Remembering Gail B. Poch (1936–2016)

Only three weeks after learning of the passing of Robert Page (of whom I wrote back in August), it was even more shocking to learn of the passing of Gail B. Poch on August 31. That makes three important figures from the choral world—the third was Gregg Smith (1931–2016) in July, about whom I shall write in the coming weeks—leaving us this summer.

Gail was my introduction to the power and potential of choral music well performed. He conducted my very first Pennsylvania Music Educators Association District Chorus at Marple-Newtown High School in January, 1970.

That program included my first exposures as a performer to the music of Jan Sweelinck, J.S. Bach (though in a decidedly inauthentic form), Benjamin Britten, Franz Schubert, Houston Bright, Joseph Canteloube, Ernest Bloch, and Leonard Bernstein; much of which, strangely, I have not had opportunity to perform in any capacity since then. As it turned out, this event also marked the first time I had ever had the opportunity to sing any Jewish choral music of substance—in addition to the Bloch “Silent Devotion & Response (Yih’yu l'ratzon)” from his Avodath Hakodesh (Sacred Service), we also performed Gail’s own arrangement (or, possibly, his edition or adaptation; I was never certain which it was) of the Israeli (?) folk melody Ki mi tziyon. (Bernstein’s French Choruses from “The Lark” didn’t fit that category, of course.)

I went home after the Saturday night concert with a head swimming with sounds I’d never heard or imagined previously. It was at that point that I began collecting scores—of choral festival music at first, but then branching out from there into music by composers whose names I recognized, or pieces that simply looked interesting.

(I also went home that Saturday night having acquired my first serious girlfriend—I a sophomore and she a senior from a neighboring high school—but that story will have to wait for my memoirs...)

And I went home that Saturday night thinking about college (and Temple University) seriously for the first time.

As an undergraduate at Temple, I had two conducting classes taught by Gail, which were wonderfully run. I remember how he managed to teach us the pieces we all were to conduct without doing a single drop of conducting himself.

Aside from those classes, I had little interaction with him other than a staged and choreographed production of Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Unicorn, The Gorgon, and the Manticore which he conducted and in which I sang; and also when he served as the narrator for a recording by Temple's Concert Choir of Karl Korte’s oratorio Pale is This Good Prince, both in my freshman year at Temple. (!) He was also my examiner for passing advanced Aural Theory by exam.

When I returned for grad school in 1981, Robert Page had moved on to Pittsburgh and been replaced by Alan Harler, but Gail was still very much on the faculty and very involved with the graduate choral conducting program. I had the good fortune to take a modern choral literature course with him and also to be coached privately by him on my second graduate conducting recital. Additionally, he was my supervisor for my graduate assistantship in conducting the second year of my degree program.

At that time, he had begun working on a conducting textbook based on a system of movement analysis and choreographic notation by Rudolf von Labann; our job was to apply what he was working out in actual conducting pedagogy. His pedagogical research and development was collected and finally turned into book form—The Conductor’s Gesture—by his student James Jordan, which is published by, and still available from, GIA Publications.

Gail always lived in the shadow of whoever had the title of Director of Choral Activities at Temple. I think he was, ultimately, seriously under-appreciated and under-acknowledged in his time there. To hear Temple graduates speak of him and their first encounters with him—invariably through high school choral festivals such as the one I described above—it’s clear that Gail was one of the College of Music’s secret weapons for recruitment. That, in itself, is a proud legacy!

I’m certain that veterans of the Reading (PA) Choral Society can tell different, but equally loving stories of working with him. We all miss you terribly; but we can say, confidently, that your memory is for blessing. And thank you—for opening so many young lives and ears to the power and joy of great choral music!

Finally, for those interested: my own performances of the abovementioned Sweelinck and Bloch pieces; from many years later, based on what I learned from Gail’s leadership.

Yet More on That Thin, Erasable Line:Song of Exile (1988)

In my post from August 27, I said that arranging work has led me to wonder, at times: if a piece prominently quotes or utilizes something preëxisting, is that piece an arrangement or an original composition that happens to use pre-existing material?

