Shameless Self-Promotion: Ballet & Chorus
/Today I am hyping two pieces that have actually been performed. Technically, one piece was performed and the other was played as a recording, but it was in a public performance and there were dancers there.
Getting through getting over, in rehearsal
We’ll start with the dance: Getting through getting over. This was a request in 2018 from Paulo Manso de Sousa, director of Southern Arc Dance, for music for his dancers. Originally it was to be a breast cancer awareness piece, entitled Red Dress, but the support for that never materialized. He ended up with the concept of a wall and the dancers’ relationship with it and each other.
At that point time was running short, and I am not a fast composer, so I asked if I could adapt/add to the Cello Sonata. Sure, Paulo said, and oh, I have a clarinetist friend and a violinist, throw them in there.
So this dance suite is a recycling of old music. I’m just like Bach that way.
I enhanced the sonata with clarinet and violin, then wrote two new movements, the II. Perpetuum Mobile (a star turn for the clarinet); and III. For Two, a lovely adagio pas de deux. They are really good.
I’m not at all sure that the suite jumps and coheres, as we say in Shakespeare, but it was nice to be asked to compose music and then see it performed. (The possibility of live musicians faded as we went along, plus the Cello Sonata, written for a professional cellist, is not easy.)
Listen to it here.
In the summer of 2005, I was the assistant program director for instruction at the Georgia Governor’s Honors Program. (That meant I was in charge of what went on in the classroom, plus I was dorm mother to the incredible and often bumptious faculty.)
I was aware that Dr. David Lee Johnson, the genius choral director at Valdosta State University and our chorus instructor for many years, was retiring and would not be returning to GHP in 2006. I asked him if I could write a piece to commemorate his service; he was not bound to perform it, of course. Ever the gentleman, he agreed.
The night before the 700 students arrived for their life-changing summer, I dreamed a musical line… “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” It woke me up. I made myself get out of bed and scribble down an outline of the melody, and the first thing I did upon getting up (for what is always a very long day at GHP) was to nail down the notation.
For once I composed quickly. I had to: the concert at which the music majors would perform it was six weeks away, which meant I only had three weeks to compose it.
I settled on men’s chorus with two cellos for accompaniment, and as I worked through Shakespeare’s lyrics I found myself settling on melodic lines that I absolutely knew how David would conduct them. And the climactic line, “Every fair from fair sometime declines,” is a perfect description of life after GHP.
The concert at which Sonnet 18 was performed was known as the Rotunda Concert, because it was held in the central rotunda of West Hall, the main classroom building on campus. The acoustics were fabulous, as you can imagine, and the concert was always lovely, with the rest of us crammed around the edges and stairs and balcony listening to our vocal majors pour forth beautiful music as our magic summer wound down.
Sonnet 18 brought tears to people’s eyes. It’s still beautiful.
Here’s the score to Sonnet 18, and here’s a video of the performance:
As usual, you can contact me if you’re interested in performance. I won’t say no.
