Music is filled with depictions of external and internal tempest. 

A thunderstorm in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony interrupts peasant revelry found in its Scherzo during a Graecian scene of centaurs depicted in Disney’s Fantasia.  Stokowski conducted that performance with the Philadelphia Orchestra on the first stereo soundtrack in commercial film.  

Stormy times.  They find their way into the first act of Wagner’s Die Walküre, in Eine Alpensinfonie of Richard Strauss, and in Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes.  They line song in every language and adorn rainmaking pleas in drought.  Cloudbursts and snow, evoked by voices, share conjured meanings of nature and beyond.

Cross-temporal storm musings are presented here.  Sonoran Storm for solo viola by Nokuthula Ngwenyama unites the descriptive and symbolic.  Byron Adams’s Sonata for viola and piano explores emotional turbulence.  Morpheus, Rebecca Clarke’s tone poem for viola and piano, hints at arising lassitude in the wake of extremis, while Franz Liszt meditates on quiet - even rueful - gusts of half-forgotten love in Romance Oubliée: the only piece he composed for viola and piano.

Chief Engineer: David Nichols
Recording Engineer: Ben Taylor
Assistant Engineer: Victor Appiah-Kubi
Recording Supervisor: Dian Baker
Mastering: Warren Sokol
Notes: Byron Adams and Nokuthula Ngwenyama
Photography: Scott Bain
Painting: Nancy Pfau

Recorded at 513 Analog (Track 1) and Katzin Concert Hall (Tracks 2-7)
Track 1 published by Thulamusic: www.thulamusic.com
Tracks 3-6 published by Editions Bim: www.editions-bims.com  
Edited at Scottsdale Music Company
Mastered at United Mastering

Produced by Nokuthula Ngwenyama

Sonoran Storm

'A Bishop's Processional' was commissioned by Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church to commemorate Bishop Thomas' 30 year anniversary with the congregation.  It premiered November 9, 2014 in Phoenix, AZ at his celebratory Sunday services.  

It was recorded December 9, 2016 by Nokuthula Ngwenyama with the Janacek Philharmonic Orchestra, Anthony Armore conducting. 

Thanks to engineering team Pavel Kunčar and Jakub Stratílek in the Czech Republic and David Nichols in the United States for the time, energy and effort with this project.            

Deep gratitude to Richard Yarbough and the entire congregation of Pilgrim Rest for the encouragement and support of my first professional commission.  

Produced by Nokuthula Ngwenyama

Published by Thulamusic

A Peace Mama Production

'A Bishop's Processional' for Solo Violin and String Orchestra

PMP pre-release of 'It's You' for high voice and orchestra, performed here by soprano Alison Buchanan with the Janacek Philharmonic Orchestra, Anthony Armore conducting.  Kerry Jackson joins on electric and bass guitar, and Gary Bruzzese joins on drums.  Violin solo performed by Nokuthula Ngwenyama.

Ostrava, Czech Republic sessions:
Sound engineer: Jakub Stratílek
Recording director: Pavel Kunčar
Sound assistant: Ondřej Nakládal

Scottsdale and Phoenix, Arizona USA sessions:
Chief engineer: David Nichols
Assistant engineer: Victor Appiah-Kubi

Composed and produced by Nokuthula Endo Ngwenyama

Published by Thulamusic

A Peace Mama Production
2022

'It's You' for high voice and orchestra

This is the last movement of Concerto for Viola and Orchestra performed by Nokuthula Ngwenyama with the Janacek Philharmonic Orchestra, Anthony Armore conducting. 

Ostrava, Czech Republic
Sound engineer: Jakub Stratílek
Recording director: Pavel Kunčar
Sound assistant: Ondřej Nakládal

Scottsdale and Phoenix, Arizona USA 
Chief engineer: David Nichols
Assistant engineer: Victor Appiah-Kubi

Los Angeles, CA USA
Mastered by Warren Sokol at United Mastering 

Published by Thulamusic

Produced by Nokuthula Ngwenyama 

A Peace Mama Production

Nokuthula Ngwenyama

Sonoran Storm For Viola & Orchestra

Sonoran Storm For Solo Viola (Single)

Romance Oubliée for viola and piano
Franz Liszt (1811-1886)

By the time he published Romance Oubliée for viola and piano in 1881, Franz Liszt had given up whirlwind years of touring and taken minor orders in the Roman Catholic Church.  This gave the composer, who was a great favorite of Pope Pius IX, the right to sign his name as ‘Abbé Liszt.’  The ‘forgotten romance’ was composed while, as a guest of Gustav Adolf, Cardinal Prince of Hohenlohe-Schillingfürst at Villa d’Este, Liszt received a sheet from an 1848 piano piece “written for Madame Joséphine Koscielska” to review for publication.  It had been based on a song written for a mysterious ‘Madame Pavlov’ in that same year.

