SKU: PE.EP72822

ISBN 9790577011769. 232 x 303mm inches. English.

I have only visited Damascus once, twenty years ago, on the way to Palmyra.  I had a purpose (I was writing music for a play about Palmyra’s Queen Zenobia) but essentially I was a tourist.  Like any visitor, I was thrilled to step out of the noisy modern city into the magical ancient world of the walled Old City, its vibrant souk leading to the magnificent mosque, and a labyrinth of winding, narrow streets filled with the smell of unleavened bread.

In Palmyra, I was met with extraordinary kindness everywhere.  On one occasion, a little Bedouin boy noticed that I was risking sunstroke wandering bare-headed among the spectacular ruins: he showed me how to tie a turban, then took me to have tea with his family in their tent.

Since then, I have watched helplessly as these places of wonder have been devastated and their inhabitants scattered and killed.  When the Sacconi Quartet suggested that I might choose a Syrian poet for our collaboration, I welcomed the idea.

I searched for a long time to find a contemporary poet whose work might gain from any music I could imagine.  I felt it was important to find first-hand accounts of the Syrian experience – but, of course, I was always reading them in translation.  In an anthology called Syria Speaks, I was astonished to read something that looked like prose, but was full of poetry.  It was Anne-Marie McManus’s fine translation of Ali Safar’s A Black Cloud in a Leaden White Sky – an eloquent, thoughtful, contained yet vivid account of life in a war-torn country, all the more moving for its restraint.

In setting these words, I have not attempted to imitate Syrian music.  However, there is what might be called a linguistic accommodation in my choice of scale, or mode.  Several movements are in a mode that I first discovered while writing a cantata commemorating the First World War: it has a tuning that I associate with war, its violence and desolation.  This eight-note mode is similar to scales found in Syrian music.  I did not choose it in the abstract: it emerged from the harmonies I was exploring in the earlier work, and emerged again as I was looking for the right musical colours to set Ali Safar’s words.  In this work, its Arabic aspect is more prominent. - Jonathan Dove

SKU: SU.80209901

For concert or worship; may be used separately 8 page octavo Duration: 7'02 1. Thou Didst Hear Me (George Herbert); 2. In What Torn Ship (John Donne) Published by: Dunstan House Minimum order quantity: 8 copies. Perusal copies are available by contacting office@DunstanHouse.com (include the organization name with your request). To order quantities fewer than 8.

SKU: SU.27110080

Melancholic setting of the middle section of a torn-up letter found on the floor of the Albion HotelBaritone & Piano Duration: 3’ Composed: 2008 Published by: Raymond J. Lustig Music.

SKU: BR.KM-2491

World premiere: Stuttgart (Festival eclat), February 3, 2002

ISBN 9790004502945. 11.5 x 16.5 inches.

For many years, I have been repeatedly asked by solo guitarists and guitar duos to write pieces for them. The Aleph Guitar Quartet and I have finally brought it off! The piece is called Der entkommene Orpheus (The Escaped Orpheus).In the old equal rights movement everything was treated as equally as possible, right from the beginning. The tones felt democratically happy. Only discontent found cause to complain. It ultimately hated this complex explicitness. The meaning, also in cases of definite tendencies in the piece, should never be able to lead a definite life. This piece, naturally, is just a tiny contribution!In the myth, Orpheus even enchanted stones and trees, turned around too soon to look at his beloved Eurydice (just think of the punctuality fanatic Schonberg - at least according to Richard Buhlig), refused the service of Dionysus - and he, who had plucked the strings of the lyre his whole life long, was now himself torn up by the Thracian Maenads as a punishment. But his head and his lyre floated over the sea and landed on Lesbos. A string is a string is a side!!!Like a coded word, this text is placed at the service of the varied role of the organiser of New Music. Like an equation. Shouldn't an organiser ever actually turn around towards a lover, so that the Furies of present-day responsibility do not drive him into a state of inner conflict?Nicolaus A. HuberTranslation: David Babcock (CD NEOS, 2017)

World premiere: Stuttgart (Festival eclat), February 3, 2002.

SKU: BR.OB-4738-16

Franz Liszt's symphonic poem Les Preludes, written in 1854, follows the eponymous text from Alphonse de Lamartine's collection of poems Meditations poetiques.

ISBN 9790004319925. 10 x 12.5 inches.

What else is our life but a series of preludes to that unknown Hymn, the first and solemn note of which is intoned by Death?Franz Liszts symphonic poem Les Preludes, written in 1854, follows the eponymous text from Alphonse de Lamartines collection of poems Meditations poetiques. It describes the fate of a man torn between the joys of love, a rustic idyll and a fierce struggle the latter serving to frame the work in the hymn-like Andante maestoso sections. Lamartines poem is printed in three languages in the present score.

Franz Liszt's symphonic poem Les Preludes, written in 1854, follows the eponymous text from Alphonse de Lamartine's collection of poems Meditations poetiques.