An "assembly" of parts of a previous composition, WILD ROSE, LILY, DRY VANILLA  on a text of Emerson. for soprano and chamber ensemble: https://soundcloud.com/matthew-greenbaum/wild-rose-mix

Matthew's Album

TRANSCENDENTAL ASSEMBLY

NAMELESS

YOU CRACK ME UP

From "The Waves (2022)" for soprano and fixed media (section 3). The soprano improvises on the following text:

The sun, risen, no longer couched on a green mattress darting a fitful glance through watery jewels, bared its face and looked straight over the waves. They fell with a regular thud. They fell with the concussion of horses' hooves on the turf. Their spray rose like the tossing of lances and assegais over the riders' heads. They swept the beach with steel blue and diamond-tipped water. They drew in and out with the energy, the muscularity, of an engine which sweeps its force out and in again. The sun fell on cornfields and woods, rivers became blue and many-plaited, lawns that sloped down to the water's edge became green as birds' feathers softly ruffling their plumes. The hills, curved and controlled, seemed bound back by thongs, as a limb is laced by muscles; and the woods which bristled proudly on their flanks were like the curt, clipped mane on the neck of a horse.
In the garden where the trees stood, thick over flowerbeds, ponds, and greenhouses the birds sang in the hot sunshine, each alone. One sang under the bedroom window; another on the topmost twig of the lilac bush; another on the edge of the wall. Each sang stridently, with passion, with vehemence, as if to let the song burst out of it, no matter if it shattered the song of another bird with harsh discord. Their round eyes bulged with brightness; their claws gripped the twig or rail. They sang, exposed without shelter, to the air and the sun, beautiful in their new plumage, shell-veined or brightly mailed, here barred with soft blues, here splashed with gold, or striped with one bright feather. They sang as if the song were urged out of them by the pressure of the morning. They sang as if the edge of being were sharpened and must cut, must split the softness of the blue-green light, the dampness of the wet earth; the fumes and steams of the greasy kitchen vapour; the hot breath of mutton and beef; the richness of pastry and fruit; the damp shreds and peelings thrown from the kitchen bucket, from which a slow steam oozed on the rubbish heap. On all the sodden, the damp-spotted, the curled with wetness, they descended, dry-beaked, ruthless, abrupt. They swooped suddenly from the lilac bough or the fence. They spied a snail and tapped the shell against a stone. They tapped furiously, methodically, until the shell broke and something slimy oozed from the crack. They swept and soared sharply in flights high into the air, twittering short, sharp notes, and perched in the upper branches of some tree, and looked down upon leaves and spires beneath, and the country white with blossom, flowing with grass, and the sea which beat like a drum that raises a regiment of plumed and turbaned soldiers. Now and again their songs ran together in swift scales like the interlacings of a mountain stream whose waters, meeting, foam and then mix, and hasten quicker and quicker down the same channel, brushing the same broad leaves. But there is a rock; they sever.
The sun fell in sharp wedges inside the room. Whatever the light touched became dowered with a fanatical existence. A plate was like a white lake. A knife looked like a dagger of ice. Suddenly tumblers revealed themselves upheld by streaks of light. Tables and chairs rose to the surface as if they had been sunk under water and rose, filmed with red, orange, purple like the bloom on the skin of ripe fruit. The veins on the glaze of the china, the grain of the wood, the fibres of the matting became more and more finely engraved. Everything was without shadow. A jar was so green that the eye seemed sucked up through a funnel by its intensity and stuck to it like a limpet. Then shapes took on mass and edge. Here was the boss of a chair; here the bulk of a cupboard. And as the light increased, flocks of shadow were driven before it and conglomerated and hung in many-pleated folds in the background.
Virginia Woolf - The Waves

The Sun, Risen

recorded by Tara O'Connor and Calvin Wiermsma for upcoming release on the Furious Artists label. Four canons of various types.

VENERABLE CANONS

HEY ABBOTT

HOW THE AXE ESCAPED THE WOODSMAN

A setting of a passage from Bernard de Fontanelle's (1567-1757)"Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes," discussing the possibility of life on other planets:

I never cease to believe that it would be very
strange if the Earth were as inhabited
such as it is, and that the other planets
were not at all; because you must not believe that we see
everything that lives on our planet;
there are as many invisible species of animals as visible ones.
We can see the elephant
down to the maggot, and there our vision stops;
but from the maggot there begins an infinite multitude
of animals of which the maggot is the elephant,
and which our eyes can't perceive without aid.
We've seen with a microscope that very small water droplets, or
vinegar, or other liquors are filled with little fish or little snakes
that we would never have suspected;
and a few scientists believe that it is they
that produce [our perception of] taste, which
is the result of these little animals biting on the tongue.
Mix certain things in a few of these liquors,
or expose them to the sun,
or let them rot;
right away there are new species of little animals.
Many bodies that appear solid are almost completely a
mass of these imperceptible animals,
who have as muchfreedom of movement as is necessary for them.
The leaf of a tree is a
little world inhabited by invisible wormlets to
whom it appears as an immense size, and with its own
mountains and abysses, and who have
no more communication with the wormlets
living on the other side than we do with our antipodes.
It is a powerful argument, it seems to me, that a large planet
should be an inhabited world.
We have found in certain types
of very hard rocks little worms without number,
who were living everywhere in imperceptible gaps, and who fed only
on the substance of these rocks that they gnawed on.
Imagine how many of these little worms there were, and for how
many years their sustenance was the size of a grain of sand.
According to this example, if the moon were merely a mass of rocks
I would rather imagine that it is fed upon by its inhabitants, than that
there are none at all there.
In the end, everything is living; everything is animated. Put together
all these newly discovered animals with those that one can
easily imagine are still to be discovered, as well as those we are
already familiar with; you will most assuredly find that the earth is
quite well-populated, and that nature has so liberally distributed the
animals that it is hard to imagine that we see more than a small
portion of them. Would you believe that on this planet she has pushed
her fecundity to excess, but that she has been of such sterility with
all the others as to produce no life at all?

Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes

THIS IS MY BELOVED: music made with computer

THE WAVES - GREENBAUM

FOUR RECOGNITIONS soundfile III

FOUR RECOGNITIONS soundfile I

FOUR RECOGNITIONS soundfile II

FOUR RECOGNITIONS soundfile IV

Banjo is the first of a series of electronic pieces under the rubric "The Comics"

BANJO

Performed and recorded by Stephanie Griffin

Simplicissimus for viola sola

Greenbaum more venerable canons

More Venerable Canons

Elegy (1998), For Piano

The Cygnus Ensemble, Re'ut Ben Ze'ev, mezzo. Text: Emerson.

Wild Rose, Lily, Dry Vanilla

Sounding Body is made up of the images on the left, converted to sound.

Sounding Body

recorded by Charles Abramovic, for whom they were composed.

Anomalies for piano

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew Greenbaum. Senior professor of composition at Temple University. Lives in Brooklyn.

Matthew Greenbaum

Pinned to spotlight

Popular tracks