I wrote previously about my Rhapsody on Anglo-American Ballad Tunes falling into this category. Here, I offer another piece that poses the same question:

Song of Exile (1988) uses the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” as its focal point, each of whose three verses prompt different reactions from the choir. The first two are drawn from Psalm 137 (“By the waters of Babylon…” and “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”); the third is drawn from Isaiah 32 (coupled with a half-verse from Psalm 31), designed to be a verse of consolation—except that the first verse of the spiritual returns over it, unchanged from the beginning. The piece ends with a Phrygian half-cadence, leaving things unresolved.

Song of Exile was originally written for the choir of Central Baptist Church, Wayne, PA, but has been performed since then thanks to the late Peter Hopkins, former director of music at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Richmond, VA. My first encounter with the Isaiah text dates all the way back to high school and the music of Emma Lou Diemer—specifically, her For Ye Shall Go Out With Joy, a work from the 1960s which contained sounds and a cappella writing that was a watershed experience in terms of my musical thinking.

Back when Peter was in Philadelphia at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church (3rd & Pine Streets, Old City), he once asked me about repertoire around Psalm 137. I suggested Salamone Rossi’s Al naharot bavel (in Hebrew; and, thus far, the only complete setting of Psalm 137 as far as I know, which pulls no punches at the end!), William Billings’ Lamentation over Boston, (a paraphrase of Psalm 137; likely by Billings himself), and Song of Exile.

He chose Song of Exile, presenting it not only in Philadelphia, but also in Reading, PA with the Reading Choral Society, and again during a week-long residency by the St. Peter’s choir at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, UK, in August, 2010 (I was privileged to have been there for that residency). The recording comes from the Evensong sung there on August 27, 2010, where it was sung as the anthem for that service.

Song of Exile is now published by MusicSpoke.com.

Psalm 51 (2000–2001)A Psalm for Another Day Living in Infamy

It was 15 years ago.

It was a Tuesday morning—a bright and beautiful late-summer morning.

I had had plans to get caught up on a bunch of work that day.

Then the news came in about the World Trade Center towers.

And then the Pentagon.

And then a 4th plane crashing in Central Pennsylvania.

Everything ground to a halt. To work seemed like sacrilege.

The last time we had seen anything of this magnitude was back on November 22, 1963.

The single-article issue of Time magazine appeared within the week following, showing us more of the horrors we hadn’t seen on television. The worst for me was the pictures of people jumping from the towers before the towers collapsed.

As it would turn out, the horrors we witnessed that day wound up providing at least a portion of the necessary focus, if subconsciously, for a commissioned work in the weeks and months that followed.

I’ll save the story of how that commission came about for another, more appropriate time. For now:

It was my first commission from anyone outside America: Rita Varonen, director of Chamber Choir Cantinovum based at the Jyväskylä Polytechnik Institut, Jyväskylä, Finland, commissioned my setting of Psalm 51 in Hebrew for SATB div. choir and 11 solo strings (or string orchestra).

I wrote the following program notes for the premiere, which took place on March 29 (Good Friday), 2002 (with additional notes/asides appearing here):

“As both a composer and conductor of music for choruses, my favorite sacred literature has always been the psalms, probably because they are, ultimately, the lyric poetry of the Bible. I have worked with many of the psalms over the years as both a church and synagogue musician, and it is always of interest to me how the same psalm text can have such different connotations for Jews and for Christians. Such a text is Psalm 51, being presented, perhaps for the 1st time in a long time (if ever), in both a Christian and Jewish context in the same program.

“While in the Christian church this psalm is central to the Good Friday liturgy, only 3 verses of this psalm are used in the entire Jewish liturgy, and only as isolated verses in other contexts—Psalm 51, in its entirety, never appears in Jewish liturgy.

“In setting this text musically, I was struck by how much of an ‘emotional roller-coaster’ this Psalm is: King David, in his remorse over his affair with Bathsheba (mentioned in the 1st two verses of the psalm in the Hebrew text—which, to my knowledge, has never been treated by any Christian setting) is by turns sorrowful, penitential, pleading, guilt-ridden, hopeful, and even off-topic. (Some hold that the final two verses were added later on by a different author.) So, while, for example, Gregorio Allegri’s setting (heard on the same program) simply uses two different musical formulas along with Gregorian psalm tones for his entire setting (hence why the young Mozart was able to write it down after hearing it only once—aside from the final phrase, the entire sequence of musical material is repeated five times), I felt obligated to reflect the ever-changing mood of the text in my setting.

