In one movement

Inspired by sonic imagery found, surprisingly, in a hiking guidebook, the music begins with small groups of hikers setting out at slow but steady and then double-time paces. Soon, instrument groups associate with components of the natural environment: wind instruments with rocks, for instance, and strings with trees. The music responds to guidebook author Edward Henry’s evocations of bellowing boulders, bold staccato rocks, muted forests, lifting melodies, spreading counter-melodies, and harmonizing ridges along the path to a rock promontory in New York’s Shawangunk Mountains known as Gertrude’s Nose. “The crescendos of rock continue to grow, and the forest interludes fade into the background as the land builds to a climax,” culminating in what Henry calls the “final stanza” from the “natural orchestra” (Gunks Trails, 2003). 

As for the title of Be Here Now, it comes most directly from a hand-painted sign of mysterious origin greeting hikers near the start of a path to a wilderness area near Santa Fé, New Mexico (appended to the end of this video). The title also borrows from yoga guru Ram Dass’s influential 1971 book of the same title. Its advice to “be here now” is as germane to music listeners as to hikers or yoga practitioners. Forego the distractions of modern life and be fully present in this place and this moment.

1. Elegy
2. Affirmation

Elegy and Affirmation was commissioned through an Iowa Arts Council initiative to mark the first anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Its premiere took place at the Blanden Memorial Art Museum in Fort Dodge, Iowa in conjunction with the opening of an exhibition of contemporary art on the subjects of peace and healing. The music’s elegiac first movement and hopeful second movement derive inspiration from diverse sources: a conversation with the mother of a victim of the World Trade Center collapse, a snippet from the nostalgic Stephen Foster tune “Gentle Annie” which serves as the culmination of Elegy, a song sung by Afghan girls returning to school and transcribed from an NPR news report that dominates Affirmation, melodies borrowed from repertories of various bowed string instruments from musical cultures along the Silk Road, and a poem by W.H. Auden. The piece seeks both to mourn our loss and to assert our interconnectedness in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks.

In one movement

The video begins with a sunrise photo from a kayak camping trip on Lake Lila in New York’s Adirondack Mountains during the early months of COVID. That trip — and the quest for serenity during trying times — inspired the composition.

The music unfolds slowly. An opening peaceful tune harmonized sweetly undergoes a range of melodic and harmonic transformations. Rhythms derive entirely from quarter note values or their multiples, with the exception of grace notes and rolls needed for wide-spanning chords. Contrapuntal techniques of canon (imitating the tune with time delays among multiple parts), inversion (changing descending motions in the melody to ascending ones and vice versa while preserving the size of those motions), and augmentation (lengthening all the notes of the melody by a consistent proportion or amount) delineate one extended section. After a peak of harmonic richness and volume, varied forms of the tune appear leading to a thrice-repeated distillation of the tune into its opening and closing melodic elements. The opening then returns intact followed by a short and quiet coda.

1. Miss Mitchell’s Comet
2. Maria’s Ghost Considers the Reappearance of Halley’s Comet in 1985
3. Observing Halley’s Comet, 1835
4. Maria Mitchell in the Great Beyond With Marilyn Monroe
5. The Total Eclipse of the Sun
6. Maria’s Ghost Contemplates Her Preservers

Comets is a cycle of six songs for mezzo-soprano and piano drawing on the poetic imagination of Carole Simmons Oles and reflecting on the legacy of 19^th-century astronomer Maria Mitchell. Three of the songs use poems Oles wrote drawing from Mitchell’s journals and diaries — about her famous discovery of a previously-unknown comet at the age of 29 in 1847 (#1), her observation (with her amateur astronomer father) of Halley’s Comet in 1835 (#3), and her account of a total eclipse of the sun, for which she traveled to Burlington, Iowa along the Mississippi River in 1869 to observe and measure the event with her female students from Vassar College (#5). The other three songs draw on Oles’s poetic imaginings of a posthumous Maria Mitchell in 1985 encountering Halley’s Comet again with the scientific tools and theories and fears of that latter day (#2), contemplating three women with PhDs working to conserve her legacy (#6), and exchanging thoughts with movie star and pop culture icon Marilyn Monroe, born Norma Jeane Mortenson (#4).

