Time Management II- Canons with Interruptions

Performed by Variant 6 

Commissioned by Variant 6 and IlluminArts.

ICU for six vocalists and fixed media is a setting of Brian Turner’s moving and transformative account of end-of-life in the ICU during the time of COVID. The composition follows the quick trajectory of the COVID patient from a healthy participant in life to the final moments in the ICU. The composition opens with the sounds of the city, the subway and people talking on a morning commute, these sounds quickly give way to the sounds of the emergency room with muffled voices and machine alarms. The sounds of the ER transform to digitally altered timbres of burning embers representing the fight to keep a patient alive. Now we are in the ICU where the patient is resting in the long recovery process. Here we find distant and robotic sounds, machine alarms, the ventilator and the cooling sound of flowing water. Finally, this transitions to the sounds of air. It is here, in the final stages of life where the spirit transitions over to the next world, with the voices of both the earth-bound world and the spirits in the afterlife heard in the final moments. Throughout the work the six vocalists guide the listener through the use of repetitive patterns and searing melodies that turn slowly, showing the different sides to view Turner’s text from.  Similarly, Brian Turners moving words show the various facades from which to view the final moments of life in the ICU. Each stanza slightly shifts the perspective of the viewer as we say goodbye to those we love.

The ICU
 
In the ICU, the nurses help us
To say our good-byes, they hold the phones
And whisper—Everything must be said with your eyes.
A lifetime of everything. Joys, regrets, sorrows, delights.
All that we might pour into the word love, one last time. 
 
In the ICU, a lifetime whispers help us
to share our delights, our sorrows, joys, regrets— 
the nurses pour the word love one last time
into the phones they hold, and remind us—
Everything must be said with your eyes.
 
Everything must be said with your eyes
the phones whisper, one last time, as we share
our joys and regrets, our sorrows, our delights,
while the lifetime within us pours love  
into the ICU, into each and every good-bye.

- Brian Turner

On Winter Afternoons

I. Thou Or Aloft Full Dazzling

II. There is a certain slant of light

III.-IV.  Thee for my Recitative/These are the days when birds come back

The Way We Departed (2022) for SSAA vocal ensemble is a setting of poet Ilyse Kusnetz (1966-2016) two poems Twilight and A Hampshire Field at Sunset. I became aware of Kusnetz’s work through her husband Brian Turner, also a poet and whose work I have set before in my Paradise (2006) and ICU (2022). I was drawn to Kusnetz’s intimate settings of love and partnership, and her impressionistic-like passages of the English countryside where many of the poems from her first collection are set. Even though these poems are not from her last book, which explores the cancer that ultimately took her life, they still reflect, or in some deeply spiritual way foreshadow her own passing and loss. 

Both Ilyse and Brian’s poetry are intimately connected; they are different, yet they are cut from the same poetic cloth. Musically, The Way We Departed shares similar melodic lines and textures I composed in setting Brian’s poetry in my Paradise which was written at the same time as Ilyse wrote these poems, only here I recomposed them using Ilyse’s words. It is as if all three of our creative voices are reaching back to a different time and collaborating from beyond the human plane.

The Way We Departed II: A Hampshire Field at Sunset

The Way We Departed I: Twilight

Performed by Variant 6 

Commissioned by Variant 6 and IlluminArts.

ICU for six vocalists and fixed media is a setting of Brian Turner’s moving and transformative account of end-of-life in the ICU during the time of COVID. The composition follows the quick trajection of the COVID patient from a healthy participant in life to the final moments in the ICU. The composition opens with the sounds of the city, the subway and people talking on a morning commute, these sounds quickly give way to the sounds of the emergency room with muffled voices and machine alarms. The sounds of the ER transform to digitally altered timbres of burning embers representing the fight to keep a patient alive. Now we are in the ICU where the patient is resting in the long recovery process. Here we find distant and robotic sounds, machine alarms, the ventilator and the cooling sound of flowing water. Finally, this transitions to the sounds of air. It is here, in the final stages of life where the spirit transitions over to the next world, with the voices of both the earth-bound world and the spirits in the afterlife heard in the final moments. Throughout the work the six vocalists guide the listener through the use of repetitive patterns and searing melodies that turn slowly, showing the different sides to view Turner’s text from.  Similarly, Brian Turners moving words show the various facades from which to view the final moments of life in the ICU. Each stanza slightly shifts the perspective of the viewer as we say goodbye to those we love.

SATB and piano. Text by William Wordsworth.

The Light Of Common Day


Lew Beach is not a beach at all, but rather a very small town in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York where my family has an old farm house which sits on a piece of land that is large enough for no sounds of modern civilization to reach. And while there are times of sheer silent beauty, more often than not there is a frenetic energy that buzzes around you in the summer months. One hears the sounds of thousands of trees blowing in canon as the wind comes through the valley, or the polyphonic cacophony of different animal life from insects to bear sounding simultaneously. At times these sounds are jagged and disjoint (part I), at times they are nearly still and lyrical (part II), and at times they come at you as brutal onslaughts that appear at the more violent moments in nature (part III).  In three uninterrupted sections “Lew Beach” is an impressionistic memory of this land. 