The work is, ultimately, a suite of miniatures: atonal passages alternate with simple, tonal passages, often in stark contrast to each other in successive verses. I made use of one specific Jewish prayer mode, the s’licha (penitential) mode/melody, introduced at the beginning by the tenors and basses in canon, and which also occurs in its most direct form in the verse Al tashlicheini mil’fanecha (“Cast me not away from Your presence.”) Also appearing as the setting for the final verse of Psalm 51 proper is the melody for a litany of pleas for help and deliverance drawn which occurs in both the S’lichot service (a pre-High Holy Days service held either at midnight or at dawn that is a penitential “warm-up” for that season) and the Kol Nidrei service for Yom Kippur.

“Another unifying element consists of the single, loud pizzicato notes that appear in unexpected places—musical ‘pangs of conscience’ (which also are designed to assist the choir in a number of their entrances!).

“One other element that may be of interest in this setting is that, because the psalm ends rather inconclusively (at least from a musico-dramatic standpoint), it seemed to me that something needed to follow the final verses, and, unlike Christian composers, I could not simply add a Gloria Patri as an ending! However, I discovered through some research that there are three verses from elsewhere in the psalms that are to be read when one concludes a reading of the entire book of Psalms. They are: Psalm 14:7 (“Oh that the salvation of Israel were come out of Zion! When the LORD brings back the captivity of his people, Jacob shall rejoice, and Israel shall be glad.”); Psalm 37:39 (“But the salvation of the righteous is from the LORD; He is their strength in time of trouble.”); and 40 (“And the LORD helps them, and delivers them; He delivers them from the wicked, and saves them, because they have taken refuge in Him.”) These three verses represented exactly the kind of concluding text that I felt the piece needed, and, therefore, constitute the extended conclusion of the work.

“Finally, as I look back over the creation of this work, I know that I had no specific, conscious thoughts about the events of September 11, 2001 during the actual compositional process. Yet, in retrospect, I am certain that those horrific events and their aftermath must have colored my thinking—ultimately, how could they not? Therefore, whatever else its content may reflect, this work also stands as my own small and entirely personal response as a human being and an artist to those horrors.

“I wish to thank Pamela Hitchcock for her invaluable and essential assistance with the Hebrew text, providing interlinear Hebrew-English translations for me, and providing pronunciation models for Chamber Choir Cantinovum; Juha and Elana Hollo for providing interlinear Hebrew-Finnish translations from the Hebrew-English text, and, finally, Rita Varonen and Chamber Choir Cantinovum for asking me to write this work, and for being fearless and willing to present its world premiere this evening.”

While Psalm 51 has yet to be performed here in the US, it was heard—or, more accurately, broadcast—here on the 10th anniversary of 9/11. It was selected to be aired during a 24-hour live broadcast entitled WE REMEMBER SEPTEMBER 11 on WPRB 103 FM (Princeton, New Jersey) at around 4 PM on Sunday, September 11, 2011, hosted by Marvin Rosen (who hosted for the full 24 hours straight!).

I wrote the following abbreviated notes on the piece for a press release for the broadcast:

“The work, which may be the first-ever setting of the complete text of Psalm 51 in Hebrew, was commissioned by Rita Varonen and the Chamber Choir Cantinovum of the Jyväskylä Polytechnik Institut (Jyväskylä, Finland) and premiered there under Rita Varonen's direction March 29 (Good Friday), 2002. It was subsequently performed there on September 15, 2002 for a 9/11 memorial service. (Rita told me that that performance was better than the premiere; but, alas, that performance wasn’t recorded.) The broadcast will be of a recording of the world premiere performance.

“Although the work was not written specifically in response to 9/11, that disaster's aftermath and effects on the US and the world significantly affected the composition of the work. Psalm 51 is, perhaps, one of the most anguished pleas for forgiveness and mercy in all the Bible, and the focus in relation to 9/11 is one of introspection, as in: How did my action or inaction contribute to this catastrophic event? How might I, as an individual, have acted differently before it happened? And how might I act differently to help prevent something like this from happening again?”

