A Compo Sunrise (2011) 8'
For clarinet, trombone, percussion, piano, violin, and double bass.
Premiered at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, 6/24/11. Self-published (Morningside Press, ASCAP).
A Compo Sunrise was inspired, in part, by the music of Charles Ives. Though its surface style is not particularly Ivesian, the basic concept is: A Compo Sunrise attempts to evoke a setting through sound, just as so many of Ives’ works do. Ives happens to have been from Danbury, Connecticut, just a few towns away from my native Westport, so it seems appropriate that the setting of this particular homage is Westport’s Compo Beach. The work is essentially in binary form: the opening sixty measures are a kind of "night music," and the second half of the piece, with its faster tempo, represents a kind of daybreak. The static materials of the work's opening rather suddenly, if gradually, give way to the lyrical materials at its end, and it is my hope that in listening to this piece, you will find these transformations to be as beautiful and satisfying as I do—evocative, sweeping, and grand.
Listen:
Compo Beach in Westport, Connecticut