From the category archives:
Cantilena (1981) mp3
Music: Roger Bourland
Publisher: ECS Publishing
Performers: Tom Harmon, organ; Gary Gray, clarinet
Cantilena was commissioned for the first season of the award-winning Los Angeles chamber music ensemble, Pacific Serenades. The premiere was in the home of Leland Burns. This work was originally written for flutist, composer, and director of PacSer, Mark Carlson. Alden Ashforth had [...]
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Death of Narcissus (1980) mp3
Music: Roger Bourland
Richard Cornell conducts the Red Sneakers chamber ensemble
Publisher: Yelton Rhodes Music
Death of Narcissus was composed for one of the Composers in Red Sneakers concerts. In that we were all students, we had composition assignments for our classes and had to keep producing for the Sneakers series, we had to [...]
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AMERICAN BAROQUE was commissioned by Mark Carlson and Pacific Serenades for their 1991-92 season. Like many of the music I was writing at that time, the form of the word is roughly palindrdomic, for instance ABCDEDC’B’A’. The sewing machine quality of the melody is something you will hear in this piece that vaguely evokes Baroque [...]
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This weekend we spent the weekend with friends in Mill Valley (CA) as well as some time on a sunset boat ride around Belvedere, Tiburon, and that general [San Francisco Bay] area. Also on the boat was a Hollywood producer with whom I hit it off, who wants to introduce me to some directors looking [...]
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Last night, Vox Femina hosted a reading of my new work for women’s chorus, HEALY MADRIGALS, based upon the poetry of Eloise Klein Healy. Iris Levine, the director, welcomed the small but warm audience and explained what was about to happen. I got up and spoke about the commissioning process as well a bit about [...]
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Today Volker Hauschka stopped by to chat about an upcoming collaboration with me on a new film by Graham Streeter (of CAGES fame). Volker is taking the prepared piano into a new realm, and it is quite often transcendent, hovering, beguiling, pretty to listen to, and original. His career seems to be taking off. Seeing [...]
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After a week of crafting possible cuts to our department’s budget, I drove up to the beautiful Lake Arrowhead area to attend an annual meeting, whose sole purpose is to give seed money to innovative curricular ideas. We arrived on Friday night; had cocktails and a lovely dinner, followed by a short meeting, and then [...]
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Today in my “music theory” class, composer and colleague Paul Chihara spoke to us about working in Hollywood, and showed four stages of the evolution of a musical cue. The cut the director gives the composer that will have SMPTE time code on it and little or no sound, nor sound effects; a version with [...]
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I may be wrong, but I can’t help but wonder whether John Williams wrote this cigarette commercial and then recycled it for Indiana Jones. N’est ce pas?
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For the first week of my music theory course, we have focused on songs with falling bass lines.
Today, we started with the so-called air on a G string by J.S. Bach. As an amusement, I quizzed what a G string was in context of a strip club, and Marcos correctly answered that it referred to [...]
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