Quarantine

SKU: AP.49145

ISBN 9781470646547. UPC: 038081564845. English.

2020 was an interesting year. With schools shutting down, and going into quarantine, it felt like each day just faded into the next. This playable musical journey through 2020 offers a wide variety of articulations, dynamics, and textures. Crossfade by Patrick Roszell contains some movie dissonances throughout offering the opportunity to teach accidentals, dissonance, and resolution, as well as ensemble balance. (1:30).

SKU: AP.49145S

ISBN 9781470646554. UPC: 038081564852. English.

2020 was an interesting year. With schools shutting down, and going into quarantine, it felt like each day just faded into the next. This playable musical journey through 2020 offers a wide variety of articulations, dynamics, and textures. Crossfade by Patrick Roszell contains some movie dissonances throughout offering the opportunity to teach accidentals, dissonance, and resolution, as well as ensemble balance. (1:30).

SKU: PR.114422850

ISBN 9781491137550. UPC: 680160691005.

Amid his beloved catalog of music for low brass, NEWBURYPORT SONATA is Eric Ewazen’s first recital work for tuba. The composer’s preface tells us, “This work was written during the year of Covid quarantine, and it reflects the strong emotions of that time. The final movement is full of energy and a return to life! There is almost a march-like feel to the music, with a lively and even playful rhythm as the tuba lines are bold, strong, and ultimately energetic and exciting.” The work is also available as NEWBURYPORT QUINTET for Tuba and String Quartet.
The Newburyport Sonata began life as the NEWBURYPORT QUINTET for Tuba and Strings, commissioned by David Yang, director of the Newburyport Chamber Music Festival in Massachusetts. The quintet version was premiered by members of the festival, featuring tuba soloist Scott Devereaux of the U.S. Army Field Band.I’ve long been a fan of low brass instruments and had the pleasure of attending the very first Tuba/Euphonium Convention at Indiana University, which was a real celebration of low brass! As a former cellist (I’ve long been a fan of instruments with a tenor/bass range, the world of euphoniums and tubas) I wanted to write a piece showcasing both the wonderful virtuosity the instrument is capable of, and also its expressive lyricism, which shaped the NEWBURYPORT QUINTET. This adaptation for tuba and piano consequently has a wide variety of musical gestures and moods, exploring the color of the instruments.The first movement is in compound rhythm, with a lilting, energetic 6/8 feel supporting a cantabile line in the Tuba. In a traditional form, there are contrasting themes, sometimes playful and sometimes heroic, which share a lively, rolling rhythm. The second movement is a heartfelt appassionata, with the Tuba sometimes singing in a soulful minor key, and sometimes expressing powerful emotions.This work was written during the year of Covid quarantine, and it reflects the strong emotions of that time. The final movement is full of energy and a return to life! There is almost a march-like feel to the music, with a lively and even playful rhythm as the tuba lines are bold, strong, and ultimately energetic and exciting.In writing this piece, I collaborated greatly with Scott, who played through passages I wrote and gave me technical suggestions on how to flatter the gorgeous sound of the Tuba, allowing it to really sing!The quintet version is also available from the publisher, www.presser.com/114-42284 .

SKU: SU.28170170

Caged is an energetic, rhapsodic journey geared toward carrying the listener through a range of emotions. As with much of my work, I sought to pair the barbarous with the deeply introspective, throwing in a couple of grooves along the way. I feel it as a work to let loose so to speak and release much of the restrictive tension quarantine and the pandemic as a whole has brought upon us. It is written in an ABA' form with the last section mirroring the first in terms of emotional drive. The middle section serves as the heart of the work and is an inward reconciling of the grief many of us feel from this difficult time. Violin, 2 Violas, 2 Cellos Duration: 11' Composed: 2020 Published by: Raphael Press.

SKU: FG.55011-686-3

In spring 2020, coronavirus began spreading throughout the world and in many places people were subjected to quarantine. It was then that Hiyoli Togawa, a violist, proposed that the BIS record label release a viola disc entitled Songs of Solitude of short compositions by different contemporary composers, as a sort of reflection of the present time and offering comfort to listeners in their solitude. Hiyoli asked Kalevi Aho (b. 1949) to compose a piece in which she could play and sing simultaneously. The meditative, melancholy Am Horizont is dedicated to Hiyoli Togawa and composed in April 2020. Duration: c. 5'30''.

SKU: PR.114422520

ISBN 9781491134788. UPC: 680160683833.

