Two trios, when we three meet (1999) for clarinet, bassoon, and piano and creation fables (2005) for flute, cello, and piano.  Soon to be stop-motion animated short films by Elizabeth Phelps.

@whencreationfablesmeet

when creation fables meet

Three Mass Movements (Kyrie, Sanctus, Agnus dei) performed by Dr. David Hurd and the Choir of St. Mary the Virgin, NYC as part of the Solemn Mass, First Sunday in Lent, March 6, 2022.  The mass also has a complete setting of the Credo.

Lenton Ordynary

Theme song for the fictional "Jack Harrod Show," the focus of the action of the play _What Passes for Comedy_ by G.D. Kimble produced by The Chain Theatre, NYC, October 28 - November 19, 2022, directed by Rick Hamilton. Performed by the Dickinson College Faculty Jazz Quintet.  Jeff Wohlbach, trumpet.  Greg Strohman, piano and trombone.  David Zygmunt, drums.  Jim Miller, bass.  Tom Strohman, saxes.  Recorded by Patrick Oh,

What Passes for Comedy

Pound was commissioned by the late Lloyd Arriola in 2014 to compose this exceptional work. Arriola, an extraordinary and daring pianist, a graduate of the Juilliard School, an opera conductor and freelance musician, requested a one-hour virtuosic piano work, epic in scope, as well as in its technical and expressive demands; a 21st-Century “Hammerklavier,” he said. Only 15 minutes of the work were completed when Lloyd died in 2016 at the age of 43.  Pound completed the sonata in summer of 2021, and Charles Hulin, Lloyd’s closest friend, premiered it in Lloyd’s honor at the Lasker Music Festival in North Carolina in July 2022. This recording is from Hulin’s reprisal at Dickinson College, September 16, 2022.

Sonata In Memoriam Lloyd Arriola

Dedicated to the memory of Ryan Anthony (1965-2020), former member of Canadian Brass and Principal Trumpet of the Dallas Symphony who premiered this work at the 1994 June in Buffalo Festival.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Anthony

Original Compositions 1991-1997 (II)

Post-Jurisimprudence Conferentiality

Baldwin Wallace University Conservatory of Music

I. brutal accession

II. ritual hunt for closure

III. meditation on absence

IV. litany of memories

V. dissolution of prophecies

1 movement of 25-minute string quartet (2003).  Premiere performance by the Corigliano Quartet, Spring 2003.

Lina Bahn, vn | Michael Jinsoo Kim, vn | Melia Watras, va | Jeffrey Zeigler, vc

About the performers:
http://www.coriglianoquartet.com/
http://www.michaeljinsoolim.com/Home2008.html
http://music.colorado.edu/faculty/lina-bahn/
http://www.meliawatras.com/
http://jzcello.com/

The movements of this work are based on traditional string quartet types: two lengthy fast movements reminiscent of the scope and character of movements that might begin and end a quartet; one slow, lyrical movement; and two short, light, scherzo-like movements.  The movements range in duration from just under three minutes to about five and a half minutes.
All movements of the quartet employ the same five-chord harmonic vocabulary, but each movement treats this harmonic vocabulary differently.  The lyrical, slow movement, “blossoming,”  begins with a lengthy solo for the second violin and comprises a series of gradually unfolding melodies derived from each of the five chords.  The two fast movements give broad, thorough expositions and explorations of the chords in lengthy, continuous progressions, and they each explore one of the ensemble’s registral extremes: “shaky ground” scrambles in the depths, thereby featuring the cello, while “bird’s eye-view” dangles from the heights, featuring the first violin.  The two scherzo-like movements play capricious tricks with the sequence of harmonies.  “Riddle games” poses musical riddles, incomplete statements of the chord progression, and then reveals the missing chord as the answer to each riddle.  At once the most and the least dance-like of the movements, “puckish: dance it trippingly” begins with straightforward, rhythmic and melodic repetitions, but it gradually reels in each phrase, little by little, omitting a segment each time, thereby creating successively longer silences between each phrase; finally, we are left with only one of the five chords which in turn is dismantled by the viola alone. 
Like the order of the basic materials within each movement, the order of the movements is variable, to be determined by the musicians.


