This piece was inspired by a video of a Ukrainian violinist playing this Ukrainian folk melody in a bomb shelter.
Nich yaka misyachna (The night is so moonlit) speaks of love and a beautiful starlit night. However, the melody is set here with dissonance, using a tone row to create tension between the beauty and comfort of the folk melody against the war, turmoil and fear of those sheltering underground.
The tone row is used in prime and retrograde transpositions, and for harmonic clusters.
Prime Row 0: Eb-A-F-F#-C-E-D-Bb-C#-G-B-Ab
An Evening Prayer (2018)
For male sextet (2 Altos; 2 Tenors; Baritone; Bass), a cappella, 3’50”
Text: Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Nocturne Semplice (2016) is based on a simple melody, with the development of the line in 6ths reflecting Chopin’s Étude, Op 25, No. 8.
Recorded on Expressions: Piano Music by Kirsten Johnson (CRC 4095).
This music score was submitted for Resonate 2024: An Open Access Call for Scores by the UCLA Music Library.
Composed in 2022 on text by Jonathan Herring, this piece is for soprano and piano.
Longing is a love song, based on a poem written by the composer’s husband to her before they married. Jonathan was living in England, the composer was in the States, and he wrote her letters daily, often including a poem. At the time the poem was written, the future was uncertain, hence the ending of the introduction, and later the piece, with a question, depicted with repeated notes.
In the beginning (2006) opens with a quiet, three-note motive, which is repeated in progressively shorter note lengths, ushering in the melody in left-hand octaves. The middle section begins as a canon, which then builds to a return of the first theme. A mirror response to the opening section ends the piece, with fast notes becoming gradually quieter and longer in length.
