Linda Dusman

for wind ensemble

ca. 7'15"

Solstice was commissioned by the Hanover, Pennsylvania Southwestern High School Symphonic Band, Carey Crumling, director, in 1997. The title refers to my inspiration for the piece, which I found in the often turbulent weather changes that characterize the change from season to season. As a larger metaphor this reflects the emotional turbulence that characterizes the change from childhood to adulthood, which I expressed in the often bi-tonal language of the piece.

A recording of the piece is available on opening the score, performed by New England Conservatory Wind Ensemble, with William Drury, Director.

Click here to view the score.

Annea Lockwood

for baritone voice, baritone saxophone, percussion, and pre-recorded sound (stereo)

These three texts, by Osip Mandelstam, the Russian poet who died in the Gulag, and by Carolyn Forché, the contemporary American writer, span fifty-eight years and evoke the same darkness, the murderous State. The first and third songs are settings of Mandelstam’s “I was washing outside in the darkness” (1921), and the first two lines of “The Age” (1923), written in the harsh aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution and the famine which followed. Both poems have been translated by Clarence Brown and W.S.Merwin.

Forché’s “The Visitor” was written in 1979 after she lived for two years in El Salvador at a time when the military’s oppression was intense and the paramilitary death squads sent the numbers of the “disappeared” soaring. “Night and Fog” (“Nacht und Nebel”) was the Nazi euphemism for the Third Reich’s death camps. “Night and Fog” was commissioned by Thomas Buckner.

Click here to view the score.

Patricia Ann Repar

for soprano, alto, tenor, baritone saxophones and digital accompaniment

1 iridium flare: a surge of light

                      marking the revolution in satellite telecommunication

                      (wire shattered and adrenals gone mad)

launching us forward to do it faster, spread it further, say it louder, push it harder,

leaving us dark in the night and cold on the ground

like the hard, dense, silvery-white metallic sheen of iridium.

2 iridium flare: a surge of light

                      marking the call to remember

                      (even if in the midst of desolation)

the overwhelming vulnerability of clouds reconfiguring, kisses colliding,

and human hearts floundering in the space between life and death

like the deep lustrous yellow of iridium gone gold.

Thanks to Willie Johnson for ‘Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground’, one of the 27 samples of music included on the Voyager Golden Record launched into space in 1977.

Click here to view the score.

Click here to view the performance notes.

Click here to view a performance (YouTube).