Weaving Olden Dances performed by the Griffin Ensemble in Liepāja, Latvia on December 4
By admin | December 3, 2007
The Griffin Ensemble will perform my Weaving Olden Dances, a work based on traditional Irish and Appalachian music and scored for Clarinet, String Quartet, Piano and Bodhrán on December 4 at Liepājas Biedribas Nams (Liepāja’s Society House) at 5PM, as part of a concert in honor of the 70th Birthday of local artist Irina Ture. Several of the musicians in the ensemble, as well as others performing on the concert, have all been the subjects of Ture’s photographic portraits, many of which are currently on exhibition in the hall.
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U of Michigan Percussion Ensemble performs The Persistence of Past Chemistries on December 2
By admin | November 21, 2007
On Sunday December 2, 2007 at 3PM at the McIntosh Theatre of the University of Michigan, The University of Michigan Percussion Ensemble, directed by Joe Gramley, will present their semester-end concert called American Tradition and Innovation, featuring seminal works that demonstrate the twentieth-century rise of percussion as a chamber-music art as well as the ever-more-global focus of American classical percussion in our time. Along with three works by John Cage and Lou Harrison that brought an array of never-before-heard instruments from around the world to the American stage, the Ensemble will perform a rock etude (co-written by Michigan’s own Michael Udow) that marries American percussion and the modern marimba to a range of vocal traditions spanning several continents. The program is rounded out with two other unique pieces: Steve Reich’s minimalist composition “Six Marimbas” and Charles Griffin’s “The Persistence of Past Chemistries,” written entirely for wood instruments.
PROGRAM: Cage/Harrison - Double Music; Cage - Third Construction;
Harrison - Concerto for Violin with Percussion Orchestra;
Udow/Douglas - Rock Etude No. 7;
Reich - Six Marimbas;
Griffin - The Persistence of Past Chemistries.
Free - no tickets required
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Percussia performs Kusanganisa in New York on December 2
By admin | November 21, 2007
Flutist Margaret Lancaster joins Ingrid Gordon’s ensemble Percussia, for an eclectic flute and percussion program featuring Asian and African compositions, my Kusanganisa (Mixing, for flute and marimba 4-hands, based in part on Zimbabwean mbira patterns), as well as other contemporary classical works.
The concert will take place on December 02 at 2:00 PM at the Hart Memorial Library in Shrub Oak, New York. Admission is free.
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Flutist Liene Denisjuka performs Fragmentary Rondo in Riga November 24
By admin | November 20, 2007
Liene Denisjuka will include my Fragmentary Rondo for unaccompanied solo flute on her concert of solo and chamber works at Rīgas Latviešu Biedrības Zālē (The Latvian Society Hall) at 7PM on November 24 in Riga.She will be joined by Liene Neija-Kalniņa (Violin) and Kristīne Paula (Piano). Other composers on the program include Artūrs Grīnups, Pēteris Vasks, Lowell Lieberman and Ian Clarke.
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Gastesi-Bezerra Duo perform From the Faraway Nearby on Florida’s Anna Maria Island November 23
By admin | November 16, 2007
The Piano Duo Gastesi-Bezerra will be performing selections from my suite of pieces for piano four-hands From the Faraway Nearby, inspired by paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe at Gloria Dei Lutheran Church on Florida’s Anna Maria Island on Friday, November 23 at 3:00 p.m. Other composers on the program include Mozart and Debussy, plus contemporary duets by Marlene Woodward-Cooper (Deceptions), and Ronaldo Miranda (Variações Sérias).
Gastesi-Bezerra’s upcoming season will take them to Las Vegas, Washington D.C., Miami and Gainesville, and a tour of Serbia in December and of Brazil in June 2008.
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Putni performs El Paso de la Seguiriya in Riga, November 23
By admin | November 12, 2007
The women’s vocal ensemble Putni will give a repeat performance of my El Paso de la Seguiriya, a brand new setting of the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca, on Friday, November 23 at 7PM at The Dome Cathedral of Riga, located at 1 Dome Square (Doma laukums 1) in Riga as part of their program Music in the Cathedral (Mūzika katedrālē).
Commissioned with funds from the Latvian Culture Capital Fund and having grown out of some workshops I had created for Putni last year that included an introduction to flamenco, the piece includes a substantial amount of clapping in the flamenco style where the two parts interlock, called the palmas and contrapalmas.
