Winds
« Previous EntriesWeaving Olden Dances (Clarinet, String Quartet, Piano and Bodhrán)
Wednesday, February 28th, 2007Clarinet, String Quartet, Piano and Bodhrán (2007) 6’30”
Premiered by the Griffin Ensemble at the Liepaja Symphony Orchestra Concert Hall in Liepaja, Latvia.
Purchase a PDF of the score and parts via PayPal for $30:
Here’s a video with Uldis Lipskis (clarinet), Baiba Lasmane, Ginta Alžane (violins), Tatjana Borovika (Viola) and Dina Puķite (Cello), from their performance with my ensemble at Rigas Jaunais Teatris on June 18, 2007 in Riga, Latvia:
Program Note:
This piece was originally a setting for baritone and string quartet of five short poems by the American poet, Langston Hughes, in one continuous movement. The majority of the piece is based on various transformations of a three-note, bluesy figure. I rearranged and also revised the set in late 2006 in preparation for a five-concert tour in Latvia with my ensemble in May and June 2007. Here are the original poems, in the order of their original appearance:
Night: Four Songs
Night of the two moons
And the seventeen stars,
Night of the day before yesterday
And the day after tomorrow,
Night of the four songs unsung:
Sorrow! Sorrow!
Sorrow! Sorrow!Border Line
I used to wonder
About living and dying -
I think the difference lies
Between tears and crying.I used to wonder
About here and there -
I think the distance
Is nowhere.Drum
Bear in mind
That death is a drum
Beating forever
Till the last worms come
To answer its call,
Till the last stars fall,
Until the last atom
Is no atom at all,
Until time is lost
And there is no air
And space itself
Is nothing nowhere,
Death is a drum
A signal drum,
Calling life
To come!
Come!
Come!Suicide’s Note
The calm,
Cool face of the river
Asked me for a kiss.End
There are
No clocks on the wall,
And no time,
No shadows that move
From dawn to dusk
Across the floor.There is neither light
Nor dark
Outside the door.There is no door!
Kusanganisa (Flute and Marimba 4-hands)
Friday, August 8th, 2003Flute and Marimba Four-Hands, one movement (2003) ca. 6′30″
Commissioned by Queens Council on the Arts for the ensemble Percussia, Ingrid Gordon, director.
Listen to an excerpt performed by Nicole Camacho, flute, with Chris Bonacorsa and Cesare Papetti, marimba:
Kusanganisa excerpt
Score and parts available for hard-copy purchase from Steve Weiss Music, or purchase a PDF of the score and parts via PayPal for $9:
Program Note:
Kusanganisa is a Shona word, which describes the idea of ‘mixture’. This piece is an arrangement of a work originally written for Flute, Violin, Cello, Percussion and Mbira, a sort of thumb piano of Zimbabwean origin. I chose the title to reflect the mixture of instruments from different cultures and the mixture of cultural influences I hope you’ll hear in the piece; the mbira passages translated to the upper register of the marimba in the middle of the piece, for example. Kusanganisa was commissioned by the Queens Council for the Arts for Ingrid Gordon and her ensemble, Percussia. I rearranged the piece at the request of three of my (now former) students at Hofstra University.
for the straight way was lost
Monday, August 19th, 2002Viola or Cello with Clarinet or Bass Clarinet or Alto Saxophone, 1 movement, (2002) ca. 8’ Commissioned and premiered by the Darkwood Consort, Boise, Idaho.
Purchase a PDF of the score and parts via PayPal for $10:
Here’s a video with Uldis Lipskis, clarinet, and Dina Puķite, Cello, from their recent performance with my ensemble at Rigas Jaunais Teatris in Riga, Latvia:
Program Note:
For the straight way was lost was commissioned and premiered by The Darkwood Consort in Boise, Idaho. The title became unintentionally more and more appropriate over time, as the work has undergone multiple revisions and tweakings and experiments. The title comes from a passage in Dante’s The Divine Comedy, and I chose it because, first, it includes the name of the ensemble that commissioned it from me, but second, it also seems a good description of how the compositional process sometimes goes; sometimes a piece takes unexpected turns (almost of its own volition) that then must be dealt with:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi retrovai per una selva oscura,
che la diritta via era smarrita.In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood,
for the straight way was lost.-Dante, from The Divine Comedy
How Do I Love Thee? (High Voice, Clarinet or Violin & Piano)
Monday, September 18th, 2000Elizabeth Barrett Browning, text.
High Voice, Clarinet or Violin & Piano. (2000) 4’30”
A co-commission and premiere by The Lark Ascending, Nancy Bogen, director, and the Lyric Arts Trio.
