Works/Orchestral

There Was a Star Danced was composed for the 2006 Alabama All-State Orchestra Festival.

Some of my greatest childhood memories stem from playing professional-level music at Iowa All-State that challenged my technique and expanded my background. When the opportunity came to compose a piece for the Alabama All-State orchestra my goal was simple: harness their youthful exuberance while pushing their technique to the limit.

Close your eyes as you listen and imagine whirling eddies of gasses coalescing until the mass and pressure finally ignite into the brilliance of a new star. I achieve this effect by using the timpani, bass drum, and an explosion from the tam-tam (gong). When you open your eyes, don't be surprised if the person sitting next to you has the same grin on their face after taking this fiery musical journey.

The title, There Was a Star Danced, is from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.

Symphony. This word in a concert program creates expectations: for musicians, a formal construction developed over the centuries; for many listeners, a large-scale work for lots of players; for younger people, something long. With this symphony, I followed some conventions and deliberately departed from others. The first departure was writing five movements, rather than the traditional four. I like scherzi—Italian for jokes. I wanted two of them. I wrote two of them.

The first scherzo (the second movement), Laughing Corn, is in the traditional ternary form: ABA, two similar musical ideas on either side of a contrasting middle section—a sort of musical sandwich. Here however, melodies and textures for the contrasting middle section are introduced in the first A section in an off-hand manner and are then developed in the middle. The opening material returns with the occasional surprise. I based the movement on the second song of my cycle on Carl Sandburg poems, The Prairie Sings.

The second of the scherzi, High Fooling, (the fourth movement) is an esoteric musical joke about my birthday, April 9, the day before the symphony’s premiere. My 41st birthday. I refer to this as my plagal birthday, because in musical parlance a IV-I cadence is known as a plagal cadence (or the “amen” cadence as heard at the end of hymns). These IV-I’s are first heard as interjections and then are transformed by various compositional tricks. Structurally it is an odd hybrid comprised of two main sections: the first is an interrupted rondo…interrupted by another rondo that transmogrifies the original rondo’s melodic material into a comic little tune for the new rondo’s theme. It ends with a surprise.

The two scherzi surround the slow movement, Verdant Twilight. When I was in my early teens, my father drove my sister and me sixty miles every Saturday to Youth Symphony. He enjoyed listening to our progress and loved the music we played. Verdant Twilight is dedicated to him as a Father’s Day gift. His love for his children, his wife, and music all come together in Verdant Twilight.

Because my mother is a pianist, I wrote the movement for piano and strings. The piano works not as soloist, but as a member of the orchestra, sometimes playing the primary line and sometimes accompanying the strings. Lush string passages shape the course of the work and lead to a piano cadenza, then return to a quiet remembrance of the opening. The shifting between major and minor creates a shimmering, ethereal twilight.

Typically final movements of symphonies are rondos—a musical form with a refrain. But rather than writing a traditional rondo, I re-imagined the rondo theme each time it recurred by transforming the rondo theme’s three elements: a melody, a repeated note pattern, and what I call the “cloud.” As contrast to the refrains, I wrote a quirky waltz.

The opening movement, which I wrote last, departs from the sonata form of a traditional first movement. It begins with a fanfare, followed by a modified arch form: ABCBA. The A section when heard first is what I call, “the big noise.” When it returns, it is the big quiet. The B sections are slower and melancholy. The C section is a frenetic development of ideas taken from both the A and B sections.

On the day the Iraq War began I wrote a setting of America the Beautiful. A conductor asked me to write this for a concert the next day. He felt it was imperative to acknowledge that our country was now in battle. I struggled, because I did not want to make a political statement. I wanted to write music that compelled listeners to contemplate what was happening.

Immediately, I knew it needed to be expanded into large-scale work. When my uncle, Franklin Pudas, heard the setting, he felt the same. At first, he secretly commissioned Passing Season as a gift for his wife, Marit, for their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Later, when he played the original setting for her, she said, “Someone should commission him to write more music like this.” He said, “We are.” She responded, “Oh great, that’s so much better than a cruise.”

Evocative titles invite the audience to more fully listen to music, especially new music. All were borrowed from titles of my grandfather’s (Marit’s father, Orville Running, professor emeritus of Luther College) woodcut prints. Looking through a list of his titles, I chose those which best fit the music I had written: January Nightsong, A Curtain of Rain, Quiet Land—Ancient Stars (from Early Snow, Quiet Land, Ancient Stars), and Moon, Girl, and New Leaves. None are musical imaginings of the actual print. Passing Season works wonderfully as the collective title, recalling the time Marit and Franklin have spent happily together.

Throughout the piece, I use clear, light orchestration. Flute and clarinet open the work with a hint at America the Beautiful. These hints occur throughout the work until the melody finally fully emerges at the end.

A trip to the English coast of East Anglia inspired me to write Norfolk Waters. The area known as the broads is extraordinary in its utter flatness and stark beauty—similar, in its own way, to the great plains of the United States. I later visited museums and saw that the English painter Turner captured these landscapes in watercolors. These impelled me to start composing. I chose to write for string orchestra for two reasons: I am a string player and English composers gave the ensemble some of its lushest music.

When I first read Carol Gilbertson’s poem Night Rising, I immediately heard a tone-poem for chamber orchestra. However, this piece is not a tone-poem in the traditional sense; it does not follow the poem’s structure or immediate imagery—for example, there are no pheasants or barking dogs depicted. Instead, the evocative quality of the poem inspired me to choose other images to portray through music: the shimmering activity in the upper strings represents cicadas as they begin their nighttime crescendos at sunset and the sighing half-steps recall the whispers of wind through the trees. The piece closes with the stillness of night fully risen.

Oh, But Everyone Was a Bird is a re-imagining of a choral setting of Siegfried Sassoon’s poem, Everyone Sang. This original version was for a solo soprano, solo violin and chorus. Choosing texts always presents me with a problem, I love great poems and prose, but I despise sifting through the mountains of great, good, bad and very bad works to find something that compels me to write. However, I often know the subject that then attracts me to write for voice. As it happened I learned from a friend, who is a librarian, that there are books that organize poems by subject and offered to search out some possibilities for me. She found this wonderful poem by Siegfried Sassoon. It immediately inspired me. I must admit that I am not an opponent of text painting and in this case the phrase, and the song was wordless provided the initial inspiration for the piece—the choir sings in the style of a vocalise and a solo soprano gives the text. Because Sassoon was British, I chose to allude to Ralph Vaughn Williams’ Lark Ascending with a solo violin representing the bird in the poem. With these two decisions, the piece naturally unfolded and was a joy to write.

Also natural is for a piece for string orchestra to be born from this same “nest” since strings are the closest instrumental relation to the voice. The new freedoms of range and sustaining ability had to be balanced and reworked without any of Sassoon’s text as a guide for the listener.

His poem, and my inspiration, is below:

Everyone Sang

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)

From

Picture-Show

New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1920

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on—on—and out of sight.

Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away . . . O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing

will never be done.