SKU: CF.CM9634

ISBN 9781491157060. UPC: 680160915620. 6.875 x 10.5 inches. Key: G major. English, English. Traditional Christmas Spiritual.

Berg's fantastic setting of this beloved American Christmas spiritual for advanced tenor-bass choirs tells a story of hope and meaning. The various textures throughout the a cappella arrangement with solos add much variety and musical interest. A holiday programming must!.
This beloved American Christmas Spiritual, like all spirituals and/or folk songs, tells a story. This is a story of hope and meaning. The introductory solo call and response (mm. 1-7) is hymnic in nature, just to get us started. (Think of it as an effective head fake!) The entrance at m. 8 from the upper three voices (we'll call them the trio part henceforth) is pivotal. They set the stage for the conversation between the singers and the soloist for the rest of the song. From this point, the song is basically a Jazz Trio in vocal form. The bass singers take on the role of the cool dude in the back wearing dark glasses and a beret playing the string bass. They provide the driving force for the forward movement of the entire song. The trio part, basically tenors 1 & 2 and baritones, take on the role of the keyboard providing chordal structure and syncopation. Their job is to fill the listener's ear with sound and rhythm. The soloist tells the story using the known melody and text with appropriate improv opportunities to keep the listeners focused on the message of the song. There is enough repetition to make for easy learning, but this also means that the chords need to snap into position cleanly every time. The Verses are easily identified (there are three) and presented with some small variations in Verse 3 (see mm. 56-58...this only happens once). The Refrain (mm. 30-37) is the part of the song where the singers switch from the Jazz Trio role and actually become a Men's Choral Ensemble. This Refrain is repeated after Verse 3 at mm. 66-71. Between verses 2 & 3, there is not a refrain. Instead, there is a bridge repeated from the introductory material, but used this time to move us into a new key signature. This can be a very exciting moment for the singers as well as the listeners! Measures 72-75 is known in the business as a vamp. It can be repeated once and then move on, OR it can be repeated multiple times, depending on the comfort level of the soloist and the response of the audience. It is important that there be a clear signal from the conductor as to how to end the vamp and move effectively to the actual coda of the song. The ending should be sung with tight control that only looks like reckless abandon! Faces bright; words clean; melody clear; rhythms precise! Enjoy.
This beloved American Christmas Spiritual, like all spirituals and/or folk songs, tells a story. This is a story of hope and meaning. The introductory solo call and response (mm. 1-7) is hymnic in nature, just to get us started. (Think of it as an effective head fake!)The entrance at m. 8 from the upper three voices (we’ll call them the “trio part” henceforth) is pivotal. They set the stage for the conversation between the singers and the soloist for the rest of the song. From this point, the song is basically a Jazz Trio in vocal form. The bass singers take on the role of the cool dude in the back wearing dark glasses and a beret playing the string bass. They provide the driving force for the forward movement of the entire song.The “trio part”, basically tenors 1 & 2 and baritones, take on the role of the keyboard providing chordal structure and syncopation. Their job is to fill the listener’s ear with sound and rhythm.The soloist tells the story using the known melody and text with appropriate improv opportunities to keep the listeners focused on the message of the song.There is enough repetition to make for easy learning, but this also means that the chords need to “snap into position” cleanly every time. The Verses are easily identified (there are three) and presented with some small variations in Verse 3 (see mm. 56-58…this only happens once).The Refrain (mm. 30-37) is the part of the song where the singers switch from the “Jazz Trio” role and actually become a “Men’s Choral Ensemble”. This Refrain is repeated after Verse 3 at mm. 66-71. Between verses 2 & 3, there is not a refrain. Instead, there is a bridge repeated from the introductory material, but used this time to move us into a new key signature. This can be a very exciting moment for the singers as well as the listeners!Measures 72-75 is known in the business as a “vamp”. It can be repeated once and then move on, OR it can be repeated multiple times, depending on the comfort level of the soloist and the response of the audience.It is important that there be a clear signal from the conductor as to how to end the “vamp” and move effectively to the actual coda of the song. The ending should be sung with tight control that only looks like reckless abandon!Faces bright; words clean; melody clear; rhythms precise! Enjoy.

SKU: PR.16500100F

ISBN 9781491114421. UPC: 680160669783. 9 x 12 inches.

