Orfei Mors (“The Death of Orpheus”) is cast in two movements (performed without pause) each itself a kind of nesting doll enclosing several shorter pieces within its structure. The narrative is described through quotations from J.B. Greenough’s translation of Virgil’s Georgics, which includes the best known version of the Orphic myth. The first movement, “Clutching vain shadows, yearning,” begins with a cadenza (labeled “…a crash was heard three times in the seas of hell…”) depicting Orpheus’ anguish at the second loss of Eurydice which leads way to a song (“Clutching vain shadows, yearning sore to speak…”) in which Orpheus struggles to give his grief a voice and once again convince the Furies to let him into Hades to claim the soul of Eurydice. The Furies, however, remain unmoved, their apathy represented by the cold, sharp chords performed by the piano, harp and percussion over which the cello weaves a lamenting passacaglia (“Move with what tears the Manes, with what voice the powers of darkness?”). At this point the movement turns back in on itself and the interrupted song is once again taken up, although this time taking on the character of a lost memory rather than a plea (“She indeed even now Death-cold was floating on the Stygian barge!”).

As the song fades into oblivion the sounds of a volta (a relatively quick dance popular in the high Renaissance) waft through the air as a group of “Bacchantes” (the Bassarids, female followers of Bacchus/Dyonisus were known for their “raves” induced through dancing and intoxication) make their way onto our imagined stage (“…Ciconian dames, amid their awful bacchanalian rites…”). This dance music is the lightest, sunniest music in all of Orfei Mors and offers Orpheus a chance at respite and delight, one which he refuses as he remembers his beloved Eurydice (“…lost Eurydice lamenting and the gifts of Dis ungiven…”). For this refusal of the “gifts of Dis” (essentially sacrifice to Venus through re-marriage) the Bassarids “tore him limb from limb and strewed his fragments over the wide fields.” Virgil states, then, that as his soul left him, Opheus’ “death-chilled tongue found yet a voice to cry ‘Eurydice! Ah! Poor Eurydice!’” Orfei Mors fades to a conclusion as the cello, Orpheus’ voice, intones the first few notes of the first movement’s song.

Orfei Mors was commissioned by the Western Piedmont Symphony, John Gordon Ross, Music Director and the Syracuse Society for New Music, Neva Pilgrim, Artistic Director for Cellist Philip von Maltzahnn. It was written in the winter and spring, 2009 in Alexandria, Virginia.

Colorfields was commissioned by and is dedicated to the Hamilton College Orchestra, Heather Buchman, Music Director.

In the fall of 2006 I was teaching a course on the history of the symphony from its origins in Italian opera through to its apparent decline and transformation in the late 20^th century.  The process of teaching this course led me to want to engage the symphonic tradition for the first time since my student days.  Unlike the two symphonies I wrote as a student, which approached the symphonic tradition from an early 20^th century perspective informed by Mahler, Shostakovich and Sibelius, the Chamber Symphony seeks to engage this tradition from a contemporary perspective.  It is scored for a sixteen-piece chamber orchestra rather than a traditional symphony orchestra and a lot of the ensemble writing is lithe and virtuosic, meant to showcase the abilities of the Great Noise Ensemble, for whom the work was written.

The “Illusory Airs” of the subtitle refers to a melody which, while providing the basis for all of the melodic and harmonic material in the entire symphony, is never fully heard in the piece.  In this way, the Chamber Symphony evokes the ways in which we are increasingly connected to people throughout the world through wireless communication and the internet while at the same time remaining surprisingly and increasingly isolated from one another in physical space.   

The first movement, “Hastening Spells,” is primarily concerned with a process of pulse acceleration while maintaining an even tempo throughout.  The result is a piece of increasing tension as events occur at progressively hastening rates.  This gives way, without pause, to a more lyrical movement, “Chanson oubliée” (forgotten song) which presents a transformation of the “illusory air” at the symphony’s core.  The effect is of hearing a melody at once new and familiar.  Throughout this “forgotten song” the percussion, guitar and piano, which throughout the symphony work together as a rhythm section, provide bell chords which serve as a ground bass for the evolving aria.  