String Quartet in five Movements: bird's eye view

25-minute work for clarinet, bassoon and piano.  Performance by Caren Levine, piano; David Griffiths, clarinet; Evan Lewis, bassoon.

When We Three Meet
(1999)

(in ten sections performed as one continuous movement)
i. foul is fair (trio) ii. scherzo: upon the heath (reprise) (clarinet, bassoon)
iii. fog and filthy air (clarinet) iv. hurly burly’s battle (clarinet, piano)
v. thunder, lightning  (piano) vi. done, lost and won (bassoon, piano)
vii. thunder and rain  (piano) viii. set of sun (bassoon)
ix. scherzo: upon the heath (clarinet, bassoon) x. fair is foul (trio)


Notes on the Work

The uncommon combination of instruments that this commission required certainly influenced my choice of extra-musical themes for this work, and the fact that the piece was to be for a trio automatically recalled the opening scene of Macbeth.  The title crystallized instantly thereafter.
The title, in turn, suggested a very general concept for the shape of the piece and the function of the ensemble in it .   The opening scene of Macbeth depicts the parting of the three witches, as if we have just discovered them at the end of the witching hour.  So I decided to treat the work as a divergence of the three musical parts into duos and solos that eventually converge again in the finale.  Thus the opening and closing sections (i. foul is fair and x. fair is foul) are points at which the three instruments’ parts complement one another in a tightly interdependent unit, as if we were watching the three witches in their conjuring or even in a bizarre, shadowy dance, arms interlocked, moving as one.  As the instruments go their several ways, the piece extends to the extreme registers.  The piano carries the work to the very highest register and links the very high register to the lowest register.  From there, the convergence of the three parts brings the work back to the middle register in which it began, another way in which the three meet.
Formally, the work is a typical sonata cycle turned inside-out.  I took this opportunity to re-explore those familiar old forms (sonata-allegro, ternary, binary and rondo), but, rather than beginning with an expansive sonata-form first movement, it seemed natural to make the beginning and end of the work the trio (usually the middle of a sonata’s third movement).  This tied in nicely with the witches-dance scenario and provided interesting possibilities for the shaping of the rest of the work.  The usual first movement becomes the climactic, middle section of registral extremes (iv. hurly burly’s battle – vii. done lost and won).  As if held to a fun-house mirror, the other movements become diminutive in comparison to the opening and closing trio: the light, fast rondo which commonly ends a sonata becomes the clarinet solo (iii. fog and filthy air), and the slow ternary movement which is typically the sonata’s introverted second movement becomes the bassoon solo (viii. set of sun).
The inversion of the traditional sonata cycle is reflected in the titles of the sections; those phrases have been inverted from Shakespeare’s original text so as to parallel the musical forms.

1 Witch.  When shall we three meet again
					In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
2 Witch. When the hurly-burly’s done,
					When the battle’s lost and won.
3 Witch. That will be ere the set of sun.
1 Witch.	Where the place?
2 Witch.			Upon the heath.
3 Witch.  There to meet with Macbeth.
1 Witch.  	I come, Graymalkin!
All.			Paddock calls: --anon!--
			Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
				Hover through fog and filthy air.
							[Witches vanish.

				Shakespeare: Macbeth, Act I, scene i.  


