The Fall semester is now well underway, and projects have come and gone.  Both Book of Hours commissions have been finished and delivered, so Katie and John are beginning to learn them.  Unfortunately, the play adaptation of The Screwtape Letters has been cancelled, so I won’t be writing any music for it until perhaps we can reschedule it at another venue.  We Outgrow Love, my big song cycle for mezzo, is receiving its premiere quite soon, so I’m looking forward to that.  Also, I’ve begun to sketch ideas for the song cycle on Rukeyser’s Iris, for soprano Kara Halleck.  Last week I sat at a piano and improvised with the poems in front of me.  A composer learns much about himself, his style, and most importantly the text itself, from this important first step.  As I concieve the cycle now, it will be in arch form, based around a D-flat major 7 chord, contrasted with sections of alternating staccato and legato notes.  As I brainstorm I can’t help but write as if soprano Dawn Upshaw were singing; somehow the quality of her voice permeates the poem and subsequently the undercurrents of the songs.  I shouldn’t admit this, but the rhythms and sonorities are beginning to remind me of Upshaw’s gorgeous arias in John Adam’s great oratorio El Nino.  Hopefully the cycle will be worthy of the comparison.

In the meantime, however, I’m working on a sonata for piano in some sort of neoclassical style, and hoping to start pieces for choir and (of all things) gamba quartet, both for competitions.

So–with such as those ahead of me I plow onward!

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