Lew Beach

Visions and Ecstasies, A Mass is a setting of the Latin Ordinary Mass with additional text by early Catholic women mystic writers, and is scored for SATB choir, mezzo-soprano soloist and two pianos. Visions and Ecstasies, A Mass was commissioned by the Saint Martha Concerts® for the Saint Martha-Yamaha Concert Series in Miami, Florida made possible by a grant from Alfred Allan Lewis and Ralph Lutrin.

7. Sanctus

3. Gloria

I first heard of Marc Kaminsky’s moving poems about life before and after the bombing of Hiroshima over a coffee in New Haven, Connecticut, where Patrick Quigley and I were both attending the Yale School of Music. Patrick recited for me a poem in which Kaminsky describes the moment after the bomb exploded, leaving only the shoes of the people who were moments before standing on the train station platform. These were moving, gripping accounts of nuclear destruction, we both wanted to collaborate in the near future on something involving Kaminsky’s words.

Scored for choir, children’s choir, soprano and baritone soloists, and chamber orchestra,the work begins with a brief “awakening” of bells days after the bombing, and moves backwards to the moments of destruction; then in the final minutes, Hiroshima as an industrial city before August 6, 1945. Borrowing much of the form from Benjamin
Britten’s War Requiem, The Road from Hiroshima works on three levels. The soprano/baritone soloists and children’s choir represent the voices whose story is told through Kaminsky’s poetry; the chamber choir, singing the Latin Requiem text represents the voice of human incarnation; and the organ, representing the spirit of
something greater than ourselves. The Latin and English text have been woven together to create not only a lament on suffering and loss, but a visceral experience of life itself in the time of tragedy.

Performance: Seraphic Fire chamber choir, chamber orchestra, and children’s choir premiered and recorded: 5/14/05 Miami, FL.

The Road from Hiroshima

Intro: The Crippled City/ I. Lauds

Orbital Variations for solo cello is a multiple theme and variations that explores the harmonic gravitational pull towards a central pitch, the pitch D. 


C	G	Bb	D	F#	A

The composition begins on D but quickly moves away in the first variation to the distance of two perfect fifths away to the pitch C. As the piece progresses the gravitational forces of D pull the composition back to its original center culminating in the final coda and moving through all six pitch centers on its trajectory back to the pitch D. 


There are seven themes that are first heard in the opening thematic area and are explored in the proceeding six variations. Each variation contains a different pitch center that by the final variation are combined to create a collective theme themselves. 

Throughout the composition there is an acceleration and deceleration of the musical line. Generally speaking as the music encounters the pitch center of each variation the energy and pacing accelerates as it approaches and decelerates as it leaves the pitch center. This is similar to orbital mechanics where a gravitational slingshot occurs when a spacecraft uses the gravity of a planet to accelerate. 

With each variation the thematic material becomes increasingly entangled in the previous variation; the line where one variation ends and the next begins becomes blurred, until the last variation when all of the themes become intertwined, and all of the pitch   centers are recapitulated emerging as a new theme.

Orbital Variations for solo cello

Paradise Live

7. V. Mihrab

Song cycle for mezzo-soprano and ensemble based on text by Harriet Levin. Recorded at Tanglewood's Seiji Ozawa Hall, Lenox, MA. Leena Chopra, mezzo-soprano, Karl Paulnack, conductor

V. Frederick Harding

I. I Imagine Myself Raging

1b. Kyrie

1a. Introit

Stained Glass for reed quintet is inspired by the changing daylight filtered by the stained glass in a cathedral sanctuary. Set in three interlocking movements, Stained Glass uses two chants by Hildegard von Bingen, O Ecclesia and Columba Aspexit, as the melodic core of the composition which are heard in different permutations throughout the work.Stained Glass was written for Splinter Reeds.

Stained Glass

Marshland Elegy

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird is a setting of the Wallace Stevens poem of the same name for four soloists (SATB), piano and percussion and was commissioned by Tony Boutte and the American Voices. 

In a letter, Wallace Stevens said of Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, "This group of poems is not meant to be a collection of epigrams or of ideas, but of sensations." There is something instantaneous and minimalist about each of the thirteen stanzas. Steven’s poem was originally published in 1917 by Alfred Kreymborg in, Others: An Anthology of the New Verse. The poem was also included in Stevens’ first collection of poetry, Harmonium. The work was inspired by the minimalistic forms of haiku and the use of aphorisms. 

The blackbird is the constant throughout the poem and representing many things; time, humankind, nature, society, and emotions. The blackbird is timeless, it is both the observer and the subject of the observed. The blackbird is the focal point of motion throughout, either itself moving across a landscape or observing the motion in others. The poem is also cyclical with the speaker returning to the snowy landscape where the cycle began, this time with the blackbird sitting in stillness, a final heavy resting point, the observer in a land of stillness.

Musically this work is a departure from my previous compositions. While repetition has always been a part of my music, the rather minimalistic use of material, which stems from the poem, is used in new ways in my setting. The musical material itself is meant to invoke a sense of 
timelessness with baroque-like musical passages moving in very un-baroque directions.  The music is meant to call to the past while connecting to the future. The listener is meant to feel pulled somewhere between two periods of time. 

Each of the performers contribute to the performance of the poem in many ways; the singers representing the various characters in the poem, each as soloist and ensemble member, the percussion providing the musical landscape with brittle timbres that include xylophone and crotales, and the piano providing the passage of time, the point of view of the blackbird and the speaker in the text.

Shawn Crouch, composer

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