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Viksnes Piano Duo perform From the Faraway Nearby in Riga on November 16
By admin | November 12, 2007
The piano duo Antra and Normunds Viksne will give a repeat perfomance of their program War and Peace, which includes the entire suite of my piano four-hand work inspired by paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe From the Faraway Nearby at the Bolderāja School of Music and Art in Riga (31 Stūrmaņu Street) on November 16 at 5PM. The other composers on the program are Juris Ābols, Arvo Pärt, and Arthur Benjamin.
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Ana Cervantes plays Murmuring in Comala at UT Dallas on November 9
By admin | October 29, 2007
Pianist Ana Cervantes returns to the University of Texas at Dallas, where on Saturday 9 November she will perform the US premiere of 6 pieces from Rumor de Páramo: pieces of Mexican composers Georgina Derbez and Federico Ibarra; of US composers Anne LeBaron and Charles Griffin (my Murmuring in Comala); and England’s Stephen McNeff. And there Hill be a sneak preview of two pieces from her forthcoming CD Solo Rumores –Volume 2 of the Project, to be released 29 November in Mexico City– works by Mexican composers Arturo Márquez and Juan Fernando Durán .
Cervantes appears in Dallas as part of the 30th anniversary Congress of ALTA (the American Literary Translators Association); her concert will take place after a homage to Margaret Sayers Peden and Gregory Rabassa, distinguished translators from Spanish to English of masterpieces like Pedro Páramo of Juan Rulfo and One Hundred Years of Solitude of Gabriel García Márquez, among many other works.
During her stay at UTD Cervantes will interact with Humanities students through some of her famous “concert-conversations” and teach master classes.
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Moon of the Floating World performed by Cantala Women’s Choir on October 27
By admin | October 22, 2007
The Cantala Women’s Choir of the Lawrence University Conservatory of Music will perform my The Moon of the Floating World, an a cappella setting for women’s voices in eight parts of a haiku by Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693). The theme of the concert is Dusk to Dawn and will be conducted by Richard Bjella and Phillip A. Swan in the Lawrence Memorial Chapel at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin on October 27 at 8PM.
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Shifting Coastlines (Medium High Voice and Piano)
By admin | October 10, 2007
Medium High Voice and Piano. (2000/2007) 20’
Texts by Charles Simic; (John Sokol); Ralph Burns; Howard Nemerov; Albert Goldbarth; Ronald Wallace
In 2000, inspired by our mutual love of science, the amazing artist Karen Fitzgerald and I collaborated on a project funded by the Greenwall Foundation and the Queens Community Arts Fund. We chose six poems by living authors that address the human condition through natural and scientific imagery. I composed six songs for the Goliard Ensemble: solo voice, flute, violin, cello, piano and percussion; Karen created six 60” paintings. The work premiered in October, 2000 at the Steinway Reformed Church, Astoria, NYC. These six round paintings were paired back-to-back and suspended above the audience. The project toured six South-East states during the Fall of 2000.
These pieces are very close to my heart, and over the past year, in my spare time, I revisited, revised and re-arranged five of them, paring it all down to a work for voice and piano in the hopes of making them more easily available for wider performance. Stylistically, the songs live in a place where art song, music theater and pop song overlap. Please email me if you are interested in seeing scores. (At some point I may take care of the sixth song, John Sokol’s Thoughts Near the Close of the Millenium, but not right now.)
Drawing the Triangle / Oleander Hawk:
Drawing the Triangle — Charles Simic
I reserve the triangle
For the wee hours,
The chigger-sized hours.I like how it starts out
And never gets there.
I like how it starts out.
In the meantime, the bedroom window
Reflecting the owlish aspect
Of the face and the interior.One hopes for tangents
Surreptitiously in attendance
Despite the rigors of the absolute.
Stars / Pearl:
Stars — Ralph BurnsI sit and rock my son to sleep. It rains
and rains. Such as we are both asleep,
we swim past the stars,
bad stars of disaster, good stars of the backbone of night.We know these stars as they are
and as we’d wish them to be, Milky Way,
Dog and Bear, hydrogen and helium, the 92
elements which make all we know of beauty.We know nothing of angular size or
the inverse square law of the propagation
of light, and swim through a cold, thin
gas, between and among the stars,which swim likewise between two creations
like children who know sleep intimately.