In spite of all the piece’s obvious symmetry, the work is not a pure palindrome.  The harmonic design is a process of motion from purely chromatic/dissonant harmony (the clarinet solo) to purely diatonic/consonant harmony (bassoon solo) via the mediation of the piano.  Together with rhythmic coordination and registral moderation, a harmonic balance between the extremes of dissonance and consonance is heard in the trio which begins the piece and to which it returns, when the three meet. 

when we three meet

Music for Percussion- I B fuer E

25-minute composition for flute, cello and piano.  Premiere performance.  Jennifer Oh-Brown, fl; Kurt Fowler, vc; Jennifer Blyth, pn.

creation fables
a cosmology in songs for flute, cello and piano (2005)

“To create a symphony is to create a world.”  Gustav Mahler
Inspired by Mahler’s declaration, I have also aspired for my compositions to be complete worlds, new universes with their own logic and laws, peopled with their own consciousnesses.  creation fables chronicles the evolution of such a world from primordial plasma through the stages of its formation, maturity, and destruction.
Most of the work’s ten sections take the shape ABABCBB, the same pattern that frames most contemporary popular songs.  Only the chorale and the chaotic section (“bang”) do not take that form.  So this composition is, in a sense, a series of songs.  
The songs are not an illustration of either religious or scientific cosmologies, though the work uses parts of both religious belief and scientific theory as models for the development of musical materials.  “fables” in the title indicates that these cosmological vignettes necessarily entail a translation into music.  The term also underscores the folk tradition in which these forms have evolved. They are therefore musical fables in all senses of the definition: fictitious narrative, a legendary story of supernatural happenings, stories intended to enforce a useful truth, esp. one in which animals (or, in this case, musical notes) speak and act like human beings.
o.    aftermath-another new beginning’s end.
(piano solo at first, then with flute and cello)
i.	bang - chaos as atoms and smaller building blocks form the materials of this small
universe followed by a lengthy tranquil section as the process become less
barbaric and more calmly evolutional. (trio)
ii    light from light - light (music of the higher registers) divides into sunlight and
moonlight. (flute and piano)
iii.	water from water - a sea of hydrogen and oxygen atoms bond and divide into water
of the surface (the liquid form, seas, lakes rivers) and waters of firmament
(steam, ice; clouds and air) (cello and piano)
iv.	chorale: seven first words-the governing physical laws of the world solidify (trio)
v.   cloudy air: touchstones beyond reach - the ideal, imaginary, unreal, hoped for,
longed for yet unattainable.  (flute solo)
vi.	devilfish and the deep black (sulfur) sea - the mortal condition, the profane.
(cello solo)
vii.	 invocation and danse sacrale (human consciousness, in which the sacred ideal
and profane reality co-exist, the capacity to defy or transform the laws of the physical world, a capacity by which absolutes of the law are unraveled...if only according to perception) (flute and cello)
viii.  genesis (post apocalypse, the garden for a new world).  A new beginning.

creation fables

4' song for baritone and piano.  Premiere performance: Dana Whiteside, baritone, Alison D'Amato, piano.

parta quies

This is the premiere performance of two arias on texts by Carol Ann Johnston, Professor of English at Dickinson College.  Jonathan Hays, baritone.  Criag Ketter, piano.  The arias belong to an incomplete opera based on the life of John Harrison, inventor of the Maritime Chronometer (https://www.rmg.co.uk/discover/explore/longitude-found-john-harrison) which made the measurement of longitude possible at sea, a world-changing advancement in navigation in the early 18th Century.  The first aria is sung by the character of Admiral Cloudsely Shovell, whose fleet wrecked off the coast of England in 1707, resulting in the death of 2000 sailors and creating a national uproar for a solution to the bedevilling longitude problem.  The second aria is that of John Harrison upon first arriving in London to present his ideas for a chronometer to the Royal Society.

Longitude: Two Operatic Arias

Lyric Sermon for Baritone and Orchestra.  Composed for the 1996 Juilliard School Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Celebration.  Lyrics by the composer based on The Letter from the Birmingham City Jail.  James Martin, baritone. Robert Pound, cond.  The Juilliard Orchestra.

Original Compositions 1991-1997

when waters seethe in tumult

Robert Pound, composer and conductor.
Professor of Music.
Director, Dickinson Orchestra.

RWPound

Pinned to spotlight

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