Commissioned for a consortium of high school and college bands in the north Dallas region, FOR THEMYSTIC HARMONY is a 10-minute inspirational work in homage to Norwood and Elizabeth Dixon,patrons of the Fort Worth Symphony and the Van Cliburn Competition. Welcher draws melodic flavorfrom five American hymns, spirituals, and folk tunes of the 19th century. The last of these sources toappear is the hymn tune For the Beauty of the Earth, whose third stanza is the quatrain: “For the joy of earand eye, For the heart and mind’s delight, For the mystic harmony, Linking sense to sound and sight,”giving rise to the work’s title.
This work, commissioned for a consortium of high school bands in the north Dallas area, is my fifteenth maturework for wind ensemble (not counting transcriptions). When I asked Todd Dixon, the band director whospearheaded this project, what kind of a work he most wanted, he first said “something that’s basically slow,” butwanted to leave the details to me. During a long subsequent conversation, he mentioned that his grandparents,Norwood and Elizabeth Dixon, were prime supporters of the Fort Worth Symphony, going so far as to purchase anumber of high quality instruments for that orchestra. This intrigued me, so I asked more about his grandparentsand was provided an 80-page biographical sketch. Reading that article, including a long section about theirdevotion to supporting a young man through the rigors of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition fora number of years, moved me very much. Norwood and Elizabeth Dixon weren’t just supporters of the arts; theywere passionate lovers of music and musicians. I determined to make this work a testament to that love, and tothe religious faith that sustained them both. The idea of using extant hymns was also suggested by Todd Dixon,and this 10-minute work is the result.I have employed existing melodies in several works, delving into certain kinds of religious music more than a fewtimes. In seeking new sounds, new ways of harmonizing old tunes, and the contrapuntal overlaying of one tunewith another, I was able to make works like ZION (using 19th-century Revivalist hymns) and LABORING SONGS(using Shaker melodies) reflect the spirit of the composers who created these melodies, without sounding likepastiches or medleys. I determined to do the same with this new work, with the added problem of employingmelodies that were more familiar. I chose five tunes from the 19th century: hymns, spirituals, and folk-tunes.Some of these are known by differing titles, but they all appear in hymnals of various Christian denominations(with various titles and texts). My idea was to employ the tunes without altering their notes, instead using aconstantly modulating sense of harmony — sometimes leading to polytonal harmonizations of what are normallysimple four-chord hymns.The work begins and ends with a repeated chime on the note C: a reminder of steeples, white clapboard churchesin the country, and small church organs. Beginning with a Mixolydian folk tune of Caribbean origin presentedtwice with layered entrances, the work starts with a feeling of mystery and gentle sorrow. It proceeds, after along transition, into a second hymn that is sometimes connected to the sea (hence the sensation of water andwaves throughout it). This tune, by John B. Dykes (1823-1876), is a bit more chromatic and “shifty” than mosthymn-tunes, so I chose to play with the constant sensation of modulation even more than the original does. Atthe climax, the familiar spiritual “Were you there?” takes over, with a double-time polytonal feeling propelling itforward at “Sometimes it causes me to tremble.”Trumpets in counterpoint raise the temperature, and the tempo as well, leading the music into a third tune (ofunknown provenance, though it appears with different texts in various hymnals) that is presented in a sprightlymanner. Bassoons introduce the melody, but it is quickly taken up by other instruments over three “verses,”constantly growing in orchestration and volume. A mysterious second tune, unrelated to this one, interrupts it inall three verses, sending the melody into unknown regions.The final melody is “For the Beauty of the Earth.” This tune by Conrad Kocher (1786-1872) is commonly sung atThanksgiving — the perfect choice to end this work celebrating two people known for their generosity.Keeping the sense of constant modulation that has been present throughout, I chose to present this hymn in threegrowing verses, but with a twist: every four bars, the “key” of the hymn seems to shift — until the “Lord of all, toThee we praise” melody bursts out in a surprising compound meter. This, as it turns out, was the “mystery tune”heard earlier in the piece. After an Ivesian, almost polytonal climax, the Coda begins over a long B( pedal. At first,it seems to be a restatement of the first two phrases of “For the Beauty” with long spaces between them, but it soonchanges to a series of “Amen” cadences, widely separated by range and color. These, too, do not conform to anykey, but instead overlay each other in ways that are unpredictable but strangely comforting.The third verse of “For the Beauty of the Earth” contains this quatrain:“For the joy of ear and eye, –For the heart and mind’s delightFor the mystic harmonyLinking sense to sound and sight”and it was from this poetry that I drew the title for the present work. It is my hope that audiences and performerswill find within it a sense of grace: more than a little familiar, but also quite new and unexpected.

SKU: MB.WBM75M

ISBN 9781737795353. 8.75X11.75 inches.

This is a collection of 86 guitar solos in notation only from William Bayâ??s books, Solo Guitar in Worship, Communion, Psalms, Timeless Gospel Melodies and Spirituals. The solos work well as preludes, offertories, communion hymns, recessionals or they can be played for enjoyment.  All 86 solos have been recorded and are available as online downloads with this book.

SKU: PR.11441690S

UPC: 680160626021. 9 x 12 inches.

