Ancient Hymns and Prayers: Six Songs for Voice and Piano (2022)
In creating a substantial song cycle for non-binary tenor Kristyn Michele, my goal was to show off Kristyn as a singer and performer of new music. While adept at standard tenor repertoire, Kristyn’s beautiful changed voice has a unique sound and expressivity. These songs were specifically crafted with these qualities in mind. The texts for the cycle consist of my own translations from the Greek of Plato, Homer, Sappho, the Orphic Hymn to Night and the Seikilos Epitaph, as well as a small part of St. Francis’s Canticle of the Sun (from Umbrian Italian). These all come together to weave a sort of narrative, one deeply appreciative of the earth and of the basic aspects of nature and our lives.
Peaceful was the night: Christmas aria for Soprano and Organ (2020)
I composed this aria during my tenure as music director of the Congregational Church of Salisbury, as a prelude for the Congregational Church of Salisbury’s 2020 online Christmas Eve service. The piece sets a stanza from John Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” The imagery in this stanza felt especially striking to me–here there is nothing heady or theological, but simply, a beautiful calm seascape. In my music the pulsing chords in the organ evoke gentle waves as the soprano voice floats and soars above.
This art song sets my translation of the Seikilos Epitaph, an Ancient Greek tombstone inscription from the 1st to 2nd Century CE. The original epitaph sets its text to music, forming the oldest surviving complete musical piece. In the art song, the epitaph’s original melody forms the basis for the repeating accompaniment pattern. I was pleased enough with this little work that it I have used it as the final aria in my opera The Metamorphosis of Gertrude and Jo, and most recently as the final song in my cycle for non-binary tenor Kristyn Michele, Ancient Hymns and Prayers.
Written for Esteli Gomez’s 2018 residency with Oregon Composers Forum, this joyful and serene setting of Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud” comes alive as an extended Mozartean concert aria for soprano and miniature orchestra. The music shifts between lyrical, cantabile phrases that seem to float above the scene while shorter, playful figures evoke the dancing daffodils. The piece culminates in an elaborate coloratura passage, answered by an ebullient coda for instruments alone.
This is the second set of three sonnet settings I wrote for my dear friend Jessica Rossi, the first of which was Three Milton Sonnets). This Shakespeare set is late-Romantic in idiom, contrasting with the more austere, Classical set of Milton poems. The first song, with its bustling textures and winding chromatic harmonies, may project more joy and hope then the poem seems to imply. The second song is pure wistful lyricism— it may be that some of my earlier experience writing show tunes shows through here. The third song does actually start off bleak, in a somewhat Russian manner, but with the sonnet’s typical turn in feeling “haply I think on thee etc.,” the music warms and rises to a Romantic climax.
John Milton’s Sonnets were written for particular occasions, especially as encomiums to friends. The three I chose to set strike me as his most personal. The first, On the Religious Memory of Mrs. Catherine Thomson, my Christian Friend, Deceased Dec. 16, 1646, beautifully depicts his friend’s death as the soul finding freedom from the body. The second poem describes a vision or dream of his late wife, who had died in childbirth. The apparition is likened to the myth of Alcestis, who was rescued from the underworld by Hercules. It is likely that Milton’s blindness prevented him from ever seeing his second wife, giving special poignancy to the line “her face was veiled”. The third poem, Milton’s most famous sonnet, is about that blindness itself, prompting a moral question: “Doth God expect day labour, light denied?” The final song has two clear sections corresponding to the question and answer, which reflect the songs that have come before. The first section recalls the musical style of the second song, and the second section recalls that of the first.
I followed this set of three sonnets with a set of Shakespeare Sonnets the following year.
Posthumous portrait of John Keats by William Hilton, National Portrait Gallery London.
This hour-long chamber opera was my masters thesis at the Frost School of Music at University of Miami and is a particularly personal work. The libretto, written in collaboration with my brother Gabriel, explores the what-if scenario of a man who claims to be poet John Keats arriving in the contemporary era. How would the poetry of an artist from a different time be received? How would the unlikely claim of his identity be received? This scenario provides a clear occasion for a Classical/Romantic musical style, but it also allows me to explore why I compose the way I do – Keats finds his work dismissed as outmoded, as my music often has been.
In the opera, a professor of English, discouraged from writing poetry by its dismissal as old-fashioned imitation, runs into Keats, or perhaps a young man who simply thinks he is Keats. He inspires her to write again, and it is left to the listener to decide – is the man mad or impossible? The libretto includes many recitations of Keats’ original poems and settings of new poems in the style of Keats’ work. These poems are set as extended formal arias a la Mozart. The intervening material have a freer Romantic style, in which the orchestra plays the main melodies while the voices weave around them in a more speech like manner.
There are five musical motives that recur throughout the opera. The first two are presented in the prelude: a rushing, impetuous figure, is heard at the outset, and a lilting love-song associated with truth and beauty and the divine. The third motive, briefly suggested in the overture and used prominently in the dialogues between the characters, is a tender winding melody, evocative of the bond that forms between the characters. The fourth motive, characterized by a driving, syncopated rhythm, appears frequently to underscore the dramatic tension. The fifth motive is a sigh-like melody that is sequenced downward, evoking the character’s pasts with a sense of nostalgia.
