None of us live by gar­den­ing alone. Lately I’ve been going back to some of my ear­lier days, com­pos­ing music. If you’ll be any­where near Long Island later in July I invite you to a per­for­mance that’ll include one of my new pieces, After­im­ages, for clar­inet and cello, com­posed for Thomas Piercy (clar­inet) and Suzanne Mueller (cello).

There is a gar­den­ing tie to all this: the pre­miere will take place at the Old West­bury Gar­dens as part of the Sun­day After­noon Con­cert Series. The date is July 22, and the con­cert will com­mence at 3 p.m.

The New York new music orga­ni­za­tion Vox Novus invited com­posers to write some­thing in reac­tion to this paint­ing, Giverny Revis­ited, by Raisy Derzie. And, oh yes, the piece had to be sixty sec­onds long or shorter–talk about a big lim­i­ta­tion! They then picked fif­teen of the sub­mis­sions for their ongo­ing Fif­teen Min­utes of Fame series of con­certs, and my piece will be one of them. In keep­ing with the idea of the paint­ing, where the artist has taken up the sub­ject mat­ter of Monet’s gar­den through a mod­ern lens, my piece uses con­tem­po­rary har­monies and rhythms to riff on the open­ing of Reflets dan l’eau, the first piece of Claude Debussy’s first set of Images for piano.

Also on the pro­gram will be pieces by all sorts of com­posers from Leopold Mozart, Beethoven, and Bar­tok to Char­lie Chap­lin. Cool music, all per­formed on the very man­i­cured grounds of the old John S. Phipps estate on Long Island in New York.

I had another short short work selected for another of Vox Novus’ con­certs, this one fea­tur­ing the West Point Wind Quin­tet in a con­cert designed to com­mem­o­rate the 150th anniver­sary of the Civil War. I was feel­ing a lit­tle con­trary, so not only did they get a piece less than a minute long, the piece was a three-movement suite, all of which clocked in at about 54 sec­onds. It’s all a lit­tle square and aca­d­e­mic but it was fun to write.

The piece: Field Notes: Three Vol­leys for Wind Quintet

The move­ments (linked to the YouTube performance):

• 1861 Over­ture
• Lamento: Get­tys­burg
• Sherman’s March

[ Pro­gram notes to the whole con­cert, includ­ing videos of the con­cert, in two parts ]

The entire world pre­miere per­for­mance on April 29, 2012:

Enjoy!