Blog/News

New album release – AGAINST WAR

Announcing the release of my latest album, AGAINST WAR, featuring soprano Lisa Rombach and conductor Marek Štilec leading the Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice. The album features music from my MUSIC FOR PEACE PROJECT. It begins with DECLARATION OF PEACE for chamber orchestra, followed by AGAINST WAR and EVERYTHING PASSES for soprano and chamber orchestra.

Coming of age in the ’60s, I absorbed in my core a belief that peace was possible. In that small instant of time, it did seem to an optimistic and naïve teenager, that the millions of voices protesting in the streets, energized by rock and roll, could make a difference. The young would take over from the old and make the world a better place. Of course, it didn’t turn out that way – and it never has. Revolutionaries become what they seek to replace. Despite the discouraging tone of these words, I still harbor an inner faith that music possesses a power to reach into the hearts and minds of those who are listening and influence them for the better. With that thought in mind, much of my music was written to encourage thoughts about the possibility of peace. Yes, much martial music has been composed over the centuries to stir up the passions of soldiers to go to war – but music also has the power to elevate, to bring peace to troubled spirits, to light the path to an inner space that is free of anger and strife. Over the years, I have composed a great deal of music intended to encourage thoughts about the possibility of peace – and this album is my first recording from that project with works composed over the past several years.

DECLARATION OF PEACE. Somewhere in the world, there is a war going on, always. Declared or not. If I had the power to wish it, I would simply declare peace, and leave it at that, for all time, putting an end to senseless wars. Not having that power, I’m left to imagine it, creating my own musical declaration.

AGAINST WAR. A suite of songs for voice and orchestra setting some powerful poems I found in the anthology Poets Against the War. The poems were written in response to a, so to speak, call to arms, by poets protesting against the decision to invade Iraq and the anthology was published in 2003. Doing something with these poems had been in the back of my mind for many years. The music is dedicated to the 11,000 or so poets who responded to the call and contributed their words and thoughts to Poets Against the War in the hope that reason would prevail over reaction. If only their effort had prevailed back then, the world would be in a better place today – but fear, hysteria and war mongering ruled the day. In our current times, their words still ring true – and are needed more than ever.

EVERYTHING PASSES. This music started off in one direction, but then reading a brief poem by Peter Levitt turned it in another direction entirely. A gentle poem, read during the same week that the world’s attention was turned to the mass shootings of innocent people in two cities in the United States, it’s imagery of petals falling like past lives, struck home – and became the theme of this symphony.

CREDITS:

Composer: Stanley Grill
Soprano: Lisa Rombach
Conductor: Marek Štilec
Orchestra: Komorni filharmonie Pardubice
Producer: Jiri Štilec
Recording Engineer: Vaclav Roubal

Listen to AGAINST WAR on Bandcamp

For your consideration – WHEN THE WAR ENDS WE WILL DANCE AGAIN

For your consideration, WHEN THE WAR ENDS WE WILL DANCE AGAIN is a symphony for string orchestra in four movements. An addition to my MUSIC FOR UKRAINE series, this string symphony was inspired by hope that Ukrainians will achieve their dream of freedom from Russian violence and oppression. It imagines a time when Russian soldiers no longer occupy Ukrainian villages and Ukrainians can live freely and without fear of attack.

BEST CLASSICAL COMPOSITION

CREDITS:

Composer: Stanley Grill
Conductor: Dongmin Kim
Ensemble: New York Classical Players
Recorded at: NV Factory, Englewood Cliffs, NJ
Recording Engineer: Sean Yoo
Recorded: October 13, 2023
Release Date: March 29, 2024

Listening links to WHEN THE WAR ENDS WE WILL DANCE AGAIN (Tracks 2-5 on the album WE WILL NOT FORGET)

For your consideration – DIE ERSTE ELEGIE

For your consideration, DIE ERSTE ELEGIE, a five movement “concerto” for soprano and chamber orchestra setting the first of Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous Duino Elegies.

