This is a live performance with The President's Own Marine Band with Jason Fettig, conducting.

Program note:
My wife’s grandfather was an extraordinary man. He was an immigrant who walked around quoting poetry and whistling tunes from his childhood in Scotland. Like a character from a movie he always seemed to pull just the right verse for the occasion.

 
In the spring of 2007, he fell into a coma following a severe stroke. After weeks of being in this state he awoke and said: 

 
In mist or cloud…

 …on mast or shroud… 

…It perched for Vespers nine… 

…Whiles all the night… 

…through fog-smoke white, 

Glimmered the white moon-shine. 

 
These were the final words of a man who always chose the right words. Within the hour he was gone. 

 
Not recognizing the verse, I immediately ran to Google to decipher what message the old man could have been delivering.

 
The verse is from the famous poem of condemnation and redemption, “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner”. The poem is the story of a mariner condemned to travel the earth telling his tale of hubris and punishment in search of redemption. The mariner shot an albatross for no other reason than he felt like it and then suffered the wrath of both death and living-death for his gall. 

 
The verse my wife’s grandfather quoted is the verse immediately before the one containing the ill-fated murder of the albatross. As they say, the calm before the coming storm. 

 
My work entitled, “It perched for Vespers nine,” on a surface level engages the imagery from the verse itself. But at the emotional core of the work is my trying to work out what my wife’s Pop Pop might have been trying to tell us about what awaits us “In mist or cloud”.

 
It perched for Vespers nine was commissioned by the American Bandmasters Association and the University of Florida. For performance materials or any additional questions please contact:

www.billholabmusic.com

Buy Studio Recording

It Perched For Vespers Nine (LIVE The President's Own Marine Band)

This is the Studio Recording of Asimov's Aviary by The Chief's Own United States Air Force Band (2013).

In 1974, Isaac Asimov [creator of the three laws of robotics and father of modern technology based science fiction] predicted in his short story, "That thou art mindful of them," that before humanoid androids would be accepted into mainstream society, robotic birds and insects would be created to desensitize the population.

While writing this piece, I frequently imagined Asimov dreaming of an aviary far in the future where robotic insects and birds were given life and flew around in constant electronic swarms.

Amazingly, this work has begun. At the Air Force Research Lab at Wright Patterson's "Micro-Aviary," these robotic insects and birds—or micro-drones, as the press has dubbed them—are being developed and put into the field as part of a whole host of projects including weather management and environmental monitoring.

However, as anyone who has read "I, Robot" or "The Naked Sun" will know, where there is potential for light in technological innovation, there is also the potential for darkness.

The piece features tightly woven canonic lines that form a furious web [swarm?] of contrapuntal activity over very slow moving [inevitable?] metallic drones.

Asimov's Aviary was commissioned by The United States Air Force Band "The Chief's Own" and is dedicated to the men and women at the Air Force Research Lab at Wright-Patterson and premiered at the 2012 Midwest Band and Orchestra Clinic.

For more information, please go to www.joelpuckett.com/asimov

Asimov's Aviary [USAF Official Recording]

Tabula Rasa Demo 2010

Winter Sun Rough Mix

When The Earth Stands Still

An energetic concert closer with percussive syllables as text. 

Fusion

Eva/Jamaican Folksong

Sung by Don Macdonald, Available from ECS Publishing. 

http://ecspublishing.com/

When The Earth Stands Still/TTBB/Don Macdonald

RECORDED LIVE at Helzberg Hall, The Kauffman Center in Kansas City.
Northwestern University Symphonic Wind Ensemble—Mallory Thompson, conducting.

Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?
That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the 
current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the 
past nor the shadow of the future?
– Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha


This quotation serves as the inspiration and soul of Joel Puckett’s that secret from the river, which approaches the idea of the river from the abstraction of sound. The composer says of his creative process:
I have a very odd relationship with the past. I am constantly forced to confront past choices I've made in the form of the music I've written which I then experience in the present. When I hear music I've written, 
I am almost always overwhelmed by the feeling that I'm not actually the person who wrote it. And in a very real sense, I'm not; at least, not anymore. But when I hear it, I feel compelled to be grateful that the 
person who did write that music left the very best of himself in those notes and I go about my life trying to live up to them.

In a sense, the metaphor of Hesse’s river is applied to the life of any person. Can any of us exist outside of the perspective of the absolute present, and are we still the same person as we were in the past or will be in the future? 
With art, the common predilection is to observe the creator’s oeuvre through a synchronic lens, assuming all works are created by the same person fixed in time rather than to take into account the evolution not just of the artists’ craft, but also of the artists themselves. In that secret from the river, Puckett deals with this concept in a personally meaningful way through a lengthy study in motivic reference and thick, seemingly mystical harmonies.
The work as a whole is cast in two large sections: first, an exploration of pure harmonies that are made distorted and hazy through glissandi into sound masses, and second, a series of variants on a familiar harmonic motive. For much of the later portions of the piece, sections of the Hesse quotation are printed to accompany the score in a quasi-
programmatic fashion. These fragments, positioned out of order, further lend to the concept of universal existence outside of time presented by the quotation itself.

That secret from the river was commissioned by Northwestern University in celebration of the completion of the Patrick 
G. and Shirley W. Ryan Center for the Musical Arts and is dedicated to Mallory Thompson and the members, past and 
present, of the Symphonic Wind Ensemble.

that secret from the river (LIVE in KC)

Original choral work written by Don Macdonald
https://donmacdonaldmusic.com/product/winter-sun/

Wind Band Transcription by Sara Sulyma

Demo recording by Encore: The Concert Band (London, Ontario)

For purchase, please visit: https://donmacdonaldmusic.com/product/winter-sun-concert-band/

To light,
to water,
and the flow of birds
through ancient stars.
To the wild sun of winter
startling the dark green
trees: giants
of majestic silence.
To snow on roofs
and the peace of Sunday.
To quiet and certitude,
to breathing, to air.
To acceptance, to dreams.
To disclosures of the sleeping heart,
for air, for light.

Malca Litovitz

Winter Sun

Sara Sulyma

Related tracks