An aging Liszt transformed ‘O, pourquoi donc’ for viola virtuoso Hermann Ritter nearly forty years later, transmuting prima materia into gold.  Sixteen measures from the original version reconfigure in the evanescent style of his late music.  As Friedrich Schnapp, the musicologist who uncovered its origins, justly observed, Romance Oubliée “can really be regarded as an entirely new composition.”

Romance Oubliée - Franz Liszt

Sonata for viola and piano (2010-11)
Byron Adams (b. 1955)

Byron Adams began composing the Sonata for viola and piano after a series of eye operations.  Unable to read over several months, he recuperated by immersion in Beethoven’s string quartets.  Upon an improvement of sight and return to composing, he learned of the death of William “Chip” Mahon, a kind and gentle friend.  The Sonata for viola and piano is a musical response to that loss and dedicated to his memory.

It is cast in four movements with primary thematic material drawn from a stormy opening statement.  In a variant of sonata form, a sinister clarion call in the piano heralds the beginning of the development section.  The second movement is a lilting and melancholy siciliana.  The third movement is a funeral procession with the viola in somber lament.  In the finale - a sonata rondo in which themes from previous movements reappear in different forms - the music hurtles towards brusque, dismissive conclusion.  Nokuthula Ngwenyama and Eckart Sellheim gave its world premiere on December 2, 2012 in a recital presented by the Da Camera Society of Los Angeles.

Sonata For Viola & Piano IV. Allegro Risoluto - Byron Adams

Sonata For Viola & Piano III. Adagio Molto E Mesto - Byron Adams

Sonata For Viola & Piano II. Allegretto Grazioso, Ma Un Poco Malinconico - Byron Adams

Sonata For Viola & Piano I. Allegro - Byron Adams

Morpheus for viola and piano (1917-18)
Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979)

Rebecca Clarke enjoyed disturbances of a storied life.  She studied at the Royal College of Music with the redoubtable Sir Charles Villiers Stanford as one of few women in composition.  She quarreled with a tyrannical Victorian father who ejected her from the family home.  Her undergraduate professor proposed to her and later bequeathed a Stradivarius violin.  She dated younger for a time.  Also among the first women to play in a British orchestra, she supported herself professionally as a violist. 

The pinnacle of her career came in the early 1920s when, while living in New York, she wrote the Viola Sonata (1919) and Trio for violin, cello and piano (1921).  Continuing to perform, she toured internationally before returning to England.  Trapped in New York visiting her brothers at the outbreak of the Second World War, Clarke took position as a governess in Connecticut.  In 1944, a chance Manhattan street meeting with James Friskin, a Scottish pianist and pedagogue whom she had known at the Royal College of Music, resulted in a happy marriage for the quinquagenarians.  Despite Friskin’s attempts to convince Clarke to return to composition, she wrote very little for the rest of her long life, saying, “I can't do it unless it's the first thing I think of every morning when I wake and the last thing I think of every night before I go to sleep.”

The textures in Morpheus for viola and piano, containing passages influenced by both Claude Debussy and British theosophist and composer Cyril Scott, evoke bittersweet tendrils of sleep.  Roman poet Ovid describes him the god of languorous dreams, and morphine is his namesake.  Rebecca Clarke played its critically successful premiere under pen name ‘Anthony Trent’ at New York’s Aeolian Hall with pianist Katherine Ruth Heyman on February 13, 1918.

Morpheus - Rebecca Clarke

Sonoran Storm for solo viola (2016)
Nokuthula Ngwenyama (b. 1976)

Humidity rises in the desert.  That scorch blaster hitting the face feels fuller and expectant upon exit.  Haboob dust causes a metal gate to clang.  It’s bulging brown outside.   Feet scamper across parched earth as clouds approach.  Expanding into the atmosphere, they amass to quench aridity’s obsession.

