SKU: PR.411411930

UPC: 680160687589.

This rebooted triptych of short operas is family friendly and full of fun, while paying tribute to the African tradition of storytelling for all ages. Sister Sparrow, Sister Robin and Madame Partridge retell the antics of Bre'r Rabbit and his nemesis Bre'r Fox in Briar Patch, The Pot of Sense, and Madame Partridge and her Eggs. Okoye's music blends African American musical styles of jazz, blues, and gospel with contemporary concert music sounds. Combined with Moore's libretto, the result brings to mind a meeting Langston Hughes and Gilbert and Sullivan on steroids, en route to the Black church. A concert version of Briar Patch will be available for full orchestra with five soloists. Libretto by Carman Moore. The music blends African American musical styles of jazz, blues, and gospel with contemporary concert music sounds. Intended for all audiences. NOTE: Each story from the Tales from the Briar Patch is derived from African folk tales. The character Bre'r Rabbit is actually the trickster, Anansi the Spider, of ancient Ghanaian folklore. While many people associate him and his friends with Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus stories, the stories predate Harris and hist stories. The creators updated the language, using all animals to portray the story, with the trio of spirited birds narrating. Producers find that the works rate well with all audiences and are especially useful for community discussions and engagement.
This rebooted triptych of short operas is family friendly and full of fun, while paying tribute to the African tradition of storytelling for all ages. Sister Sparrow, Sister Robin and Madame Partridge retell the antics of Bre’r Rabbit and his nemesis Bre’r Fox in “Briar Patch,” “The Pot of Sense,” and “Madame Partridge and her Eggs.” Okoye’s music blends African American musical styles of jazz, blues, and gospel with contemporary concert music sounds. Combined with Moore’s libretto, the result brings to mind a meeting Langston Hughes and Gilbert and Sullivan on steroids, en route to the Black church. A concert version of “Briar Patch” will be available for full orchestra with five soloists. Libretto by Carman Moore. The music blends African American musical styles of jazz, blues, and gospel with contemporary concert music sounds. Intended for all audiences.NOTE: Each story from the Tales from the Briar Patch is derived from African folk tales. The character “Bre’r Rabbit” is actually the trickster, “Anansi the Spider,” of ancient Ghanaian folklore. While many people associate him and his friends with Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus stories, the stories predate Harris and hist stories. The creators updated the language, using all animals to portray the story, with the trio of spirited birds narrating. Producers find that the works rate well with all audiences and are especially useful for community discussions and engagement.

SKU: PR.144404960

UPC: 680160545476.

Although my wife Elizabeth took me on a two-week Caribbean cruise as a pre-70th birthday vacation gift, two short works for string instruments emerged during the trip: Trance for solo violoncello and Sojournen for solo viola. This cello piece invokes two of the many meanings of spell: an incantation and also a short period of time. The solo is a trance-like, fleeting scherzo in a three-part through-composed design. The entire piece is constructed from very limited material stated in the opening gestures with much use made of open strings. Following an introduction, the three brief sections serve as mini-etudes for glissandi tremolandos, measured tremolos, and double-stopped rapid bowing. I think an omnipresent autumnal aural breeze was in my mind since the soloist's oration -- indeed under a spell -- never lets up, even at very low dynamic levels. This constant motion requires dexterity, finesse and an elegant control from the performer. Trance is approximately five minutes in duration, was written while at sea and completed on December 15, 2003, in Saint Johns, Antigua. The score is dedicated to the American cellist Jeffrey Zeigler.

SKU: HL.50600566

8.25x11.75x0.07 inches.

The Finnish composer Osmo Tapio Räihälä reports that he experienced a phase whilst working on his Horn Concerto in 2011 during which he had the feeling of “having landed in a deadend”. To find a remedy, he decided to develop a kind of “finger exercise” for composers, comparable to the “warming-up process of an instrumental soloist before performing”. Räihälä remembers furthermore: “Instead of writing for orchestra, I started a short solo piece for clarinet. Little did I know that I had opened a Pandora's box! I wrote 'Soliloque 1: Étoffé' in two days. Perhaps this frenzy caused the music to become restless, with quick turns – in short, a rather virtuosic etude. The clarinet seeks paths, at first without success, but obviously finding one in the end. And what about the Pandora's Box? I had given the title the number one, and during the next two years I wrote five more Soliloques, solos of six to seven minutes, for various instruments, as well as one for soprano a cappella. The title Étoffé means 'rich', or 'well rounded', but also 'fabric' or even a 'patch' - and I felt that I had patched something in my work that was broken; indeed, working on the concerto now gave me a fresh start.”.