After decades as a renowned oboe virtuoso, Katherine Needleman was improvising at the piano during the quarantine summer of 2020 when her ideas congealed in a powerful way. Within a week she completed a 16-minute oboe sonata inspired by the world’s overlapping crises. This riveting three-movement sonata bears the title qua resurget ex favilla, drawn from the Dies Irae text referring to rising back from ashes. Needleman won the International Double Reed Society’s Inaugural Commissioning Competition by entering her own recording of this work, performing as both oboist and pianist from her living room. As a result, IDRS commissioned her to compose a new work for English horn and piano which was premiered at their 2021 Virtual Symposium and programmed for the live 2022 convention.
I’m not exactly sure how, in a life consumed by music, I never put anything on paper between the time I stopped at age 10 and the age of 42. I mean, I have some ideas why, but that could easily dissolve into a feminist manifesto or a condemnation of my musical education and the overwhelming culture of American oboe playing, the vehicle through which I’ve made a living my entire adult life. Rather than go there, I will just say this is the first piece I put on paper in my adult life.Six months into COVID-19 lockdown in the US, the world was feeling pretty weird. I had familiarized myself with the music notation program, Sibelius, for recent arranging projects. I had written some mockeries of A.M.R. Barret oboe etudes in response to an assignment I was given (and did appropriately first). When I descended into a dark chorale in the middle of the fourth mockery, I realized I needed a new vehicle. I wrote a short, ridiculous piece for my husband’s birthday, and then, the next night, when improvising at the piano, like I’ve done since I was seven years old, this piece came to me. However, this time, I sketched it out into Sibelius. Over the course of the next week, I found notating and picking permanent, official notes to enter into the computer challenging. But it was all done on paper in seven days, and I took another few for dynamics and articulations thinking they might be useful for someone else, if I would ever be lucky enough for someone else to play it.I don’t have much to say about the music of qua resurget ex favilla itself. It’s a personal statement couched in the feelings of that time. The US presidential election was looming large and ugly in my mind, well, that and the end of life as we knew it, but I also had some bizarre feeling that everything would be okay.

SKU: HL.49046935

ISBN 9781705169353. UPC: 842819116837. 9.25x12.0x0.5 inches.

SEVEN DAYS is a cycle for solo piano in 21 movements, most lasting between three and seven minutes, distributed in the form of a custom app produced by the 92Y and released during their Fall 2021 season. Using the app on their phones, listeners are asked to listen to three movements a day according to an approximate schedule - one movement in the morning, one in the afternoon, and another sometime in the evening - for seven days. The music is performed by Pedja Muzijevic and presented alongside paintings by Gloria Maximo. (Please visit 92Y.org for information on how to download the Seven Days app.) The work is designed as a listening experience that tunes us into the passing of time, connecting us both to the present moment as well as the cycle of the week. The experience invites music to inhabit and structure our everyday - to find us where we are in the world. The morning-afternoonevening schedule is meant to focus participants on the dawn-to-dusk cycle as well as to create a communal listening ritual. It is also an experiment in large-scale form, designed to draw attention to musical material developing across a week-long expanse, interspersed with vast silences. SEVEN DAYS was shaped by a year spent in relative isolation due to the pandemic. While it is a work composed during a time of quarantine, it will be experienced first by an audience in the process of returning to a more normal world. In that sense, it is an artwork born out of a year of relatively cloistered existence that seeks to preserve aspects of that experience as we move forward. The piece was also inspired by the work of Morton Feldman and Chantal Akerman, whose large-scale works consider time, process, and stillness. Their art struck me with a fresh relevance during the silent stretches of the pandemic year 2020. It was also a year in which writings about time, penned by contemplatives like Henry David Thoreau and Thomas Merton, held new weight. All of this in turnresonated with Gloria Maximo's profound paintings, which I've long admired. SEVEN DAYS is an artwork we are invited to do - using music to point our attention to the present moment, the everyday, and the seemingly mundane. It is a piece listeners are also asked to live within as it unfolds over a week rather than to witness it live. The key players here are time and the listener's own surroundings, starring together alongside music and art in a wordless drama. -Gregory Spears.

SKU: PR.144407380

ISBN 9781491133903. UPC: 680160683475. 9 x 12 inches.