The title of the finale, “Lieto Fine,” refers to a specific type of symphonic finale typical of 18^th century symphonies.  These are the traditional “happy endings” of Haydn’s, Mozart’s and Beethoven’s major key symphonies and are traditionally lithe and vibrant in character.  The term here is meant somewhat ironically as the apparent joy prevalent in the movement’s rhythmic vitality is obliterated by the return of the first movement (itself a move reminiscent of 19^th century symphonic models, particularly Brahms’s Third Symphony and Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony), after which the finale cannot return to the mood of careless abandon in which it started, despite the valiant efforts of the woodwinds and rhythm section and the symphony ends in a lonely, unresolved note.  

Ritornello is a brief work for ensemble based on the ritornello (a portion of music which returns relatively unchanged throughout the course of a piece, like the refrain or chorus in a song) in Michael Praetorius’ (1571-1621) motet “Puer Natus in Bethlehem” from the Polyhymnia Caduceatrix et Panegyrica (1619).  I have known this motet for many years and one night I found myself improvising on it and discovered the possibilities it holds within a post-modern, post-minimalist style.  The piece is, essentially, a deconstruction of the motet’s major themes built around the ritornello’s sixteenth-note pulse.  It is not, however, a collage but more of a gloss or free fantasy on the Praetorius original.  The piece begins with an outburst on the first four notes of the ritornello and continues with a quiet sixteenth-note pulse of seething intensity and growing chords.  Fragments from the motet’s opening instrumental “sinfonia” and its first verse are superimposed on these sonorities, which gradually build to a brief, yet incomplete statement of the ritornello.  Finally anticipation gives way to ecstasy and a brief dance in changing meters leads into a full statement of the ritornello theme after which the piece winds itself down to silence with fragments of the motet played “like something misremembered.”

In mood Ritornello owes much to the chorus “Glory to God in the Highest” from part one of Handel’s oratorio, Messiah. In that work the chorus, representing angels, bursts forth as though unable to take the building intensity of the previous recitative, only to vanish like a will-o-the-whip into the heavenly ether.  Ritornello is, in a way, an extension of this mood, although there are no musical references to Handel in it.  The piece is also something of a rarity among contemporary art music: a celebration of Christmas.  I have been interested in religious music for some time and music written around the biblical passion narratives in particular.  The nativity stories, however, have not played as central a role in my musical thinking and this piece seeks to explore the mood of joyful excitement prevalent in these stories, if only in the briefest of ways.

Program Notes:

The Concerto a Due, written in the winter of 2005-06 for the husband and wife Duo 46, Beth Ileana Schneider, violin and Matt Gould, guitar, is representative of certain neo-classical predilections in my music and is one of only a handful of works of mine in recent years that aim to directly project certain Classical and late-Baroque formal procedures through the 21^st century prism of Post-modernism.  The work is loosely based on J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 5, particularly in the use of ritornelli to divide the musical dialogue between soloists and ensemble.  As in Bach, the soloists have a symbiotic relationship to each other as well as to the orchestra. The first movement begins with a short statement from the orchestra presenting the main motivic material for the first third of the piece.  The soloists quickly take up this material, are interrupted by an abbreviated orchestral ritornello, and vary the melodic material leading to an extended ritornello in which the relationships heard in the movement’s opening are registrally inverted.  This section gives way to a new theme, led by the violin which, after an increasingly violent chordal interlude, gets taken up by the guitar (with the musical relationship between the soloists inverted much in the same way that of the orchestra was in the preceding section).  The chordal interlude returns with increasing violence and, after a brief statement of the central theme by the orchestra, leads to a return of the opening material and a final push to the coda.

The second movement begins as a simple duet for violin and guitar and proceeds as a simple song punctuated by a persistent and obsessive half-note pulse which becomes increasingly maddening.  After an orchestral climax the balance is restored and the duet is restored though with the guitar taking the leading role and the strings accentuating the harmony.

The finale is a brief, boisterous variation on the first movement, with melodic material derived from the union of its themes with those of the central movement.  A brief tutti from the orchestra, which otherwise plays a subservient role to the soloists in this movement, leads to a rhythmically charged cadenza which, once the orchestra rejoins the soloists, brings the concerto to an end.