My initial statement in the abbreviated notes still astounds me. Surely I’m not the first person to have set the entire psalm to music in Hebrew; let alone with the extra three verses added...

But that’s not the most important question. Not at all.

Those other questions remain open. It all has to do with how we choose to relate to the rest of the world, as individuals and as a larger society.

Lest anyone misread the second paragraph of my amplified notes: I have no illusion that I bear any responsibility for what happened, nor that anything I, alone, could have done would have made any difference.

But humanity, collectively, seems to have a great deal of difficulty looking past surface details to address the root causes of what happens in this world—in many, many areas, not merely social or political. Should we ever learn, collectively, to address those root causes (for both good and bad things that happen), I believe this shall be the ultimate source of human redemption.

A Thin, Erasable Line: Part 2 Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair (1991; rev. 2014)

The word “arranging,” as it applies to music, is abused far too often.

It drives me crazy the way certain brands of press about new music describe a new piece, often for chorus, as “a new arrangement” of [fill in the title of the text]; say, Psalm 150.

This is symptomatic of so many things that it could produce a book-length manuscript. Not the least of these is the notion that no one can possibly be writing new, classically-based music today because, well, aren't those composers all dead now?

Never mind that this is a truly classic (as it were) case of Orwell's double-think: no one would ever question that a new movie has a brand new (= newly composed) symphonic score by John Williams, Danny Elfman, Hans Zimmer, or any number of other living composers—but, somehow, if it's something close to home or not out of Hollywood or not on a program by your city's symphony orchestra, etc., etc., it can't possibly be new or original.

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This post’s offering is, indeed, an arrangement—the genuine article; and one of which I’m proud.

I mentioned last time that one of the works that influenced my Rhapsody on Anglo-American Ballad Tunes was another rhapsody, for oboe and strings, by Wayne Barlow entitled The Winter's Passed. It, too, falls into the ambiguous category about which I wrote last time: it quotes two different Anglo-American folk songs at length, but the setting and harmonic language is wholly original.

One of the two folk songs is easily identifiable as “Wayfaring Stranger”—but that one is the “B” theme. The other, the “A” theme, is more pervasive, sounding both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

Back when I worked for Theodore Presser Company in the days when they ran a retail store, I ran across Folk Songs of the Americas (ed. A.L. Lloyd et al) published by Novello (London, UK; out of print; but I’ve seen copies for sale on eBay) some time in 1991. It contained many songs I’d never heard of, but one title I recognized was “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair.” I turned to it expecting to see some variation of the familiar melody associated with John Jacob Niles, but: lo and behold, here was the tune that Barlow used in The Winter's Passed!

According to Wikipedia:

“These words are set to two distinct melodies: one of which is traditional, and the other was written by the Kentucky folk singer and composer John Jacob Niles. (Emphasis mine.) Niles recalled that his father thought the traditional melody was ‘downright terrible,’ so he wrote ‘a new tune, ending it in a nice modal manner.’”

This confirms something I’d suspected for a long time. I have no idea why Niles’ father disliked the traditional tune so, unless he was thinking of a different one altogether...

Needless to say, the arranger-half of me got right to work on it, since, to my knowledge, it had never been set chorally (and, as far as I can tell, still hasn’t). I completed a setting for soprano solo, mixed chorus and celtic harp (or keyboard) that summer.

It took until 2014 for it to be premiered, after some substantial revision and refinement. Here it is, sung by the Vocal Ensemble of Community College of Philadelphia under my direction, accompanied by H.L. Smith, II, with soprano soloist Shanice Manley.

Rhapsody on Anglo-American Ballad Tunes Musings on a Thin, Erasable Line: Composing vs. Arranging

I have spent as much time as an arranger and editor as I have as a composer over the past (roughly) five decades, if not more—and have wound up equally obscure in all three fields. Part of the reason why this is so, especially regarding arranging, is purely practical: many performance situations require music tailored to a very specific situation. Most of the time, that required tailoring results in something that isn't widely marketable.

So: this will be the first, probably, of many musings, semi-rants, and occasional behind-the-scenes posts on this other creative process.

I think I have always viewed composing and arranging as two sides of the same coin: the only difference is whether the material to be worked over is one’s own or someone else’s.

