I love the feeling of snow falling.  I like to walk outside or cross country ski when the snow is falling, and it's a feeling that I tried to create with this piece.

Dan Kocurek plays flugal horn and trumpet for this recording!

Winter

A concert work for an advancing cello student.  I wanted to create a piece that is fun that people want to play.

My friend Luke Kim provides an amazing cello performance for this recording!

Hidden Garden

Have you ever bounced a baby on your knee and started singing?  Well, have you?  Chances are if you do, and you start to sing, a melody like this one might come out.

02 Playtime

Time to get up, baby.  This was the last song I wrote for the cycle but it completes the overarching concept of a day in the life of a baby.  Those with discerning ears will note that I quote later songs in the earlier songs to add a sense of consistency to the cycle as a whole.  

01 Morningtime

This is the first in a 4 song cycle that handles dealing with hardships in life.  These are things that the singer, Paul Williamson has experienced in his life.  Predictably, he gives a chilling performance.  


Despair - Songs about Suffering

In this track, the singer delivers a tuneful and emphatic melody (and message) while the piano chimes in, conveying the true wickedness of the text.  

Paul Williamson, a distinguished Jamaican Canadian tenor, waxes poetically, singing white supremacist tropes with conviction.  As someone who has experienced racism first hand, he is well acquainted with the sick and perverse false victim mentality adopted by these individuals.  It is a shocking role reversal to hear a visible minority sing these ideologies.
  
While I am aware that I have substantially limited the number of performers who can sing these songs, I thought it more important to write something truly powerful and meaningful for such an extraordinary talented singer.  

The Darkest Evil - Songs About Suffering

These are the last two songs which are performed 'attacca' or one right after the other.

The Bully: When I was in grade 5, I distinctly remember a group of older boys who were intent on doing me grievous bodily injury.  They were planning on getting off at my bus stop but when they had exited before me, I stayed on the bus and got off at the end of the line.  When I was sneaking down an alleyway I saw one of them peer out from behind a fence near the road....

Suicide:  Normally, people kill themselves because it is an escape from reality.  They want to make 'it' stop, whatever that might be.   In this cycle, the main character has experienced despair, depression, and an intense amount of physical trauma at the hands of bullies.  The churning, aggressive music suddenly becomes eerily calm, gorgeous, and yet somehow hollow.  It is really terrible how so many young people simply cannot cope and opt to take their own lives as a strategic means of escape.  

This whole song cycle should probably have a trigger warning.

Bully & Suicide - Songs about Suffering

This is my first attempt at the artsong genre.  When I was searching for a text, I opened my 20th century poetry anthology and I started reading this poem where the words were absolutely pregnant with music.  It was like the words were singing to me.

This is a hugely important topic so I felt a huge sense of responsibility when setting this text to music and I'm quite pleased with the result.  In fact, this is possibly one of only a handful of works I am pleased with from my undergrad.  

Performers:  Cary Denby - Piano.  Andrea Truderung - Soprano.

Anorexic
Eavan Boland

Flesh is heretic.
My body is a witch.
I am burning it.

Yes I am torching
her curves and paps and wiles.
They scorch in my self denials.

How she meshed my head
in the half-truths
of her fevers

till I renounced
milk and honey
and the taste of lunch.

I vomited
her hungers.
Now the bitch is burning.

I am starved and curveless.
I am skin and bone.
She has learned her lesson.

Thin as a rib
I turn in sleep.
My dreams probe

a claustrophobia
a sensuous enclosure.
How warm it was and wide

once by a warm drum,
once by the song of his breath
and in his sleeping side.

Only a little more,
only a few more days
sinless, foodless,

I will slip
back into him again
as if I had never been away.

Caged so
I will grow
angular and holy

past pain,
keeping his heart
such company

as will make me forget
in a small space
the fall

into forked dark,
into python needs
heaving to hips and breasts
and lips and heat
and sweat and fat and greed.

Disclaimer:  This poetry was set within the context of a university program and this piece has not been performed outside of a learning environment.  The rights of the text belong to the poet and her publisher and this music is posted for educational purposes only.  


Anorexic

A beginner string piece in the style of Joe Hisaishi.  Viola performed by Rosie Samter.



The White Princess

Emanuel Aguilar has become kind of a mascot for this Facebook "Djent Shitposting" group.  He plays mean sport guitar, which is really fast, and very chromatic sounding.  It reminds me of an atonal rendition of the flight of the bumblebee, a comparison which is admittedly somewhat charitable.  

I was commenting on how his playing might just work over crushing, atonal riffs so I decided to give it a go to see just how well it will work.  

This is what happened.


Emanuel, Huggs brotherrr.  We are together.



Gear list, for people who care.

Drums: GGD Modern and Massive.  
Guitar: Ibanez RG7421 1999, from Japan.  Hipshot Bridge, BKP Juggernauts.

Schecter Diamond Series Custom Chop 24 fret 35" scale bass with MJ pickups.  Bridge pickup. 

Amp: Revv Generator 120.
Torpedo live.  
Britgreen + SM57 impulse.  Green Channel.
Revv close back 4 x 12 + SM57 impulse.  Red Channel.

Bass: Green channel.

Cleans Britgreen with Blue channel and Source Audio Ventris for delay.

Emil Levasseur

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