Commissioned for Elinor Armer’s 75th Birthday Celebration

Program Note: When presented with the opportunity to write for Elly’s festivities, overwhelmed ridiculosity ensued. There were too many options. I would have loved to work on a grand opera that reached the absurd puns saturation point, but time and instrumentation restraints brought me back down to
earth. Elly helped instill a love of plundering other composers’ work. This inspired my tinkering with Bach’s “Gavotte in G Minor BWV 822”. The arrived at dance has little in common with the baroque gavotte. Instead an attempt at rhythmic, Milhaudian joy is offered in celebration of the greatest mentor, composer, inspiration and friend.

Recording Coming Soon

Score Published Through Imagine Music Publishing

SILVER KEYS TRIO – ALL AMERICAN MUSIC

Center for New Music in San Francisco, Sept. 30, 2015 – 7:30pm
San Jose State University, October 1st, 2015 – 12:15pm
Sacramento State University, October 2nd, 2015 -4:00pm

Program Note: When granted the opportunity to write for the Silver Keys Trio’s instrumentation, my wife and I had just begun to expect our new daughter. I swung between exhaustive fragility and terrifying elation and still do with Alice now here and born. This text has become my much needed mantra, as anything I do, from parenting to music, is destined to fail without love. My deepest thanks go to the virtuosic Silver Keys Trio for organizing the commissioning consortium that brought about this seven movement piece.

I Might Speak
With Tongues of Angles
Yet Without Love
I
Have Now Become
A Clanging Cymbal
Resounding

Jill Morgan Brenner’s – I Sing Words: The Poetry Project

 A collaboration between poets, composers, and performers alike; Brenner will be premiering an evening of art songs written by living composers and poets with pianist Anne Rainwater. In an effort to further music for classical singers to come, Brenner came up with the idea to fascilitate the creation of new and accesible music.

– THE CENTER FOR NEW MUSIC
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12TH 

– 70 WEST CLAY STREET
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13TH AT 5 PM

Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) was briefly famous in the 1910’s as a traveling singing poet who would chant or sing his own poetry while wandering through the United States. Yet later in life he faded into obscurity, often bartering his pamphlet “Rhymes to Be Traded for Bread” in exchange for food. Lindsay eventually commit suicide by ingesting Lysol. This setting of four poems was commissioned by Carrie Zhang and her Classical Trio Impromptu for their performances in the Bing Music Series at Stanford Hospital.

Recording and Score Coming Soon