The music for the songs is eclectic and responsive to the texts. Wide-ranging piano arpeggios evoke Mitchell sweeping her telescope across the skies (#1). Propulsive rhythmic drive reinforces fears of human-created environmental calamities (#2). A dreamy reverie expresses wonder at seeing Halley’s Comet (#3). Jazzy interludes match interjections from Marilyn Monroe (#4). Breathless anticipation of the total eclipse contrasts with lyrical evocation of the experience (#5). Paeans of praise and blessing honor three modern-day women preserving Mitchell’s legacy (#6).

Comets, the song cycle, emerged during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020-21. The overwrought treatment of the phrase “keep you from the latest flu” in the final song owes something to this origin.

1. Singing
2. Chops
3. Joke
4. Meditation
5. Jazz

Frolics, for oboe and English horn, is a set of five character pieces created for the composer’s daughter, Claire Chenette, and her teacher Robert Walters, English horn player in the Cleveland Orchestra. The work is in five movements. Lyricism and trills prevail in “Singing.” “Chops” incorporates fragmentary and virtuosic musical figures. “Joke” pokes fun with discords and grace notes. “Meditation” uses oboe multiphonics as the backdrop for a sonorous and plaintive English horn soliloquy. “Jazz” contrasts a walking line with syncopations and includes wailing solos for each instrument.

In one movement

Duo Variations was composed for John Chiego, former Principal Bassist of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, who presented its premiere with harpist Jeanmarie Chenette, former Principal Harpist of the Cedar Rapids Symphony Orchestra, at a concert of the Iowa Composers Forum in 1991.  Conceived as a set of variations on an original theme, the composition requires the musicians to share particularly closely in the elaboration of the musical materials, with each instrument completing musical thoughts begun by the other.  The variations seek to explore different types and degrees of relatedness between the two instruments, along the way revealing some unexpected similarities in performance techniques and timbres.

1. Fantasy
2. Fugue

Fantasy and Fugue on BACH is an homage to J.S. Bach, composed for the Mirecourt Trio in 1985, on the occasion of Bach’s 300th birthday.  It re-explore,s in 20th century terms, two of the most exhilarating aspects of Bach’s prodigious musical personality – the incredible flights of fancy and harmonic invention in his toccata and fantasia movements, and the wonderful sense of intellectual play in such masterworks as the Art of Fugue.  In the case of this trio, the glue that binds it all together is BACH too – literally, that is, the note order Bb (German B), A, C, and B (German H) – which recurs throughout the work in a variety of guises: as a melody, as a chord, as the basis for a canon or round, played backwards, played simultaneously at different speeds, and finally as the basis for most of the fugue (subject, countersubject, episodes, etc. consisting of transformations of the BACH signature strung together. )  Of course, the idea of basing music on Bach’s name is an old one, originating with Bach himself and recurring in the music of Schumann, Mendelssohn, Reger, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and literally hundreds of others.  My contribution to this vast on-BACH literature is an acknowledgment of the extent to which Bach’s music has taught and inspired me.

In one movement

Fast Track was commissioned by Red Cedar Chamber Music of Marion, Iowa for the Boland-Dowdall Flute and Guitar Duo as part of their Artistic Celebration of the 21st Century. Seven composers were asked to compose music inspired by works of art from the permanent collection of the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art. Each piece was to be brief (three to four-and-a-half minutes), with the whole set premiered at the museum early in the year 2000 in conjunction with an exhibition featuring the selected artworks.

This music for Sam Gilliam’s “Fast Track” draws inspiration from the jazzy energy of the print along with its paradoxical combination of density and airy lightness. Syncopated rhythms and darting melodies abound. The image’s prominent structural element of a circle inscribed in a square led to the opening musical ideas: the guitar’s solid four-note chords built of harmonic fourths and the flute’s constrained, circular melodies. Textured white veils rising from the bottom of the image gave rise to a gravity-defying melodic
figure built of ascending intervals that grow ever larger, which becomes the basis for later sections of the music. In the end, of course, the notes have an energy of their own, but both the music and Gilliam’s image evoke the frenetic pace of life on the fast track.