Having said that: a distinction should be made between the brand of arranging that is really transcription—changing a given piece’s instrumentation or adding or subtracting parts; as opposed to working with only a melody line, sometimes a harmonization (& sometimes not), and fashioning a whole new musical environment for said melody. These are two completely different approaches requiring completely different skill sets.

Shuttling back and forth between these two fields has led me to wonder, at times: if a piece prominently quotes or utilizes preëxisting material, is that piece automatically an arrangement? Or is it an original composition that happens to use preëxisting material? Please feel free to weigh in and discuss!

Herewith a piece that, I believe, falls into this category and poses the question: my Rhapsody on Anglo-American Ballad Tunes, a work for 11 solo strings (or string orchestra) and piano (covering what, someday, will be wind and harp parts). It uses two different tunes to which the Old English ballad “Barbara Allen” may be sung, and its influences and models are threefold:

One was Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Five Variants on “Dives and Lazarus” for large string orchestra and harp—one of my all-time favorite orchestral works. Here is one of a number of excellent performances; I would rather have you see an actual performance video than hear a commercial recording with nothing but a slide for a visual.

Another was a less well-known rhapsody for oboe and strings: Wayne Barlow's The Winter's Past. Watch and listen here.

The third was Art Garfunkel’s achingly beautiful rendition of “Barbara Allen” (to one of the tunes used here) from his solo album Breaking Away. The Rhapsody itself is based on an earlier choral piece that had a not-so-terrific text, reworked into its present instrumental form.

The performance on Soundcloud.com is the world premiere; and so far, the only performance, anywhere, ever. The track has additional information posted which I won’t repeat here, except I must thank the late Gregg Smith (1931–2016) for programming it at his Adirondack Festival of American Music in Saranac Lake, NY in 1995. You may listen here.

Update: RIP Robert Page (1927–2016)

My opening post mentioned Robert Page in passing as having programmed my May the Words on the last concert he conducted with the Temple University Concert Choir in May of 1975, before he left Philadelphia for a post at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Today, August 9, I learned of his passing on August 7. (So much for two-week spacing between posts here for now...)

I can honestly say that I would not be the musician/composer/conductor/educator I am today had I not sung in his Concert Choir in the '70s; and I may not have even gone to Temple for undergraduate school had I not also been a student in his High School Choral Workshop (sponsored by Temple) the summer between my junior & senior years in high school—where I first sang Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana—with the Pennsylvania Ballet & Orchestra (the first of some two dozen performances as an undergrad), & Arthur Honegger's King David—in a staged performance with chamber orchestra, no less.

That was only the beginning of what would prove to be an unrivaled undergraduate choral experience. The repertoire we did completely warped my musical thinking (these are the highlights):

Ligeti: Requiem (in its entirety; the Kyrie movement is the “Obelisk” music heard in 2001: A Space Odyssey)

Bernstein: Chichester Psalms

Beethoven: Choral Fantasy

Rachmaninoff: The Bells & 3 Russian Peasant Songs w/the Philadelphia Orchestra & recorded on RCA Red Seal

Page: 3 Christmas Motets; two of which were for triple chorus; inspired by his work preparing the Temple choirs for Penderecki’s Utrenja, Part I (“The Entombment of Christ”), premiered with the Philadelphia Orchestra & recorded on RCA Red Seal the year before I arrived.

Ives: Psalms 54, 67 & 150

& that was just my freshman year!

Subsequently (& we may have done some of the following in my freshman year as well; I’d have to go back & look):

Penderecki: St. Luke Passion with the Philadelphia Orchestra—that was the Philadelphia premiere; Page himself conducted

Berlioz: The Damnation of Faust (concert version); Eve Queler, conductor

Bach: St. Matthew Passion (tour concerts w/chamber orchestra)

Ives: Psalm 150 (again); 3 Harvest Home Chorales, & the Holidays Symphony (also w/Philadelphia Orchestra & just the symphony recorded on RCA Red Seal)—though the Holidays Symphony involved exactly one page of unison singing at the end of the 4th movement…

Puccini: La Boheme (Concert Choir was drafted to be the chorus for that year’s opera production)

Rossini: The Turk in Italy (Concert Choir was drafted to be the chorus for that year’s opera production as well, but I had one of the lead roles in that one)

