SKU: HL.4004646

UPC: 888680604578. 9x12 inches.

Undercurrents provides an electrifying, virtuosic showcase for the whole ensemble – featuring a series of solos, duets and trios, as well as highlighting the various chamber sections within the band. The music was inspired by watching schools of fish and flocks of birds perpetually moving with the ocean currents and air currents. Every once in a while a single solo shape will appear – or two or three – they dance apart for a moment and then are drawn back into the ensemble. Commissioned by the Naden Band of the Royal Canadian Navy, Victoria, BC, this is a powerful tour-de-force from beginning to end. Duration: c. 6:30.

SKU: AP.24757S

UPC: 038081269276. English.

The term current is defined as a steady flow of water, air or electricity in a particular direction. Whatever form the current takes, it is a fascinating source of energy that supports, yet challenges mankind in multiple ways. The composition Currents by Robert W. Smith takes its inspiration by the various forms of energy used in the art of music and in music education. Unpredictable, yet constantly flowing, the interacting musical lines of energy provide a unique experience for both performer and listener alike.

SKU: XC.RCB2308

Written for her mom, composer Laura Estes creates a charming and emotional tribute in Changing Currents. As educators, we can apply so much to this work utilizing its title and material, there is a lot to teach in this one. We know you will love this new work by Laura!

SKU: FG.55011-372-5

ISBN 9790550113725.

Images of the sea figure prominently throughout my life and memories: from holidays on the Atlantic coast during my Canadian childhood to my current Baltic home, and the imagined, only later experienced Mediterranean of my ancestral heritage. As an immigrant (son of an immigrant) bound to two northern countries, the sea is emblematic of my twin homelands, from the expanses of water surrounding them to those separating them. A Mari usque ad Mare. The sea is also an enduring image of the unknown, of expanses unexplored, of the raw power of nature and, for too many currently, of terror holding a hope of refuge - or the pain of loss.
Such disparate ideas were captured for me in the seascapes of the New York painter MaryBeth Thielhelm, whom I met in 2008 during a residency on the Gulf of Mexico. Her vast, abstract, nearly monochromatic depictions of imaginary seas in wildly varying moods were the catalyst for a concerto where the piano is frequently far from a hero battling a collective, but rather acts as a channel for elemental forces surging up from the orchestra, floating - sometimes barely so - on its constantly shifting surface. There are few themes to speak of, beyond a handful of iconic ideas that periodically cycle upward. Rather, the piano's material is largely an ornamentation of the more primal rhythmic and harmonic impulses from the orchestra below - a poetic interpretation, if you will, of the more immediate experience of facing the vastness of some unknown body of water.
The title Nameless Seas is borrowed from one of Thielhelm's exhibitions, as are those of the four movements, which are bridged together into two halves of roughly equal weight - one rhapsodic and free, the other more single-minded and direct, separated only by a short breath. The opening movement, Nocturne, is predominantly calm, if brooding, darkness and light alternating throughout. Lyrical arabesques sparkle over gently lapping cross-currents in the strings and mirrored timpani, the piano's full power only rarely deployed. The waves gradually build, drawing in the full orchestra for a meeting of forces in Land and Sea, a brighter, more warmly lyrical scene that unfolds in series of dreamlike, sometimes even nostalgic visions, which for me carry strong memories of sitting on rocks above surging Atlantic waves. The third movement, Wake, is a fast, perpetual-motion texture of glinting, darting rhythms and sudden shafts of light, with a prominent part for the steel drums, limning the piano's quicksilver figurations. An ecstatic climax crashes into a solo cadenza that grows progressively calmer and more introspective rather than virtuosic. Much of the tension finally releases into Unclaimed Waters, a drifting, meditative seascape in which the piano is progressively engulfed by a series of ever-taller waves, ultimately dissolving into a tolling, rippling continuum of sound.
It has been a great privilege to realize such a long-held dream as this piece, and to write it for not one, but two great pianists. Risto-Matti Marin and Angela Hewitt, both of whose friendship and support have been unfailing and humbling, share the dedication. Nameless Seas was commissioned by the PianoEspoo festival and Canada's National Arts Centre, with the premieres in Ottawa and Helsinki led by Hannu Lintu and Olari Elts. Thanks are due also to the Jenny and Antti Wihuri fund, whose generous grant provided me with much-needed time, and Escape to Create in Seaside, Florida, the source to which I returned to do a large part of the work.

SKU: UT.QC-2

ISBN 9788881094585. 6.5 x 9.5 inches.

