The City Emerging
Benign Fixations for Violin and Piano (1983)
Burned and Scattered Gods for Trumpet and Small Ensemble (1987)
Autumn Music for Small Ensemble (1985)
Entente for Orchestra (1988-89)
From Here to There Can Be a Complicated Thing for Electric Guitar and String Orchestra (1983)
Mainstreams for Soprano and Piano (1987)
The Observer and the Observed for Speaker, Soprano and Chamber Orchestra (1983-86)
This piece got me into some real trouble back in 1983. My music professors believed that atonality was the only legitimate way for a composer to go. I wanted to write this, so I did. It caused some real problems, but all these years later I’m pleased I went my own way.
Entente is scored for 1 piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 1 bass clarinet, 2 bassoons; 4 French horns, 3 trumpets, 2 trombones, 1 bass trombone, 1 tuba; 5 persussionists, 1 harp, 1 piano, and a full string section.
Mainstreams (four songs)
Soprano, Jan Abell Piano, Kathryn Elaine Williams
Hands embrace hands,/ Eyes close in on other eyes./ Shouting with their bodies, /Their truth and their lies come oozing./ Doubting but uncritical, they surrender/ To their homes and the warmth they remember.
He locks in beyond the distance./ Beyond his empty park he knows / There lies a still pool edged with snow. / He locks in./ But soon an ardent flagellate / will thrust his arms through plates of glass / To smear the words whispered in neon: / No vacancy. / He locks in, and the distance is longer.
Wide synclining fall, / Frozen umbra, lazing, glacial, floating faun. / Sky lunar turn blind sun falling.
Contourless shadows meandering lowly / Merge darkness with neon, / Soft water and ether.
Frazzled lawyers shout for repetition, / Mimed novena. / Hidden clauses, definition changing, / Ave Maria. / Faces in the stucco smile, / Miles divide us now providing time to fret away our fears. / Burning barrios, neon we'll not hear.
Laws concerning laws, / Neon lit fulcra, / A word to drone, / A bodiless, floating form.
Scattered pauses punctuate the sermon, / Lone Curia. / Wrapped in gauze, / Their San Benitos hanging, / Ave Maria. / Faces in the stucco smile. / Father of all defined, / Father of one.
Wide synclining fall, / Frozen umbra, lazing, glacial, floating faun. / Sky lunar turn blind sun falling. / But long this my Maginot Line was crossed.
Your hands are lesioned, / The sky is bleeding snow. / Hands embrace hands, / But stranger, an empty park lies inside of you.