BEST CLASSICAL COMPOSITION

DIE ERSTE ELEGIE. It is Rilke, more so than any other poet with whom I am familiar, who writes about the invisible world around us. Other poets describe the beauties (or the terrors) of the world we can see, but Rilke uses words that may be rooted in that world only to leave it and open a door beyond that to what we cannot fathom. Although I do not believe that angels, in the ordinary meaning of that word, exist, I had an immediate visceral, gut acceptance of Rilke’s words when I read “Every Angel is terrifying.” It reminded me of my love of studying stars when I was a child, and the terror that I felt when I began to understand, in a small way, the immeasurably vast distances between stars and how minute in comparison to the scale of the universe we all are (despite our species’ limitless capacity for self-aggrandizement). That terrifying realization put a quick end to that line of study for me. And he does, at least to my understanding, clearly describe how in the face of that vastness, humans shut themselves down, to shield themselves from the enormity of what surrounds us in order to protect ourselves. His opening line of the first elegy so powerfully expresses this – “Who, if I cried out would hear me among the Angels’ Orders? and even if one of them pressed me suddenly to his heart: I’d be consumed in his more potent being.”

But, more than an expression of humanity’s relationship to the infinite, invisible world, the poems are elegies – laments for the dead. But it is not just the dead that concern Rilke, but the relationship that the living have to those who have left the world of the living. The perhaps inevitable result of the too early death of my own father, this subject has never been far from my mind. How it is that we can bear such grief of loss is at the heart of these poems. While most people seem to me to find ways to ignore their mortality, or push it down to some deep place where they can avoid thinking about it, that has never been the case for me. And, as I grow older, it becomes still harder to ignore. The division between the living and dead is always present for me, and that, perhaps, is the thing that attracts me to Rilke’s ten elegies.

Composer: Stanley Grill

Soprano: Lisa Rombach

Conductor: Marek Štilec

Orchestra: Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice

Producer: Jiri Štilec

Recording Engineer: Vaclav Roubal

Listening links to stream DIE ERSTE ELEGIE

Global Music Awards

I was thrilled to receive a Global Music Award Silver Medal for composition for DECLARATION OF PEACE. This expression of hope that, contrary to all evidence, humanity may eventually come to its collective senses and find a way to resolve its disputes without resorting to war, is the lead track on my next album AGAINST WAR. The album will also include AGAINST WAR, settings of poems against war by various poets for soprano and orchestra and EVERYTHING PASSES, settings of several Zen poems about the fleetingness of our existence.

My next album

Working on my next album, with a plan to release it over the next few months. Recorded in November, the editing is done and I’m now designing the album artwork. It is a mostly somber album – but then, we are living in somber times.

The album will include:

WE WILL NOT FORGET, for soprano saxophone and string orchestra. Originally composed for duduk and string orchestra, this music was composed during 2020, at a time when Hamas was once again firing missiles at Israel. I decided to record it in 2023, following Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel. It is a musical reminder of the long list of genocides that one or another tribe has inflicted on another throughout human history. After every genocide, we say “we will not forget” – but then we do.

WHEN THE WAR ENDS, WE WILL DANCE AGAIN. An addition to my MUSIC FOR UKRAINE series, this string symphony was inspired by hope that Ukrainians will achieve their dream of freedom from Russian violence and oppression. It imagines a time when Russian soldiers no longer occupy Ukrainian villages and Ukrainians can live in freedom.

SERENADE. Originally composed for oboe and string orchestra, I decided to record this with soprano saxophone after hearing Javier Oviedo perform it at a concert in New York. As the title suggests, it is a love song of sorts.

The recording is with the New York Classical Players, conducted by Dongmin Kim, with guest artist Javier Oviedo on soprano sax.

THE BRIDGE

Sharing a link to a review of THE BRIDGE in Grego Applegate Edwards’s Classical-Modern Music Review.

[button color=”steel_blue” link=”https://classicalmodernmusic.blogspot.com/2023/” size=”xx-large” target=”_blank” block=”true”]Gapplegate Music Review – THE BRIDGE[/button]