SKU: PR.16400272S

UPC: 680160588442. 8.5 x 11 inches.

My third quartet is laid out in a three-movement structure, with each movement based on an early, middle, and late work of the great American impressionist painter Mary Cassatt. Although the movements are separate, with full-stop endings, the music is connected by a common scale-form, derived from the name MARY CASSATT, and by a recurring theme that introduces all three movements. I see this theme as Mary's Theme, a personality that stays intact while undergoing gradual change.   I The Bacchante (1876) [Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania]   The painting shows a young girl of Italian or Spanish origin, playing a small pair of cymbals. Since Cassatt was trying very hard to fit in at the French Academy at the time, she painted a lot of these subjects, which were considered typical and universal. The style of the painting doesn't yet show Cassatt's originality, except perhaps for certain details in the face. Accordingly the music for this movement is Spanish/Italian, in a similar period-style but using the musical signature described above. The music begins with Mary's Theme, ruminative and slow, then abruptly changes to an alla Spagnola-type fast 3/4 - 6/8 meter. It evokes the Spanish-influenced music of Ravel and Falla.   Midway through, there's an accompanied recitative for the viola, which figures large in this particular movement, then back to a truncated recapitulation of the fast music. The overall feeling is of a well-made, rather conventional movement in a contemporary Spanish/Italian style. Cassatt's painting, too, is rather conventional.   II At the Opera (1880) [Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts]   This painting is one of Cassatt's most well known works, and it hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The painting shows a woman alone in a box at the opera house, completely dressed (including gloves) and looking through opera glasses at someone or something that is NOT on the stage. Across the auditorium from her, but exactly at eye level, is a gentleman with opera glasses intently watching her - though it is not him that she's looking at. It's an intriguing picture.   This movement is far less conventional than the first movement, as the painting is far less conventional. The music begins with a rapid, Shostakovich-type mini-overture lasting less than a minute, based on Mary's Theme. My conjecture is that the woman in the painting has arrived late to the opera, busily stumbling into her box. What happens next is a kind of collage, a kind of surrealistic overlaying of two different elements: the foreground music, at first is a direct quotation of Soldier's Chorus from Gounod's FAUST (an opera Cassatt would certainly have heard in the brand-new Paris Opera House at that time), played by Violin II, Viola, and Cello. This music is played sul ponticello in the melody and col legno in the marching accompaniment. On top of this, the first violin hovers at first on a high harmonic, then descends into a slow melody, completely separate from the Gounod. It's as if the woman in the painting is hearing the opera onstage but is not really interested in it. Then the cello joins the first violin in a kind of love-duet (just the two of them, at first). This music isn't at all Gounod-derived; it's entirely from the same scale patterns as the first movement and derives from Mary's Theme and its scale. The music stays in a kind of dichotomy feeling, usually three-against-one, until the end of the movement, when another Gounod melody, Valentin's aria Avant de quitter ce lieux reappears in a kind of coda for all four players. It ends atmospherically and emotionally disconnected, however. The overall feeling is a kind of schizophrenic, opera-inspired dream.   III Young Woman in Green, Outdoors in the Sun (1909) [Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts]   The painting, one of Cassatt's last, is very simple: just a figure, looking sideways out of the picture. The colors are pastel and yet bold - and the woman is likewise very self-assured and not in the least demure. It is eight minutes long, and is all about melody - three melodies, to be exact (Young Woman, Green, and Sunlight). No angst, no choppy rhythms, just ever-unfolding melody and lush harmonies. I quote one other French composer here, too: Debussy's song Green, from Ariettes Oubliees. 1909 would have been Debussy's heyday in Paris, and it makes perfect sense musically as well as visually to do this.   Mary Cassatt lived her last several years in near-total blindness, and as she lost visual acuity, her work became less sharply defined - something akin to late water lilies of Monet, who suffered similar vision loss. My idea of making this movement entirely melodic was compounded by having each of the three melodies appear twice, once in a pure form, and the second time in a more diffuse setting. This makes an interesting two ways form: A-B-C-A1-B1-C1.   String Quartet No.3 (Cassatt) is dedicated, with great affection and respect, to the Cassatt String Quartet, whose members have dedicated themselves in large measure to the furthering of the contemporary repertoire for quartet.

SKU: IS.PN7495EM

ISBN 9790365074952.

Louis Anthony deLise is an American composer, pianist, and percussionist. The compositions in A Gift of Moments are typical of deLise’s composing style that often features the juxtaposition of disparate musical elements like serial technique, frequently changing meters, the urgency and drive of rock and roll, and the lush harmonies of 1960’s West Coast Jazz. Dr. deLise was Adjunct Lecturer of Theory and Composition at the Boyer College of Music and Dance (in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). He is the author of The Professional Songwriter, a textbook on songwriting. The title, A Gift of Moments, comes from something a friend wrote about her deceased husband. She described their too-short time together as, a gift of moments. (Time with someone you love is always too short, isn’t it?) Since February 2020, (since I’ve been locked down at home with my patient and loving wife, Theresa), like the rest of us, I’ve been reminded each day of just how delicate life is. My friend’s comment about her lost love has gradually revealed itself as a worthy title for the collection of music I was creating during this time of lockdown. All of the pieces in this collection are in some way about love: of a mate, of family, our way of life, and those beliefs we consider particular to us. The compositions are varied in style as they encompass musical gestures reflective of the many disparate musical traditions alive in my soul. With this unapologetically sensitive, perhaps even nostalgic, music of mine I intend to blur the arbitrary boundaries of genre classification, like classical or pop; ambient or orchestral. Special thanks to Vivian Barton Dozor, a wonderfully talented cellist who provided insight into bowing and phrasing for the cello parts.

SKU: PR.510076960

1. Choral: An improbably superimposing of Beethoven and Brahms. At the end of the first performance of the latter's 1st Symphony, someone asked the composer: Don't you find that your main theme remin ds one of the Ode to Joy? To which he retorted: Even an idiot would have noticed it! 2. Fugue: in the last exposition, the subject of Fugue I from volume 1 of Bach's Well-Tempered Keyboard is super imposed on the theme from Mozart's so-called easy sonata. 3. Passion: In his Violin Concerto, Mendelssohn, to whom we owe the rediscovery of Bach's Passions, seems to have borrowed a theme from a lost Passion. 4. Recitativo: Tribute to Franck's tribute to Bach in his Sonata for violin and piano. 5. Invention: A private revenge, after a bitter failure. Debussy's Toccata was on the compulsory list for the Conservatory piano class entrance exam. 6. Arpeggione: In which the listener realizes the similarity in the introduction to Schubert's Unfinished Symphony and Arpeggione Sonata. 7. Sarabande: The most iconoclastic, for Bach's 5th Cello Suite is already suffused with harmony. There might be an evocatioin of a Brahms-like overarching structure, though... 8. Variation: The slowest variation ever written on Paganini's 24th Caprice. 9. Scene: Schumann's Reverie as a Prelude. 10. Finale: In order to capture the elusive harmony of the Finale of Chopin's Sonate Funebre. 11. Fugue on Au clair de la lune: Our greatest nursery rhymes, fugue fitted and choralized. 12. Fugue de Noel (Christmas fugue): Quite appropriate. 13. Fugue on J'ai du bon tabac: Prohibited counterpoint. 14. Fugue on La Marseillaise: Franco-German reconciliation. 15. Pedal - Exercitium: Realization and conclusion of Bach's organ pedal exercies.