Karl Korte: Pale is This Good Prince; an oratorio; world premiere; recorded on a private label

Ariel Ramirez: Misa Criolla (on which I was one of the percussionists—that's for a separate post, perhaps…)

Max Reger: Vater Unser—imagine a work using the tonal language of Wagner’s Prelude & Liebestod from Tristan & Isolde—but in a setting of the Lord’s Prayer in German for triple chorus, a cappella…

Arthur Honegger: Cantique de Pacques (women’s chorus) & La Danse des Morts

Poulenc: Six Chansons, Un Soir de Neige & Mass in G

Ravel: Trois Chansons (Ravel’s sole contribution to the a cappella repertoire; all on his own texts, by the way)

Schönberg: De Profundis (a late, atonal setting of Psalm 130 in Hebrew)

Webern: Enflieht auf Leichten Känen (Op. 2; pre-atonality [but not by much...])

...over & above the standard historical (Renaissance through Romantic era) motets, folk songs, spirituals & show tunes that flesh out tour programs. Nor does this enumerate the additional, equally wide range of repertoire performed on graduate conductors’ recitals in which I sang and, occasionally, soloed.

RP, as many of us used to speak of him, never took no for an answer—that’s what made this dizzying array of professional level rep possible. To be honest, he carried a measure of contempt for “singers” as opposed to “musicians” (something I do not perpetuate in my own practice) which often led to sarcasm & abusiveness in rehearsals—it came off as funny if you weren’t the target of it; but certainly not if you were the target thereof. Once upon a time, that was the norm for working “effectively” with choirs; one can’t do that & get away with it any more (as Robert Shaw once learned the hard way—singers actually walked out of rehearsal after one particularly egregious fit of abuse).

But RP also brought a profound depth of study and background to everything he conducted, such that simply rehearsing and performing any given work was an education in itself.

While I was never a one-on-one student of his, nor did I ever take an academic class with him, singing with RP provided a wildly wide exposure to and education in choral literature, along with performance experiences like no other, all at an impressionable age. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Thank you, RP...please give Gregg Smith (1931–2016) my regards.

A New Beginning: May the Words (1973)

This, in a few words, is long overdue.

Having been recently added to the composer roster of MusicSpoke.com is the impetus for the appearance of this new venture, which has been in the planning stages only since May of this year.

I owe gathering up the courage and resolve to embark hereupon to two small and wondrously useful books by visual artist Austin Kleon: Steal Like An Artist and, probably more so, Show Your Work!

Of the latter book, he says:

“In ten tight chapters, I lay out ways to think about your work as a never-ending process, how to build an audience by sharing that process, and how to deal with the ups and downs of putting yourself and your work out in the world:

1. You don’t have to be a genius.

2. Think process, not product.

3. Share something small every day.

4. Open up your cabinet of curiosities.

5. Tell good stories.

6. Teach what you know.

7. Don’t turn into human spam.

8. Learn to take a punch.

9. Sell out.

10. Stick around.”

I highly recommend it! (No, I haven't become Mr. Kleon’s publicist—credit where credit is due, that’s all.)

For decades now, I have been working in relative obscurity, as countless composers now and before me have done; always hoping for That One Big Break(through) that will change my fortunes for the better. That’s hard enough to come by in the music industry, let alone if one, like me, is classically oriented, and, worse yet, not regularly writing for the concert hall. And said break(through) probably has to be not singular, but at least several in number, if not many.

That’s not to say that my work is completely unknown and unheard, as is the fate of far too many. Indeed, I am very fortunate in that there are a few places (mostly houses of worship, as it turns out) where some music of mine is heard with some regularity. Alas, that brand of journeyman work—liturgical music miniatures of one sort or another, original or arranged—true gebrauchsmusik, if you think about it—somehow doesn't count as being a successful composer nowadays—if, indeed, it ever did.

We in the classically-oriented end of the field tend to think that we have no choice but to work and create in obscurity. If no one knows or cares about what we’re doing, we remain obscure. Couple that with fear of rejection, and it becomes a vicious, depressing, and soul-draining cycle.