SKU: CF.CAS160F

ISBN 9781491165454. UPC: 680160924363. Key: C major.

The story of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor is of a rising star composer, one with a significant gift for melody and a simple lyricism, who embraced the previously unexplored song and dance forms from his father’s native west Africa and incorporated them into his own very European art music. Coleridge-Taylor began playing the violin at age five and by age fifteen wasadmitted to London’s Royal College of Music, where he studied both violin and composition and composed his first works. The simply-titled Melody is taken from Three Short Pieces for Organ - a set of pieces originally published in Novello’s Album for the Organ, No. 3 (1898). While certainly typical of the late 19th century, many of Coleridge-Taylor's creations display inspiration by African musical elements much like spirituals inspired Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony.

SKU: PR.111401770

UPC: 680160003372.

This text of this piece use four languages - English, Hebrew, Italian, and French - to express joy and give thanks. Except for the word 'joy' which is presented simultaneously in all four languages at the outset of the work, the rest of the composition was composed initially without words.
In 1981, WFMT Radio in Chicago commissioned twelve composers to write short fanfares in celebration of the station’s thirtieth anniversary.  For one month at a time, each composer’s Fanfare was heard every day at a previously unannounced time slot.  Because of my special fondness for the human voice as an instrument, I decided to make my Fanfare a vocal one.  “My” month in this series being the month of November, the idea of giving thanks naturally suggested itself.  Though the work can be performed live by a minimum of five female voices, I really wanted to limit timbre differentiation to a minimum — hence the idea of pre-recording two singers and multi-tracking them.  And, in any event, it seemed especially appropriate to compose a work of this nature for the radio, a medium that is certainly quite distinct from the concert-hall. For a text, I put together a series of words in English, Hebrew, Italian and French, all concerned with joy and giving thanks.  Except for the word joy which is presented simultaneously in all four languages at the outset of the work, the rest of the composition was composed initially without words.  In a process akin, perhaps, to the orchestrating of music already composed, the words were then strung together by me to fit the sounds and the rhythms (a reversal, at least for me, of the usual process of combining text and music).

SKU: BR.CHB-4809-02

With its rich contrasts, E. T. A. Hoffmann's Miserere is like a bridge thrown between the musical idiom of his time and the style of the Palestrina school, which Hoffmann so admired.

ISBN 9790004408513. 9 x 12 inches.

Written in 1809, E. T. A. Hoffmanns Miserere remained unprinted and unperformed during the composers lifetime. With its rich contrasts, the work is like a bridge thrown between the musical idiom of his time and the style of the Palestrina school, which Hoffmann so admired. There are a few short five-part a cappella passages that resemble the Palestrina style. Overall, however, the small-segmented structure of the work is definitely noteworthy. None of the twelve movements lasts longer than five minutes. Diary entries confirm the composers inner tension. On 16 January 1809, for example, Hoffmann while working on this piece writes: rather unhealthy state, more like a romantic-religious feeling.

SKU: CA.965820

ISBN 9790007164973. Text language: French. Text: Rilke, Rainer Maria. Text by Rainer Maria Rilke.

In his settings of five quatrains by Rilke, Cyrill Schurch explores the colorfulness of the literary model. His mainly homophonic, song-like style of setting corresponds to the compactness of the poetry. Schurch wanders freely, but always comprehensibly, through the keys and employs dissonances pointedly and economically. In this way, Schurch's songs for choir are comparable to Hindemith's sophisticated choral settings of Rilke, while speaking their very own tonal language. The short compositions with their poetically sanguine basic character will enrich every concert program focused on the topics of nature and landscape. They represent a rewarding project for any choir that finds pleasure in exploring tone colors and delicate emotional nuances.