1. The Ice-Glazed Landscape, poem by Ray Young Bear
2. Once When the Ground Was Holy, poem by Michael Carey
3. Rhizomes and Flora, poems by Paula Smith and Ed Hirsch
4. Ocean of Grass, poem by Ed Hirsch
5. When the Ground Was Broken, poems by Dan Hunter and Mary Swander

Broken Ground was commissioned by the Des Moines Symphony Orchestra, the Iowa Sesquicentennial Commission, and Grinnell College in honor of the sesquicentennials in 1996 of the State of Iowa and Grinnell College. Its creation brought together 6 poets, a composer, and a large network of performers and supporters in pursuit of a common goal: to reflect on the relationships between the people and landscape of the prairie Midwest through the arts of music and poetry.

All six collaborating poets write with a distinctive lyricism about the midwestern landscape. They include poet-farmer Michael Carey, Native American poet and novelist Ray Young Bear from the Mesquakie Settlement of the Fox-Sauk Tribe, poet and essayist Mary Swander from Iowa State University whose work often focuses on the Amish culture around Kalona, poet and novelist Paula Smith of the Grinnell College faculty, songwriter and humorist Dan Hunter of Des Moines, and National Book Award-winning poet Ed Hirsch, a Grinnell College graduate from the University of Houston.

Movement 1, “The Ice-Glazed Landscape,” emerges from the icy cold sound of the crotale (small tuned cymbal). The texture thickens gradually and hopefully as the chorus intones the phrase “We lived here once inside and along these ancient hills.” But after this brief moment of warmth, the music settles back into the icy coolness of its opening.

Movement 2 (“Once When the Ground Was Holy”) settles in to a steadier, more energetic motion. The meter is compound — beats subdividing into groups of three notes rather than two — inspired by the playful galloping of the horses described in Carey’s text,. Carey’s line “butcher, baker, beggar man, thief” reappears in Swander’s concluding poem as “butcher, baker, beggarwoman, thief,” and the two lines share similar music.

Movement 3, “Rhizomes and Flora,” weaves together two poems depicting the scenes below and above the prairie surface. Smith’s “silent force… working underground” is depicted through driving rhythms set up by the low brass. Hirsch’s contrasts between native and alien flora are reflected in harmonies that alternate between natural, stable chords and slightly twisted, tension-filled ones. Hirsch’s poem is dedicated to Iowan Amy Clampitt, a MacArthur “Genius” Award recipient and keen observer of nature who died in 1994. The closing line concerning “the shining, cup-flowered grass of Parnassus” leads smoothly back to Smith’s poem with its “waving sea of grasses.”

Movement 4, “Ocean of Grass,” is a poignant and somber meditation on incidents taken from the diaries of prairie frontierswomen and assembled by Hirsch into a poetic structure of great incisiveness. Its villanelle form (19 lines with the first and third lines of the opening stanza appearing alternately as the concluding lines of succeeding stanzas and coming together at the end) gives rise to a musical counterpart. Line 1 is set to a hymn-like depiction of holiness and harshness, while line three is distinguished by an opening point of imitation characterized by the interval of a rising 4th. The hymn-like music, especially, grows gradually richer and more elaborate with each of its recurrences. The movement closes with a dirge-like, slow march accompanying the lines “Think of her sometimes when you pace the earth, our mother, where she was laid to rest.”

“Ocean of Grass,” is a poignant meditation on incidents taken from the diaries of prairie frontierswomen and assembled by poet Edward Hirsch into a poetic villanelle (19 lines with the first and third lines of the opening stanza appearing alternately as the concluding lines of succeeding stanzas and coming together at the end). The music mirrors this form, with line 1 set to a hymn-like depiction of holiness and harshness and line three distinguished by an opening, imitative rising 4th interval. The hymn-like music, especially, grows richer and more elaborate with each of its recurrences. The movement closes with a dirge-like, slow march accompanying the lines “Think of her sometimes when you pace the earth, our mother, where she was laid to rest.”

Movement 5, “When the Ground Was Broken,” begins with Dan Hunter’s “Only the Wind” in energetic, shifting meters driven by a prominent xylophone line. After a quieter, more legato section for the line “Now the stones lie silent and smooth…,” the opening, rhythmic music returns briefly, leading directly to the setting of Mary Swander’s “When the Ground Was Broken.” This closing music involves several fugal sections, echoes of earlier musical and poetic ideas, and an impelling drive towards its energetic conclusion.