Listen to a performance by Marcelle Duarte (Soprano), Dennis Jospeh (Clarinet) & Lin Lee (Piano):
HowDo
Purchase a PDF of the score via PayPal for $4:
SONNET #43, FROM THE PORTUGUESE
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
So, We’ll Go No More A-Roving (High Voice & Piano, opt. Clarinet)
Saturday, March 20th, 1999Lord Byron, text.
for High Voice & Piano, with or without Clarinet (1999), ca. 3′30″
Commissioned and premiered by The Lark Ascending, Nancy Bogen, director.
Listen to a performance by Elizabeth Farnum (Soprano) & Peter Vinograde (Piano):
Roving
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So, we’ll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.
Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon.
Lord George Gordon Byron, 1788-1824
The Far Field (High Voice, Clarinet & Piano)
Tuesday, April 15th, 1997Theodore Roethke, text.
High Voice, Clarinet & Piano (1997), ca. 22′
Premiered by Elizabeth Farnum, Dennis Joseph & Charles Tauber at NYU.
Purchase a PDF of the score and parts via PayPal for $12:
Listen to excerpts from a live performance by Melissa Fogarty (soprano), Chris Cullen (clarinet) and Laura Barger (piano):
I.
I dream of journeys repeatedly:
Of flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel,
Of driving alone, without luggage, out a long peninsula,
The road lined with snow-laden second growth,
A fine dry snow ticking the windshield,
Alternate snow and sleet, no on-coming traffic,
And no lights behind, in the blurred side-mirror,
The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone,
Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut,
Where the car stalls,
Churning in a snowdrift
Until the headlights darken.
II.
At the field’s end, in the corner missed by the mower,
Where the turf drops off into a grass-hidden culvert,
Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field-mouse,
Not too far away from the ever-changing flower-dump,
Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken machinery,-
One learned of the eternal;
And in the shrunken face of a dead rat,
eaten by rain and ground-beetles
(I found it lying among the rubble of an old coal bin)
And the tom-cat, caught near the pheasant-run,
Its entrails strewn over the half-grown flowers,
Blasted to death by the night watchman.
I suffered for birds, for young rabbits caught in the mower,
My grief was not excessive.
For to come upon warblers in early May
Was to forget time and death:
How they filled the oriole’s elm,
a twittering restless cloud, all one morning,
And I watched and watched
till my eyes blurred from the bird shapes,-
Cape May, Blackburnian, Cerulean,-
Moving, elusive as fish, fearless,
Hanging, bunched like young fruit, bending the end branches,
Still for a moment,
Then pitching away in half-flight,
Lighter than finches,
While the wrens bickered and sang in the half-green hedgerows,
And the flicker drummed from his
dead tree in the chicken-yard.
-Or to lie naked in sand,
In the silted shallows of a slow river,
Fingering a shell,
Thinking;
Once I was something like this, mindless,
Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar;
Or to sink down to the hips in a mossy quagmire;
Or, with skinny knees, to sit astride a wet log,
Believing:
I’ll return again,
As a snake or a raucous bird,
Or, with luck, as a lion.
I learned not to fear infinity,
The far field, the windy cliffs of forever,
The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow,
The wheel turning away from itself,
The sprawl of the wave,
The on-coming water.
III.
The river turns on itself,
The tree retreats into its own shadow.
I feel a weightless change, a moving forward
As of water quickening before a narrowing channel
When banks converge, and the wide river whitens;
Or when two rivers combine, the blue glacial torrent
And the yellowish-green from the mountainy upland,-
At first a swift rippling between rocks,
Then a long running over flat stones
Before descending to the alluvial plain,
To the clay banks, and the wild grapes
hanging from the elmtrees.
The slightly trembling water
Dropping a fine yellow silt where the sun stays;
And the crabs bask near the edge,
The weedy edge, alive with small snakes and bloodsuckers,-
I have come to a still, but not a deep center,
A point outside the glittering current;
My eyes stare at the bottom of a river,
At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains,
My mind moves in more than one place,
In a country half-land, half-water.
I am renewed by death, thought of my death,
The dry scent of a dying garden in September,
The wind fanning the ash of a low fire.
What I love is near at hand,
Always, in earth and air.
IV.
The lost self changes,
Turning toward the sea,
A sea-shape turning around,-
An old man with his feet before the fire,
In robes of green, in garments of adieu.
A man faced with his own immensity
Wakes all the waves, all their loose wandering fire.
The murmur of the absolute, the why
Of being born fails on his naked ears.
His spirit moves like a monumental wind
That gentles on a sunny blue plateau.
He is the end of things, the final man.
All finite things reveal infinitude:
The mountain with its singular bright shade
Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow,
The after-light upon ice-burdened pines;
Odor of basswood on a mountain-slope,
A scent beloved of bees;
Silence of water above a sunken tree:
The pure serene of memory in one man,-
A ripple widening from a single stone
Winding around the waters of the world.
