Up Front! Becoming the Complete Choral Conductor

Partita for Violoncello & Double Bass

Cartes postales de la guerre : Postcards from the War

Commissioned for the 2018 National Convention of the American Guild of Organists in Kansas City, Missouri. The texts which provide the basis for the work were all written by the French poet, Guillaume Apollinaire, in 1915 and published between 1916 and 1918. Since Apollinaire served in the French military and fought on the front lines during the war, his poetry comments on various aspects of life in time of war from his own first-hand experience. Apollinaire's use of imagery in these poems presents his observations of change, transformation, and disillusionment.

3 Pieces for Chanukah : No. 1 Oh, Chanukah/Y'mei hachanukah

Published in 2003, Three Pieces for Chanukah is not so much a set of arrangements of familiar words and tunes than it is a set of original compositions based on them. The first two settings feature jazz-influenced, classical harmonic and melodictreatment of the tunes. The mood of the first setting is upbeat and the mood of the second one is more subdued. The mood of the third setting is extremely upbeat; it is composed in a straight funk style, albeit contrapuntal. The front matter to eachedition features program notes, a pronunciation guide for the Hebrew words and the Hebrew and English texts.

Three Pieces for Chanukah: No. 2 Maoz tzur

Published in 2003, Three Pieces for Chanukah is not so much a set of arrangements of familiar words and tunes than it is a set of original compositions based on them. The first two settings feature jazz-influenced, classical harmonic and melodictreatment of the tunes. The mood of the first setting is upbeat and the mood of the second one is more subdued. The mood of the third setting is extremely upbeat; it is composed in a straight funk style, albeit contrapuntal. The front matter to eachedition features program notes, a pronunciation guide for the Hebrew words and the Hebrew and English texts.

Fantasypiece

The duet version of Fantasypiece for violoncello and double bass was composed in 2001, an arrangement for chamber orchestra was completed in 2002. The title has multiple meanings. The musical language, what I regard as free tonality, is one that I had always wanted to employ but never found occasion to use. By free, I mean employing unusual dissonances in a controlled manner within a tonal framework. The discourse of Fantasypiece involves the presentation of musical passages which set up a polemic between chromatically colored harmonies and tonal ones. The piece opens with a brooding theme featuring the tritone interval, followed by an interlude leading to a liricotheme. Chromatic, transposed variations on that interlude return throughout the piece to frustrate the attempts of increasingly tonal music to prevail over chromatically colored music. One even hears a cantando Neo-Classical sequence with running sixteenth notes a couple of times over the course of the work, as well as a set of ornate, Baroque-like variations on the lirico theme. Near the end of the piece, an extended recapitulation occurs which is utterly devoid of chromatically colored harmonies, making it seem as though that sort of music will prevail: a passionate, celebratory Tango ensues. All of this is to no avail for, in the end, the chromatic harmonies return and the piece ends on the ambiguous interval of the tritone with which it begins.