SKU: P2.80059

Impromptu for Trombone and Piano was written, as the title suggests, rather spontaneously. Classical improvisation has always been a favorite technique of mine; I very much enjoy simply sitting down at the piano and composing freely through improvisation, sometimes for up to forty-five minutes or more without a pause. These sessions for me are both personal and musical, but in a seemingly incompatible way, and with different affects. As a personal endeavor, I have always found improvisation to be essentially a meditative exercise for me; after a substantial bout of spontaneous music-making, playing the final note feels like emerging from a blurry and dream-like state. I've always enjoyed the markedly improved clarity and focus that I am granted in all my non-musical activities immediately following such an event. However in hindsight of my musical mind, these long sessions of improvisation have always been extremely unsatisfying...I'm not really able to retain any of the musical information which I created. The music that I made, with some choice moments of dictation-worthy value, is not only through-composed but essentially un-replicable. It has, of course, been suggested to me that I record these moments so that I might transcribe them later, however as with most creative things in this world, a true impromptu work requires complete spontaneity; I simply can't improvise anything of real value on my own command. This is the reasons that I feel lucky to have wrote this piece. I suppose it was luck of the draw to have a brief stint of enough patience to combine composition with short bursts of improvisation. As both a trombonist and a pianist, I am thankful to have the luxury of improvisational facility on both instruments. The result is that the work is truly a duet, in that both the trombone and piano parts contain original motives. It is not the case that the piano part serves to accompany a melody in the trombone, because some music which you hear from the piano came as improvisational ideas before a trombone part was superimposed on top of it. And, of course, the opposite is true as well. Essentially, Impromptu was written like a jigsaw puzzle made of oddly shaped pieces; two jagged and asymmetrical chunks become balanced only when they find each other. I hope you enjoy pulling the pieces apart as much as I enjoyed putting them together.

SKU: CA.1039505

ISBN 9790007188139. Language: German.

Beethoven's Meeres Stille und Gluckliche Fahrt (Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage) op. 112 for four-part mixed chorus and symphony orchestra - his setting of a pair of poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - defies straightforward categorization, but can best be described as a choral ode. Beethoven in fact never voyaged by sea, but his composition, premiered in 1815, continues to surprise even today. He depicted in music the smooth surface of the motionless water and the oppressive calm, which meant nothing other than being becalmed, a delayed voyage, and short rations in the era of sailing, with the same intensity as a freshening increasing wind, with which Aeolus, the God of the winds, ultimately enabled the longed-for prosperous voyage to take place. The composed calmness of the motionless sea is conveyed in the low register used throughout, in which the chorus sings the first poem accompanied by washes of pianissimo sounds on the strings. There is a surprising moment with the musical portrayal of the ungeheuere Weite (immense breadth), at which the vocal-instrumental writing suddenly crescendos to forte and unfolds into a texture of over five octaves. By contrast Gluckliche Fahrt is written in restlessly-compiled meters, whose musical setting in flowing movement with diatonic scale passages evokes happy excitement and confidence. The work was dedicated to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whom Beethoven greatly admired throughout his life. The work has now been published in a new critical edition based on the first printed edition and the performance score which Beethoven himself checked and corrected. Score available separately - see item CA.1039500.

SKU: CA.1039511

ISBN 9790007245337. Language: German.

Beethoven's Meeres Stille und Gluckliche Fahrt (Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage) op. 112 for four-part mixed chorus and symphony orchestra - his setting of a pair of poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - defies straightforward categorization, but can best be described as a choral ode. Beethoven in fact never voyaged by sea, but his composition, premiered in 1815, continues to surprise even today. He depicted in music the smooth surface of the motionless water and the oppressive calm, which meant nothing other than being becalmed, a delayed voyage, and short rations in the era of sailing, with the same intensity as a freshening increasing wind, with which Aeolus, the God of the winds, ultimately enabled the longed-for prosperous voyage to take place. The composed calmness of the motionless sea is conveyed in the low register used throughout, in which the chorus sings the first poem accompanied by washes of pianissimo sounds on the strings. There is a surprising moment with the musical portrayal of the ungeheuere Weite (immense breadth), at which the vocal-instrumental writing suddenly crescendos to forte and unfolds into a texture of over five octaves. By contrast Gluckliche Fahrt is written in restlessly-compiled meters, whose musical setting in flowing movement with diatonic scale passages evokes happy excitement and confidence. The work was dedicated to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whom Beethoven greatly admired throughout his life. The work has now been published in a new critical edition based on the first printed edition and the performance score which Beethoven himself checked and corrected. Score and part available separately - see item CA.1039500.