 Anti-trades carry sea moisture across Baja California to the Sierra Madres during the monsoons.  It drifts north across el Camino del Diablo and swirls above the Mogollon Rim.  Cumulus giants, made stronger by el Niño, dwarf the eastern landscape.  The sun sets, the earth cools, and the desert braces for thermal dynamism.  Tree branches partner with updrafts while downdrafts pelt the land.  Angular veins shoot through darkness.   

 Thunder rumbles with an abusive baritone’s vigor while the saguaro leads succulents in thirsty supplication, arms toward the sky.

 Static tendrils demand audience: jagged voltage constructs melody in joyful obeisance.  Virga stop teasing as ten miles of heaven drop to the floor (section A). Big weather enjoys a snail-paced game of bumper cars, reforming whilst arboreal cards stand empty.  It’s calm.  Is it over?  Abated leaves bathe in temporary starlight (section B).  But summer westerlies do not relent, and another thunderhead descends.  The romp resumes, culminating in a celebration of renewal and life (section A1).  Sonoran Storm received its world premiere April 15, 2016 in Zipper Hall at The Colburn School in Los Angeles with members of the advanced modern dancers choreographed by Tamsin Carlson.

Sonoran Storm For Solo Viola - Nokuthula Ngwenyama

Primal Message for string quintet by Nokuthula Ngwenyama

Performed by the Dover Quartet and Nokuthula Ngwenyama

Recorded by Chamber Music Northwest on July 6, 2018 at Lincoln Recital Hall, Portland State University

Chief engineer: David Nichols

Recording engineer: Roderick Evenson

Assistant engineer: Victor Appiah-Kubi

Mastering: Warren Sokol at United Mastering

Cover Photo of M13 courtesy of ESA/Hubble and NASA

Produced by Chamber Music Northwest and Peace Mama Productions


It’s 1974.  What should we put in humanity’s first message in a bottle sent 25,000 light years away?  Astronomers Francis Drake (Drake equation), Carl Sagan (Contact) and others created the historic Arecibo message, in which 186 seconds of interstellar radio waves sent a friendly map, our then-understood DNA structure and transmitting technology in binary anthropomorphic organization to globular M13 in our galaxy's Hercules cluster.  
 
The ideas conveyed by Steven Johnson’s New York Times Magazine article Greetings E. T., (Please Don’t Murder Us.) from 6/28/2017, encouragement from the Phoenix Chamber Music Society and Chamber Music Northwest and early days with partner John Clements awakened imaginings about what a “primal message” might sound like.  This assumes other possible life forms hear and feel sound like we do.  Opening off world communication through transverse waves explores existential conveyance under a frayed veil of decorum through form, melody and numbers.  

Primal Message is a fantasia that relies upon primal relationships – duo vs trio textures, modulations through the ii with conventional homage to the V, one voice as the outlier in primal 2 vs 3 vs 5 rhythmic layering, melodic structure descending in seconds and thirds, centering around the fifth, then leaps and the ocassional septuplet.  It invites examination of our collective evolution through a drive to express, tying us in concert with universal celebration.  
 
 
 
Dear Ubiquitous E. T., 
Awaiting your serenade in about 50,000 years.  
Love, 
Earthlings
 
P. S. 
The hub did crumble, 
But the message flows on

Primal Message for string quintet

Welcome to the Thulamusic Soundcloud page, thanks for visiting!  

Nokuthula Endo Ngwenyama (No-goo-TOO-lah En-gwen-YAH-mah) is the first composer in residence with the Phoenix Chamber Music Society.  She is also an international concert artist, director and producer.  She produces 'Composer's Choice' with Phoenix Chamber Music Society and Peace Mama Productions (PMP).  

Winning the Primrose International Viola Competition at age 16 and the Young Concert Artists’ International Auditions six months later launched ‘Thula’s performing career.  A recipient of the Avery Fisher Career Grant, she performs as an orchestral soloist, recitalist and chamber musician throughout the world.  

Her music has been performed by the Detroit, St Louis, Chicago, San Francisco, and Toronto Symphonies, the Orquesta Nacional de España, Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Scottish Chamber Orchestra and London Symphony Orchestra, amongst others.  

The album ‘Sonoran Storm’ - featuring works by Nokuthula Ngwenyama, Byron Adams, Rebecca Clarke, and Franz Liszt with pianist Eckart Sellheim - is available to listen to below.  

New additions include PMP pre-releases of 'A Bishop's Processional' for solo violin and string orchestra and 'It's You' for soprano and orchestra featuring Alison Buchanan and the Janacek Philharmonic with Anthony Armore conducting.

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