On November 16th, 2011, Susanna Phillips and Margo Garrett performed my song cycle “In Colors of Feelings” at the home of a dear friend and supporter, Cynthia Lilley.
The event was a huge success with generous supporters helping out in the funding for the upcoming recording of my songs.
I was deeply moved to feel all the love and commitment from the artists and the genuine warmth from the audience.
Susanna is now singing Musetta in La Bohème at the Metropolitan Opera.
Elizabeth Futral, who will be recording my French songs on the CD, is singing on Wednesday at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall in NY.
As I said to all at the soirée, for a composer, there can be no greater sense of joy then to hear one’s works performed with such love and artistry and responded to so genuinely by a public.

It is sad to realize that still in 2011, 93 years after his death, Debussy is still only dimly recognized for the truly radical ideas he put forth in music. At the fall of Tonality (ca. 1890′s) two paths opened up. The Second Viennese School, with its determination to jumble the surface of the music while maintaining the traditional linear developmental ideas of the late Romantics (like Brahms), became recognized as modern; the way of the future. It “sounded” new. Whereas the serialist were simply jumbling the letters of musical “words”, Debussy decided, like his symbolist twin in literature, the poet Mallarmé, to use the same musical “words” which had been being used before, but to distill away traditional syntax. It “sounded” more like traditional music but in fact was creating a radically new syntax and saying things in ways which had never been done before: Mosaics instead of lines of development. Discrete units juxtaposed into fanciful orders instead of logical trajectories grown from the tired old methods of the German Romantics.

In 2012, Delos /Naxos will record and release a CD of my vocal works including my French cycle “Les Visages de l’Amour” sung by Elizabeth Futral and my recent American song cycle “In Colors of Feelings” sung by Susanna Phillips.
Both sopranos will sing together “Nicolette et Aucassin” my Medieval Chantefable for 2 sopranos, narrator and piano. Pianist Margo Garrett will accompany Ms. Futral and Ms. Phillips in all the works.

After a stunning recital season where pianist Simone Dinnerstein performed my “12 Variations on a Chorale by J.S. Bach,” well over 100 times,
my American publisher Rassel Editions announced that they sold out of the printed score and had to go to a second Edition! Roughly 2.5 scores were sold for every performance Ms. Dinnerstein played of the work!!

We can easily see how prevalent music is in all our lives, from Ipods to ring-tones to radio to concerts.
Still, one aspect of music has been removed from the equation little by little to the detriment of our society.
The wall between creators and consumers has been built thick and tall over the past 20 years. Tape recorders of the 1970′s used to record, not just play.
Computers give some ability to record one’s musical ideas but the molds they force us into make us think in codified ways.
Music is not a product but a shared art.
Our society will benefit if children are taught that they can create something, not just consume something.
Writing music should be fostered and encouraged in the schools.

Music is a fabric, a texture, not a structure as in a building. So many make the mistake of comparing the “form” of a piece to a structure like a building.
But music unfolds in time, like a steam following its course from mountain to ocean. If you change one event early in the piece, it is akin to placing a pebble in the riverbed. Ultimately, it will change the course of the river.
Music does not arrive at pillars or structural moments that are more “important” than any others. Again this is akin to structures in physical space.
Another image for music is one of a tapestry woven on the loom of time. There are no more important structural units holding a tapestry together, only
“warp and woof” and the rhythmicity of colored threads in and out of the surface. The images we see on a tapestry are the result of this rhythmicity; the “structures” we hear in music are similarly results of the rhythmicity of sound threads (to be discussed in a later blog) called Contrapuntal Motives.
Understanding music as a fabric or a flow can greatly enhance the awareness of how music truly organizes and therefore communicates.

I begin with a thought about music:
Music for me is an utterance.
More than organized sound, more than meaning, music speaks in a meta-language above and beyond the notes, beyond the rhythm and beyond the structures. It speaks without words, says without saying and moves the psyche without ever touching it.
It is an utterance and I don’t know how that is, but am a conduit of its force.