This is the source of the name for this blog: No More Rusty Paper Clips! Too many of us have had them handed to us: we submit a work to a competition or for consideration by a conductor for programming, and it is returned to us after some months (or years) with a rusty paper clip in one corner—meaning: it was never unclipped and looked over.

No more, I say! Of course, electronic media and sending .pdfs out makes paper clips somewhat obsolete, but still…No more, I say!

In this day and age of social media and the blogosphere, there’s really no reason not to put one’s work/works-in-progress out for examination and scrutiny any more. True, it’s still possible to have one's work met with indifference (been there, too; far too many times…), but the chances of that should be smaller the bigger the population one reaches—I hope!

So: at this point in my life (the youth of my old age, I guess) it’s time to start showing my work intentionally and committedly, and to start following Mr. Kleon's 10 Steps. I don’t see these as 10 easy steps, nor, I suspect, would he—some are easier than others. In fact, each of these steps seems to call for commentary of one sort or another. (Oh, boy! Material for another 10 posts at least!)

Initially, many of the pieces I'll be talking about here have recordings posted on Soundcloud.com; more specifically: <https://soundcloud.com/robert-ross-9>, where my handle is <Robert Ross 11>. (I can't explain the "robert-ross-9" in the URL…) Soundcloud.com is free to join (though you don’t have to join; & once you do, you don’t have to post anything or spend any money there). It will simply be nice to know if you've listened to something of mine there. Soundcloud.com has mobile apps for iOS and Android as well.

The bottom line is that when I talk about a work of mine, you’ll be able to listen to it, come to your own conclusions, comment thereon…and, maybe even become interested in performing it? Buying it? Recording it? Etc., etc., etc. it?

And that’s my goal: to generate interest in/inspire performances and/or recordings of/inspire commissions for more of—my music. In short: to become less obscure and more in-demand—to establish a brand! (Hmmmnnnnn: “Establish a brand/be in demand!” Catchy…)

How often will I be posting? Good question! Blogs are, after all, a big commitment requiring fresh material regularly! I’m going to aim to post once every two weeks or so initially—I’m not certain this is a topic that necessarily merits a daily or even a weekly post, despite what Mr. Kleon’s Step #3 advises. Then again, maybe I’ll discover he's right…

Every once in a while, I reserve the right to veer into an area not directly related to my music, but I don’t plan to do that very often.

So: I invite you to become part of an interested, supportive community here—not just of me, but of everyone who participates herein. Sign up for Soundcloud.com now and check out what’s there, just in general! I may create related FaceBook and Twitter accounts specifically for this blog—it depends on what happens once it’s out in cyberspace. If you know other potentially interested musicians/conductors/composers, please help me spread the word—<insert cliché of your choice regarding greater numbers…>.

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As this is a beginning, it seems fitting that it include some sort of invocation/benediction; and so my initial offering here is an early work: May the Words (1973) for SATB choir a cappella on Psalm 19:15 (14).

This piece was inspired by having sung David Amram’s setting of a longer version of the text in English translation found in his Shir L’erev Shabbat (pub. C.F. Peters; now, apparently, out of print) which the Temple University Concert Choir (then under the direction of Robert Page) sang to open its Spring, 1973 tour concerts. It was on June 14, after completion of that year’s tour, that I sat down that afternoon and composed this setting in the space of about an hour.

My musical goal in this piece was to create something mystical-sounding by striking a balance between Renaissance-style polyphony (that year’s tour program also included the Josquin DesPres Ave Maria…Virgo Serena—my first exposure to the music of DesPres) and thoroughly modern tonal language. That the piece practically wrote itself that quickly is still an exhilarating memory!

I submitted it to Mr. Page in the Fall of 1973. It took until his very last concert with the Temple University Concert Choir in May, 1975 for him to program it—but program it, he did!

To this day, I think it works well—it has been sung any number of times in synagogue services (mostly High Holy Days) and Judaica concerts in which I have been involved. It is suitable not just for synagogue (as a post-Amidah meditation), but also church (introit, short anthem, or communion meditation), or as a concert opener.

The recording (to which you may listen here) comes from a concert by the Yavneh Ensemble under my direction. It is now published by MusicSpoke.com and purchasable from them here . MusicSpoke.com co-founder Kurt Knecht’s reflections about May the Words may be found here.

Enjoy, and see you again soon!