The career of Muzio Clementi (1752-1832) spanned the lives of both Mozart and Beethoven and was exceptionally diverse. It encompassed performing on the keyboard, conducting, teaching, business activities and composition in the realms of keyboard, chamber and orchestral music. This book focuses on Clementi’s keyboard sonatas and aims to shed new light on their relationship with the complex cross-currents of late eighteenth-century musical style, both in England, where Clementi was active for much of his career, and the continent, which he visited periodically.
The first chapter summarises Clementi’s historical reputation as it developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and evaluates the impact on it of the significant developments in Clementi scholarship since 2000. The aim is to stress the deficiencies of the established view of Clementi as a keyboard pedagogue and to stress the importance of liberating him as much as possible from this ingrained perception. This is attempted, in the remaining chapters, through close, analytical readings of a variety of keyboard sonatas from all stages of his career, comparing them with a range of works by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and other contemporaries such as Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760-1812). The comparisons are made from the perspectives of distinguishing features of Clementi’s style such as his unusually intense deployment of strict counterpoint in the later keyboard sonatas; his cultivation of irregularity in recapitulations; his use of the ‘three-key’ exposition in the middle-to-later stages of his career that seems to anticipate nineteenth-century developments, and also his assimilation of heightened virtuosity into the earlier sonatas, often in the form of cadenzas more suggestive of the keyboard concerto – a genre Clementi seems, rather strangely, to have neglected. The book has been envisaged as a direct response, not only to the most recent scholarship on Clementi, but also to current approaches to eighteenth-century music in general, including the interdisciplinary work of Annette Richards.

SKU: SS.50028430

SKU: PR.466411770

UPC: 680160640850. 9 x 12 inches.

Mississippi I. Father of Waters: born of the Highlands and the Lakes; the Glaciers, the Mountains, and the Prairies. The picture of your birth is clounded in the ice and mists of ancient ages but your spirit remains our life stream. II. The Red Man knew your bountiful gifts and gave thanks to the Great Spirit on your banks. -- The Spanish and French Fathers brought the glory of Christianity to America on Mississippi. But all men, white and dark; -- Indian, Spaniard, and Negro; Bourbon and Yankee, combined to make Mississippi the heart of America. Saga of the Mississippi Harl McDonald Born near Boulder, Colorado, July 27, 1899 Now living in Philadelphia The original suggestion for a symphonic work on the subject of the Mississippi came indirectly from the late Booth Tarkington who saw in it color and movement and atmosphere translatable into the terms of music. In the course of time, by the mysterious processes of composers' chemistry, it took shape as a tone-poem of two sections, one representing the rise of the great stream from its primeval geologic sources, the other the human history of the river. Mr. McDonald devised the following verbal outline of the general scheme of his diptych: I. Father of Waters: born of the Highlands and the Lakes; the Glaciers, the Mountains, and the Prairies. The picture of your birth is clounded in the ice and mists of ancient ages but your spirit remains our life stream. II. The Red Man knew your bountiful gifts and gave thanks to the Great Spirit on your banks. -- The Spanish and French Fathers brought the glory of Christianity to America on Mississippi. But all men, white and dark; -- Indian, Spaniard, and Negro; Bourbon and Yankee, combined to make Mississippi the heart of America. The first of the two movements, beginning molto andante, is vaguel modal to hint at antiquity. It is built upon the conventional two themes, with an episode, poco piu mosso, misterioso, for prehistoric murk and muck. There are various changes of pace and mood. The second, Allegro ma vigorosamente, prefigures an Indian ceremony. A theme presented by flute, clarinet and bassoon is a Canadian Indian fishing call collected by the late J.B. Beck. A later passage of quasi-Gregorian chant identifies the French and Spanish priests who made the great river their highway. The fishing-call is altered in rhythm and harmony to represent Negro field hands and roustabous. A turbulent close brings all these elemts together in the muddy swirling currents of the Mississippi. The work was begun in the summer of 1945, and was revised and completed in the summer of 1947. Harl McDonald, who is the manager of The Philadelphia Orchestra, has concerned himself with music as an art, as a science and as a business in course of his career. He was born on a cattle ranch in the Rockies, but since his was a musical family, his up-bringing combined piano lessons with ranch life. Years of study and professional experience followed in Los Angeles and in Germany. In 1927 he was appointed lecuter in composition at the University of Pennsylvania and he has since then made is home in Philadelphia. In 1933 under a grant of the Rockefeller FOundation he collaborated with physicists in research dealing with the measurement of instrumental and vocal tone, new scale divisions and the resultant harmonies. In that same year he was named head of the University's music faculty and conductor of its choral organizations. In 1939, having been a member of the Board of Directors for five years, he was appointed manager of The Philadelphia Orchestra. He continus to write, but otherwise his entire attention is now devoted to managerial duties. Chief items in the catalogue of his compositions are four symphonies, three orchestra suites, a half-dozen tone-poems, three concertos and considerable quantity of choral music.