Ran's third string quartet was written for the Pacifica Quartet, who are featuring it in numerous performances from May 2014 through February 2016, across the country and abroad. Their blog page dedicated to the work also features the composer's notes, for more indepth insight. ...impassioned solos emerge from ominous quiet, and high arpeggios in the violins quiver alongside the earthy cello. Ms. Ran skillfully deploys these extremes of color, volume and pitch, yet the overall somewhat chilly impression is one of poise. -- Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times.
My third string quartet was composed at the invitation of the Pacifica Quartet, whose music-making I have come to know closely and admire hugely as resident artists at the University of Chicago.  Already in our early conversations Pacifica proposed that this quartet might, in some manner, refer to the visual arts as a point of germination.  Probing further, I found out that the quartet members had special interest in art created during the earlier part of the 20th century, perhaps between the two world wars.  It was my good fortune to have met, a short while later, while in residence at the American Academy in Rome in the fall of 2011, art conservationist Albert Albano who steered me to the work of Felix Nussbaum (1904-1944), a German-Jewish painter who, like so many others, perished in the Holocaust at a young age, and who left some powerful, deeply moving art that spoke to the life that was unraveling around him. The title of my string quartet takes its inspiration from a major exhibit devoted to art by German artists of the period of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) titled “Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s”, first shown at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2006-07.  Nussbaum would have been a bit too young to be included in this exhibit.  His most noteworthy art was created in the last very few years of his short life.  The exhibit’s evocative title, however, suggested to me the idea of “Glitter, Doom, Shards, Memory” as a way of framing a possible musical composition that would be an homage to his life and art, and to that of so many others like him during that era.  Knowing that their days were numbered, yet intent on leaving a mark, a legacy, a memory, their art is triumph of the human spirit over annihilation. Parallel to my wish to compose a string quartet that, typically for this genre, would exist as “pure music”, independent of a narrative, was my desire to effect an awareness in my listener of matters which are, to me, of great human concern.  To my mind there is no contradiction between the two goals.  As in several other works composed since 1969, this is my way of saying ‘do not forget’, something that, I believe, can be done through music with special power and poignancy.    The individual titles of the quartet’s four movements give an indication of some of the emotional strands this work explores. 1) “That which happened” (das was geschah) – is how the poet Paul Celan referred to the Shoah – the Holocaust.  These simple words served for me, in the first movement, as a metaphor for the way in which an “ordinary” life, with its daily flow and its sense of sweet normalcy, was shockingly, inhumanely, inexplicably shattered. 2) “Menace” is a shorter movement, mimicking a Scherzo.  It is also machine-like, incessant, with an occasional, recurring, waltz-like little tune – perhaps the chilling grimace we recognize from the executioner’s guillotine mask.  Like the death machine it alludes to, it gathers momentum as it goes, and is unstoppable. 3) ”If I must perish - do not let my paintings die”; these words are by Felix Nussbaum who, knowing what was ahead, nonetheless continued painting till his death in Auschwitz in 1944.  If the heart of the first movement is the shuddering interruption of life as we know it, the third movement tries to capture something of what I can only imagine to be the conflicting states of mind that would have made it possible, and essential, to continue to live and practice one’s art – bearing witness to the events.  Creating must have been, for Nussbaum and for so many others, a way of maintaining sanity, both a struggle and a catharsis – an act of defiance and salvation all at the same time. 4) “Shards, Memory” is a direct reference to my quartet’s title.  Only shards are left.  And memory.  The memory is of things large and small, of unspeakable tragedy, but also of the song and the dance, the smile, the hopes.  All things human.  As we remember, in the face of death’s silence, we restore dignity to those who are gone.—Shulamit Ran .

SKU: GI.G-10678

SKU: ST.C463

ISBN 9790570814633.

This volume contains contrasting works by Federico Ruiz spanning quite a large and rich period of his compositional output that goes from his early Micro-Suite (1971), to lilting, sweet and rhythmic Venezuelan waltzes passing by the mysterious, intimate, and intense Nocturno (1994) plus pieces originally composed for film, and theatre. Real eclecticism in styles, moods and atmospheres that show Ruizâ??s talents and scope.

The Nocturno is a deep, intriguing, substantial piece presenting a satisfying length which moves from different paths of the mind and the heart written in an abstract, chromatic idiom, that does not dissociate itself from the Venezuelan waltz and the joropo. One could perhaps say that there is a deconstruction of the latter. For the interpretation, the composer has suggested to me that it is allowed to have some flexibility in the tempo. Ruiz kindly dedicated it to me, and I have had the pleasure of performing it in many concerts.