In her powerful Foreword to the music, violinist Kelly Hall-Tompkins has written: “There are great works which give voice to important moments for generations, and this is one of them.” The tragedy of Elijah McClain’s murder has moved us all, and for many musicians the image of this gentle young man playing his violin for kittens at an animal shelter has added a poignant extra layer. Zwilich was a professional violinist before turning exclusively to composing, and A LITTLE VIOLIN MUSIC is a memorial from the heart of one violinist to another.
[THESE NOTES MAY NOT BE REPRODUCED OUTSIDE OF THE PUBLICATION; OK TO QUOTE A BIT AND GIVE AUTHOR CREDIT]We often research important pieces of music to gain some glimpse into the mind of the composer by understanding the times in which a piece was written. The times that brought this piece into being, 2020, has been a year like no other in our lifetimes.With the suffering of a once in a century pandemic raging in ever higher waves, and millions of people around the world confined to their homes with a shared attention span for the first time in generations, we watched in horror the 8 minute 46 second killing of George Floyd, a man previously unknown to us, but now unwillingly joining a long list of names of unarmed African Americans killed by police. The anguished backlash of citizens around the world, from Japan to New Zealand to Germany to the United States, of every age, color, and creed, has rallied for weeks and months on end to demand enough and that “Black Lives Matter.”And yet, in the midst of it all is an America starkly divided against itself with some defiantly pushing back, emboldened by authoritarian-style government actions against its own citizens occurring all over the country. It is against this backdrop that we ever had a chance to know of Elijah McClain. Here in quarantine I sometimes practice my scales in front of the news. And one day the mirror image looking back at me from the screen was a slight young man, warm, affable brown eyes, and also a violin under his chin. The newsreel-style camera pan so familiar now, I knew the only reason we were gazing upon his unfamous face was that he too had been killed by police nearly a year before. But the revelation of it in the broadcast hit me particularly hard.Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, who is not only one of the great composers of our time, is also a dear friend, and called me the next day, also deeply saddened by the news. It was from Ellen that I learned that Elijah used to play for the kittens at the local animal shelter so they wouldn’t be lonely. This kind, gentle soul was aggressively taken into police custody while saying, “I am an introvert. Please respect the boundaries that I am speaking... I’m going home.” He was never seen alive again.Ellen and I spoke of the sadness and the injustice of this several times. She felt a powerful calling to contribute something in a statement and the result is the piece you now hold in your hands. I am deeply honored to be the dedicatee of the piece, to have worked together with Ellen on some of the final details, and to pen this score note. As an invited alumna of the Eastman School of Music, I premiered the work for their virtual event on Diversity and Inclusion. Each time I play it, there is a persistent lump in my throat because Ellen has captured something poignant and powerful here.There are great works which give voice to important moments for generations, and this is one of them. We humbly offer this piece in memory of Elijah McClain.Foreword © 2021 by Kelly Hall-Tompkins. Used by permission.

SKU: HL.508338

UPC: 196288073604. 6.75x10.5x0.036 inches.

Written and recorded while we were all in quarantine, this is a song of hope and overcoming challenges “together.” This is a natural pop/gospel tune for choral singing and the message is a perfect vehicle to begin conversations around hope, friendships and the importance of community during challenging times.

SKU: GI.G-1110

Composer Chris de Silva emerges from the quiet solitude of quarantine with a beautifully expressive collection of carols for solo piano. This third edition in the Colours series is filled with pieces that fully capture the range of emotions that fill the Christmas season–from moments of joy and goodness to those of emptiness and loss. Whether playing them yourself or listening to the gorgeous recording, these carol arrangements will become seasonal favorites.   CONTENTS: Angels We Have Heard on High • Away in a Manger • Bring a Torch, Jeannette, Isabella • The Coventry Carol • The First Nowell • The Holly and the Ivy • Infant Holy, Infant Lowly • O Come, All Ye Faithful • Silent Night, Holy Night • ‘Twas in the Moon of Wintertime • We Three Kings of Orient Are • What Child Is This?  .

SKU: HL.1105189

UPC: 196288102106. 6.75x10.5x0.036 inches.

Now available for SSAA.This thrilling new arrangement by twin brothers Matt and Adam Podd became an internet sensation shortly after we were all quarantined due to Covid-19. Drawing on friendships in the New York City Broadway, church, and opera worlds, more than 120 world class singers and players came together to create the virtual choir and orchestra. In the final chorus, the arrangers very cleverly turn the iconic phrase “How can I keep from singing?” into “Keep Singing.” A message we all need to hear and remember during times of isolation and at all times.