Figures of Thought / Triton:
Figures of Thought — Howard NemerovTo lay the logarithmic spiral on
Sea-shell and leaf alike, and see it fit,
To watch the same idea work itself out
In the fighter pilot’s steepening, tightening turn
Onto his target, setting up the kill,
And in the flight of certain wall-eyed bugs
Who cannot see to fly straight into death
But have to cast their sidelong glance at it
And come but cranking to the candle’s flame —How secret that is, and how privileged
One feels to find the same necessity
Ciphered in forms diverse and otherwise
Without kinship — that is the beautiful
In Nature as in art, not obvious,
Not inaccessible, but just between.It may diminish some of our dry delight
To wonder if everything we are and do
Lies subject to some little law like that;
Hidden in nature, but not deeply so.
The Sciences Sing a Lullabye / Treetops
The Sciences Sing a Lullabye — Albert Goldbarth
Physics says: go to sleep. Of course
you’re tired. Every atom in you
has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
nonstop from mitosis to now.
Quit tapping your feet. They’ll dance
inside themselves without you. Go to sleep.
Geology says: it will be alright. Slow inch
by inch America is giving itself
to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness
lap at your sides. Give darkness and inch.
You aren’t alone. All the continents used to be
one body. You aren’t alone. Go to sleep.
Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow,
Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle,
Psychology says: but first it has to be night, so
Biology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over town
and
History says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down on down.
Love’s Discrete Nonlinearity / Rubythroat:
Love’s Discrete Nonlinearity — Ronald Wallace, from Chaos TheoryNo heart’s desire is repeatable, or,
therefore, predictable. If a few hungry foxes
gorge on a large population of rabbits,
the population of foxes increases
while that of the rabbits declines,
until some point of equilibrium is passed
and the foxes begin to vanish with
the depleted supply of rabbits, and then
the rabbits multiply, like rabbits. And so on.
The ebb and flow of desire and fulfillment
is a story as old as the world. So,
if I loved you, finally, too much, until
you began to disappear, and I followed,
would you theoretically return to love
repeatedly again? There are forces so small
in our story of foxes and rabbits
no Malthus could ever account for them.
Whole species daily disappear, intractable
as weather. Or think of a continent’s
coastlines, their unmeasurable eddies
and whorls: infinite longings inscribed
by finite space and time,
the heart’s intricate branchings.
Thoughts near the Close of the Millennium / Burning Bush (not complete)
Thoughts near the Close of the Millennium — John SokolIn this expanding universe, everything is leaving everything,
yet there is no center
From which any of this leave-taking leaves; the middle
of every departure
Is everywhere. Microcosmically viewed, it all looks a lot like
the pores of Dizzy Gillespie’s cheeks
When he blew his horn. We’re spinning away from the sun
and the stars
While Ceres moves away from Jupiter and Neptune moves
away from Mars.
Everything is leaving its immediate neighborhood, gathering
more and more distance
For itself, like the furthest quasar, that — 18 billion years ago —
said goodbye to Proxima Centauri.
Even Nancy down the street is leaving Charlie and the kids. Like
everything else,
We’re forever blown away by that first Big Bang. We’re stuck
in the atmospheric saddle
Of a slow-motion explosion, like that one at the end of Antonioni’s
Zabriskie Point,
Where that floating olive might be the earth, and if we slow down
the slow-motion (slow it,
Geometrically, down), we can witness that olive decomposing
and watch entropy eat it up
While we consider that all those little anatomizing volcanoes and
Olive-quakes of it
Might be comparable to the shifting and colliding of continents
which have slow-danced
To the music of the spheres for billions of summer nights, crashing
their own weddings
And feasting off each other’s tectonic plates until the next big bash:
all of which is just the drop-of-an-olive
In a martini glass compared to what it would take to understand
what I’m talking about
Is the energy that is the black hole of me that sucked this martini
so dry that no light exists,
And now the pimento of that olive is the pit of my stomach
which seems to have multiplied
In density a thousand-fold, like a pellet of buckshot become
shot-put,
Or maybe, like — at the core of a white dwarf — that teaspoon
of matter that weighs five tons.
So maybe all this wonder and worry — and all this speculation —
is futile, because, here it is,
New Year’s Eve again and I don’t think I need to overstate my point.
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