Program Note:
I composed my setting of Theodore Roethke’s The Far Field in 1997, over the course of a month; there was a deadline for a performance that in the end was cancelled at the last minute due to an illness. Writing this piece was emotionally difficult for me. At the time, I had written a string of short chamber pieces, and wanted to tackle something large to shake myself out of the pattern. The large-scale trajectory of Roethke’s text moves from a point of isolation and a fearful contemplation of mortality and decay to a place beyond acceptance of one’s own death, to an embrace of it. The rapidity with which I had to set this monumental, beautiful text meant that I had to live with it intimately for that month, and ultimately take that same journey with the poet. I had trouble with this, and would find myself in a sullen funk for days at a time. In the end I found a place within myself to find the beauty in death that Roethke found, and set it that way. As I write these program notes four years later, I look back on that process and that text and can’t help but regard it as one of the most precious gifts I’ve ever received, and thank Roethke for it.
Fragmentary Rondo (Solo Flute)
Friday, May 10th, 1996unaccompanied solo flute, 1 movement, (1996 rev. 2000) ca. 6′30″
Premiered by Hugh Williams at Next Stage in NYC, 1996. In the review of the premiere concert, The New Music Connoisseur (Vol. 5, No. 3, 1997) said: “Charles Griffin’s Fragmentary Rondo for solo flute should join the ranks of standard repertory.”
Purchase a PDF of the score via Paypal for $5:
Watch a live performance by Liene Denisjuka at Rigas Jaunais Teatris in Riga, Latvia:
Click on the image to open a perusal PDF of pages 1-3 in a new window:
Program Note:
Fragmentary Rondo is the first piece I have written for a solo melodic instrument. I was interested in exploring and integrating several extended techniques for the flute such as slap-tongue, whistle tones, tongue-stops, multiphonics, etc. The piece is in rondo form, and alternates between dance-like or running melodic fragments or gestures and quieter, cautious passages. It was premiered by Hugh Williams and has since been performed by Jennifer Grim (Zephyros Winds), Patricia Spencer (Da Capo Chamber Players), Andrea Ceccomori (soloist, Rome, Italy), Rogério Wolf (soloist, Sao Paolo, Brazil), and others.
Fist Through Traffic
Saturday, May 15th, 1993Alto Saxophone and Percussion Ensemble
(1+8 players) 3 Movements, (1993) ca. 8′
Full instrumentation: Eb Alto Saxophone, Vibraphone, Marimba, Chimes, Timpani, Congas (2 or 3), Timbales (2), Tom (2), Bass Drum, Sand Blocks, Claves, Triangle, Cowbell (more cowbell!!), Tambourine, Suspended Cymbal, Hi-Hat, Brake Drums (2), Whistle
Premiered by the University of Minnesota Percussion Ensemble, Fernando Meza, director, with Richard Dirlam, Saxophone.
Listen to a performance of the 2nd movement, with Anthony Canestro and the Queens College Percussion Ensemble:
Industry - 2nd. Mvt. of Fist Through Traffic
Score and parts available for hard-copy purchase from Steve Weiss Music, or purchase a PDF of the score and parts via PayPal for $25:
Subsequent notable performances include: Queens College Percussion Ensemble, Michael Lipsey, Director, with Anthony Canestro; Columbus State University Percussion Ensemble, Paul Vaillancourt, Director, with Amy Griffiths; North Carolina School of the Arts Percussion Ensemble, John Beck, Director, with Taimur Sullivan; and Interlochen Percussion Ensemble, Kim Burja, Director, with Timothy McCallister.
Program Note:
A composer can only really express their perception of the world through the filter of their own experience, and since my earliest musical experiences revolved around singing and drumming, I often incorporate in my writing elements of popular and/or world music that are most compelling to me, within the context of continuing a concert music tradition. Written in 1993 while a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, Fist Through Traffic is a three-movement work that comes from this impulse.
The title of the work comes from a line from a Paul Simon song as an homage (I was listening to his Rhythm of the Saints album quite a lot at that time) and to reflect my sympathy for his approach to songwriting, which in the long run has also been about integrating diverse elements from outside his native experience or from outside the expectations of the genre into his personal style.
Three Miniatures (Wind Quintet)
Monday, March 15th, 1993Wind Quintet (Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, French Horn, Bassoon), 3 Movements (1993) ca. 8′
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Download a perusal PDF of the score in a new window by clicking here.
Program Note:
« Previous EntriesInspired by the poetry of Juan Ramon Jiménez, this piece was premiered by the North Woods Wind Quintet at the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis. It has subsequently been performed by the Emerald Winds (as part of an Encore Grant from the American Composers Forum), Imani Winds (usually as part of their music in the schools outreach programs) and Quintet of the Americas.