Julia Sheriff, piano and voice
Lavena Johanson, cello and voice
Evolution Series concert Feb 3, 2015 Baltimore, MD

Spun - movements 1 and 2

VOICES IN MEMORIAM began as a commission from two wonderful and talented pianists:  Leah Hokanson and Daniel Koppelman.  A month after the 9/11 attacks I made a trip to New York and stopped at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.  There I spent a few minutes in a chapel dedicated to the Firefighters of New York.  The sentiments expressed in this shrine were at once universal and specific, and brought home to me the full impact of this tragedy on the individual and collective spirit.  

Hence the 343 tones of the opening piano section create the work’s sound world, and honor the voices of the firefighters lost at the World Trade Center..   The piece itself is an example of this process of change:  once the voices have been stated, there is a significant change of mood, and the sound world of the piece changes its context completely.  Yet memory persists and, in the end, brings us inevitably back to these now-silent yet very audible voices.  In fact, our memories argue convincingly that nothing that we love ever really leaves us.

If the electronics are used, the computer does what computers do best – hold the voices in memory, and bring these memories back, changed – as memories always are – by time and by new experiences and associations.


Voices In Memoriam for piano with optional electronics

Performed and recorded on April 28, 2019 by the Crossroads Quartet:
Kevin Arbogast, soprano sax
Mariah Goulet, alto sax
Vince Buzzelli, bari sax
Colin Brown, tenor sax

Doppler Effect

Setting of Hildegard of Bingen's "Sequence for the Holy Spirit" (English translation by Nathaniel M. Campbell), commissioned by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in celebration of Sir Andrew Davis's final season as their Chief Conductor. Completed in June 2019 and premiered by the MSO, Sir Andrew Davis conducting, on November 22, 2019. This is a recording of the second performance, given on November 23, 2019.

Fire of the Spirit — choir and orchestra

Queen of Heaven is a large-scale composition for piano and electronics, cast as five meditations on the Virgin Mary. Each of the five movements is set in musical materials that both subjectively and symbolically express the composer’s study and experience of scriptural, liturgical and iconographic sources relating to different aspects of her unique place in Christian theology.

The first movement, “Hail, Holy Queen,” imagines the greeting of the Virgin by the hosts of angels, in enormous, sonorous and terrifying voices. The second and fourth movements each take their inspiration from titles for Mary: “Full-of-Grace” from kecharitomene, the Greek word of greeting spoken by the Archangel Gabriel in Luke 1:28; and “The-One-Who-Gives-Birth-To-God” from Theotokos, an ancient liturgical and devotional epithet. These two are divided by “The Unburnt Bush,” based on iconographic and liturgical sources that celebrate the prefiguration of the Virgin in the burning bush of Exodus. The fifth and final movement returns to the heavenly setting of the first, drawing its imagery from Revelation 12: “And a great sign appeared in heaven: A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.”

Queen of Heaven was commissioned by pianist Kari Johnson, and is dedicated to the Most Holy God-Bearer and Ever-Virgin Mary.

Hail, Holy Queen!

Full-of-Grace (Kecharitomene)

The Unburnt Bush

The-One-Who-Gives-Birth-to-God (Theotokos)

The Woman Clothed With the Sun

D-A-N
for flute, clarinet and alto saxophone 

all instruments recorded by Daniel Roncari


Composed and recorded during the second Corona Lockdown
dedicated to Daniel & Nina

«D - A - N»

Every sound produced by an initial attack goes through a stage of decay, and then perhaps lingering a little at a sustaining level, before it is released into silence. There’s something really poetic about what every sound has to go through. The attack is often what gets more attention, but somehow I am alway more drawn to beauty in the decaying of sound. Perhaps, because I am essentially a decaying body, there is something I can relate to. Perhaps dusk is beautiful in a similar way. 


performed by Kenji Bunch

written in May-June 2020.

Dusk(2020)

Laura Whitney-Johnson is a composer based in Kansas City. Her music has been called “neat!” by her dad.

Doppler Effect

Laura Whitney-Johnson

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