

When thou wilt swimme in that live bath,
Each fish, which every channell hath,
Will amorously to thee swimme,
Gladder to catch thee, than thou him.

If thou, to be so seene, beest loath,
By Sunne, or Moone, thou darknest both,
And if my selfe have leave to see,
I need not their light, having thee.

Let others freeze with angling reeds,
And cut their legges, with shells and weeds,
Or treacherously poore fish beset,
With strangling snare, or windowie net:
Let coarse bold hands, from slimy nest
The bedded fish in banks outwrest,
Or curious traitors, sleavesilk flies
Bewitch poor fishes wandring eyes.

For thee, thou needst no such deceit,
For thou thy selfe art thine owne bait,
That fish, that is not catch'd thereby,
Alas, is wiser farre than I.
—John Donne


The Baite

Not only does my "cassia boat" drift
"easily and free," But verdant banks are also winding in and out. My light line stirs the tender water plants; The muffled oars arouse a solitary duck. I tap the gunwales, heedless that the sun is setting; Till my dying day 
I'll make this my delight.
—Shen Yüeh


The Fishing Rod

Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had all retired, I have returned to the woods, and partly with a view to the next day's dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me,—anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind. At length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned pout squeaking and squirming to the upper air. It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook.
—Henry David Thoreau


As Above, So Below

Which is Which is for clarinet and 2-channel fixed audio with a duration of ten minutes. The title refers to a moment in Shakespeare’s Macbeth" when the king and queen are clearly out of touch with reality. The fixed audio makes extensive use of the spoken line “Stones have been known to move and trees to speak.” The work explores the edges of perception and between musical sound and noise through the use of granular synthesis. 

This is the world premiere performance by Ford Fourqurean, clarinet at the 2025 edition of the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival at the Sheen Center in Manhattan.

Which is Which

"Quintet" is a clarinet quintet commissioned by the Fromm Foundation. This large scale four movement composition explores  rhythm. This recording is by the Contemporary Chamber Players of the University of Chicago a.k.a. Contempo with the clarinetist Ed Gilmore.

Quintet, first movement

"Jag" is a one movement chamber music piece composed in 1991 while the composer was living in lower Manhattan on South Williams Street. The odd instrumentation represents the now disbanded ensemble the piece was composed for. This recording is by the New York City ensemble Either/Or. 

Quintet, second movement

The first movement of "A Fool's Journey" presents the Fool of the Tarot in the form of a wandering and laughing piccolo solo accompanied by a barking dog, the piano, and the sound of the bells worn by the Fool to remind him to stay alert. The melodic material throughout is inspired by the many forms of laughter. The entire work, in fact, is a catalog of laughter that is notated from real life some of which heard from my window in Manhattan. "A Fool's Journey" was commissioned and premiered by Parnassus at Merkin Hall in New York City in 1999.

Contemporary ClassicalChamber MusicAvantgarde


A Fool's Journey, first movement

What if? for bass/baritone, bass clarinet, percussion, piano, double bass and female chorus

1.  Prelude - Jacob Rhodebeck, piano; Mark Gustavson, percussion 

2. Scene One - (midi realization) the cello is substituting for the solo baritone/bass.

Text for scene one
When I was a windy  boy and a bit
And the black spit of the chapel fold, 
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of women),
I tiptoed shy in the gooseberry wood,
The rude owl cried like a tell-tale tit,
I skipped in a blush as the big girls rolled
Nine-pin down on donkey's common,
And on seesaw sunday nights I wooed
Whoever I would with my wicked eyes,
The whole of the moon I could love and leave
All the green leaved little weddings' wives
In the coal black bush and let them grieve.

Lament - Prelude and Scene One

"In-Between" is a 2-channel fixed audio electroacoustic work.

This piece presents two complementary musical characterizations that appear consecutively, yet never overlap in time. The two characterizations oscillate somewhere between the two discrete-yet-interconnected musical elements. The piece also explores becoming/disappearing; organization/entropy; and aims to make sensible that which operates between polarities—the forces that make things whole, yet paradoxically multifaceted and fragmented.

Special thanks to Chris Howard and Jean-François Charles.

Watch the film:  https://vimeo.com/410746584/e09baaa8ea

In-Between

That day, like no other, took forever to pass.  The destruction that occurred on September 11, 2001 left me stunned and numb.  As I watched on television the uniformed workers, doctors and volunteers sacrifice their lives for their fellow citizens I wondered what I could do as an artist.  After some days had passed I felt that an offering in the form of a piece of music would be my humble contribution to the collective conscience.  I would like this piece to help inspire the inner strength and resolute determination that is necessary for us to endure and in turn keep those who died from dying in vain.

Hymn To The Vanished (string orchestra)

Over twenty years ago I composed a sincere and passionate work—a modern hymn—to honor the people who lost their lives on that day. The original work was composed soon after the attack for string orchestra and was presented at Carnegie Hall by the String Orchestra of New York City on May 24, 2002. 

Twelve years later I arranged "Hymn to the Vanished" for clarinet and piano and I performed it with pianist Jad Bernardo on a distinguished faculty recital at Adelphi University.

Hymn To The Vanished (clarinet & piano version) by Mark Gustavson

What is my music? To compose music that is as wonderful as the first works of music I ever heard. I’m trying to create an experience that I call the “musical experience.”  Part of the creation of that effect is making something unexpected happen. It’s a combination of using sounds you think you understand, to create a result you know you don’t understand. I want to compose music that puts me in the position of innocence and recreate the feeling of innocence. Simply, I compose music I want to listen to.

Mark Gustavson

Pinned to spotlight

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