Although all highly expressive, the Three Venezuelan Waltzes present in this collection as well as the piece titled Aliseo, are works that are close to the colourful Venezuelan folk tradition. Federico Ruiz had given me two of them when we first met: â??Tu Presenciaâ?? (1981) and â??Eloísaâ?? (1989) and then I attended a performance of the play â??Office Number Oneâ?? by Miguel Otero Silva with a fantastic actor, Elba Escobar in the role of Carmen Rosa and, I just fell in love and was very moved by the incidental music that I later discovered, by reading the programme, had been written by Federico Ruiz. Later that evening, I called him and asked to please make a piano score of the composition, so I could have the desired piece in my hands. That is how â??Carmen Rosaâ? waltz (1987) came to exist in a piano version.

â??Eloisaâ?? is another Venezuelan waltz with more jazzy harmonies where precision in the rhythm and elegant playing is also essential, as it is in most of his pieces.

â??Tu Presenciaâ?? was dedicated to his mother, Margarita. It is written with the structure of the Venezuelan waltz, which consists of a nostalgic subject that leads to a faster, happier middle section where the typical graceful rhythm is given by the left-hand accompaniment figure of a dotted crotchet followed by a quaver and a crotchet.

The craft and magic found in the five movements of the Micro-Suite is based on a dodecaphonic row by Ernst Krenek. They remind us of the idiom of the Second Viennese School. These real miniatures seem to tell short stories. The â??Preludioâ?? is full of humour. I imagine dancing figures given by the jumps all over the keyboard and extreme dynamics; the phrases give the impression of a conversation with many questions and answers. The â??Invenciónâ?? is a kaleidoscopic piece where the hands mirror each other. The â??Passacagliaâ?? is the longest movement, at just over a minute where the prime motif is repeated three times on the bass line. For its construction Federico Ruiz uses as well the retrograde and the retrograde inversion of the twelve-tone series. It must be played expressively with dynamic contrasts between pianissimo and louder events. The â??Scherzoâ?? has repetitive motifs of a minor third in both hands and the â??Finalâ?? displays virtuosic passages for the pianist.

Aliseo was originally written for the film â??Aire libreâ? (1995), by Luis Armando Roche. It contains elements of diverse types of Venezuelan joropo. In the film, the character of Aliseo Carvallo is played by the composer himself who performs this piece on a harpsichord to welcome scientists Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland one day at the turn of the 1800â??s, as a sample of the new music from the South American land. It presents the refinement of the late European classical era in fusion with Venezuelan folk music.

SKU: SS.50600030

Commissioned by the Colonial Symphony, Paul Hostetter, Music Director and Conductor. First performed in 2006. Composer's Note: My inspiration for Smiling Dennis is the great bass clarinet virtuoso Dennis Smylie. I have had the pleasure of getting to know Dennis over the past several years owing to our mutual affiliation at Montclair State University. We would meet unintentionally in the halls and begin conversations regarding all manners of topics: from the colorful history of the bass clarinet - and bass clarinetists - to the furious appetite of the New Jersey groundhog. Dennis inevitably finds the humor in things - he revels in discovering the comic story that can often be found, just underneath the topic. When Maestro Hostetter asked me to compose a new piece during his initial season with the Colonial Symphony, and mentioned the possibility of a work related to humor, I immediately thought of the Dennis. When I spoke with Maestro Hostetter the following day, I had already conceived of the title (very unusual for me - I'm much more a musical/visual thinker than a verbal one) as well as the overall musical narrative. Smiling Dennis is a concerto in one movement for one bass clarinetist and twenty string players. Somewhat unusually, each performer has a unique musical assignment - that is, the string players are not aligned into their typical alliances of first violins, second violins and so forth. This permits a more complex string texture, allowing each performer to assert his or her individuality. Indeed, the notion of individuality is essential to this concerto, as it often is in concerti. For example, Smiling Dennis begins with the bass clarinet not quite obeying the conventions of tuning to the orchestra. Rather than simply take the A offered by the Concertmaster, the soloist playfully performs a gently descending series of notes. Offered another A, the soloist repeats this gesture (though with a different descending series). This exchange occurs four times. In the final one, members of the string orchestra join the soloist in the first significant statement of one of the central melodies. The bass clarinet completes this introductory section alone, playing all the way down to a low A, a third below the lowest note in the celli. Following the introduction, Smiling Dennis consists of six sections, somewhat along the lines of a dance suite: an energetic Allegro, a lyric Arioso, a forward Piu mosso, a light-hearted and syncopated dance, a even more energetic passage for strings alone, and finally a modified return to the introduction. In the return, the string ensemble is no longer at all oppositional to the soloist. Rather, in response to the soloist's gentle cajoling and supportive commentary, the strings accompany - with pleasure, you might say - the quiet, individual playfulness of the bass clarinet. The work ends with a return to the soloist's substratum A, accompanied quietly by the strings.