Program note: Commenting on the media carnival spin overlaid onto the news.
Walking on Wires
An anxious lament for love lost. The emotional context begins from a point of sadness and feeling that there is no escape, then transmutes into edgy feelings of anger against the emotional pain. It takes musical inspiration from the plainsong, “Dies Irae”.
Traveling Dreams
Program note: Emotional memory of travels, painted with a brush of modal sound. (Later expanded to “Memories of Place” scored for chamber orchestra)
Tangents
Tangents derives its name from divergent musical lines that seem to arrive and depart from a musical center, much like fragments of thoughts that tangentially pass through conversations.
Street City
Evocative of the elemental dissonance, repetition and rhythmic pulse of the city street sounds, as well as, the cyclical moods as day transitions to quieter night hours, then picks up rhythmically once again as morning approaches.
Running Late
Chamber version of the first of a set of three sequential nocturnes for orchestra entitled “Disturbances.“ (Premiered 2000, NYC)
Resisting Reason
Resistance to the application of logical reasoning to emotional complexities. – RW
(Video features a 2001 NYC concert performance: Jacqueline Leclair, ob; Richard Vrotney, bsn; Theresa Salomon, vln; Liuh-Wen Ting, vla; Ariane Lallemand, vc.)
(Score purchase link is the version for wind quintet.)
Dark Dreams
Dark Dreams was inspired by a painting by Jared FitzGerald, and is dedicated to him. The germinating idea for the piece relates to its image of an angel in the moonlight, wrestling with a shadowy figure. “Dark Dreams” extends the metaphor to the struggles with “emotional demons” confronted in life. – RW
Painting by Jared FitzGerald
A Song Alone
Memories of Place
Memories of Place arose from emotional memories of a time traveling and living in Greece, Egypt and Turkey. It is a recollection of that time, not as a literal transcription of melodies, but rather as an emotional memory of aural textures, painted with a broad brush of modal sound. – RW