Opus 7 Vocal Ensemble performs Don’t Treat Me as a Stranger in Seattle, October 20, 2018
(From Opus7.org)
With Elisabeth Ellis, piano; David Nichols, organ;
Gunnar Folsom & Rob Tucker, percussion
What does it mean to be an American?
Do you know someone who is patriotic?
Who are your American heroes?
Opus 7 explores these questions in the opening concert of our 27th season as we celebrate the American spirit exemplified in these words from Lloyd Pfautsch’s Litany for America: “Dream of a land where all people can think as they please, or say what they think; see an America where no one is another’s master, where no one’s mind is dark with fear—to see an America at peace with the world.”
This thought-provoking and celebratory concert will feature works of musical Americana by some of our country’s most beloved composers, including selections from Randall Thompson’s The Peaceable Kingdom, Stephen Paulus’s Hymn for America, Aaron Copland’s “The Promise of Living” from his opera The Tender Land, and Lloyd Pfautsch’s A Litany for America.
American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein’s 100th birthday will be celebrated with a performance of his iconic look at immigration in “America” from West Side Story, while Charles Griffin’s Don’t Treat Me as a Stranger, for choir and percussion, poses the question “who is my brother, my sister?
The concert will also feature a mix of historical and patriotic songs including arrangements of God Bless America, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, The Star-Spangled Banner, Irving Berlin’s Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, and Walter Robinson’s Harriet Tubman.
Two major American choral works form the centerpiece of the concert: Charles Ives’s Psalm 90 (Lord, Thou has been our Dwelling Place) for choir, organ, and percussion, and the West Coast premiere of John Muehleisen’s setting of Walt Whitman’s epic poem Salut Au Monde (“Greetings to the World”)—the American poet’s timely, border-blurring homage to the universal bond between all humanity.
Saturday, October 20th, 2018 @ 8:00 pm
University Congregational United Church of Christ
4515 16th Ave Ne, Seattle, WA 98105
general seating $20 in advance, $24 at the door;
preferred seating $40 in advance
The Berkeley Women’s Community Chorus, directed by Debra Golata will perform my 
On Saturday, April 7, 8pm, at the Bob Carr Theater (401 W Livingston Street, Orlando), the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra will premiere my Frontispiece on J.S. Bach’s Prelude in G major, a 4+-minute work that features as part of it J.S. Bach’s solo cello Prelude in G major. Music director Eric Jacobsen will play the featured cello part himself. The piece presents the prelude in its entirety at the center of it and is fully orchestrated, with countermelodies, and an introduction and closing based on the main Bach motive. The orchestra is the exact same instrumentation as Brahms’s Symphony #1: double winds, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings, with the added solo cello. The Bach Prelude exhibits that special magic that he’s so famous for amongst composers, particularly the outlining of chord structures and polyphonic lines within the solo cello part. He also, once G major is established, takes a kaleidoscopic detour away from the home key before returning to the spectacularly sunny opening motive. I tried to capture the various tonal worlds and motives that Bach crafts in the original and amplify them with my orchestration. 
Between January 19 and February 19, I will give five different thirty minute invited lectures as part of the 2018 Epcot International Festival of the Arts. The lectures were great fun to prepare and to give to an enthusiastic audience of park-goers at the Odyssey Festival Showcase. The lectures are:
The Missouri State University Percussion Ensemble will perform my 
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