About the Composer

Thanks to a big improvement in the latest version of Wordpress, I’ve switched this site from being organized around “categories” to being organized around “tags”. It’s hard to explain what the difference is. Suffice it to say that, in my case, the word “monkeys” could never be justified as a category, but it seems just fine as a tag.

The best way to understand it is to see it. Meet my tag cloud.

Every post can have any number of tags associated with it. The tag cloud shows how frequently or infrequently I’ve used each tag. It’s a startlingly real picture of my world.

As for the old categories, many of them have been converted to tags. Others are just gone now. (Sorry, yeah, no more “category shmategory”.) I’ve replaced the sidebar list of categories with just the most frequently used tags.

Happy tag browsing!

My clarinet/piano piece American Standard will be performed in London next week…

Peter Furniss (clarinet) and David Leiher Jones (piano) will be holding a recital to celebrate the recent Clarinet Classics CD release, Time Pieces, 60 years of American music for clarinet and piano. The recital will take place on Wednesday, 24th October at 7:30pm. The Warehouse, 13 Theed Street, London, SE1 8ST.

Sculptor Georgianna Krieger (ahem, my wife) is among the many San Francisco artists presenting their work throughout October as part of ArtSpan’s annual San Francisco Open Studios. The city is divided into four sections and artists in each section are open over four weekends in October.

Georgianna’s work is on display this weekend, Saturday and Sunday 11am-6pm at Fort Mason Building C, room 375.

Here’s more information, including a downloadable map to artist exhibits.

It will be worth your while to see writer/performer Amanda Moody’s latest music theater piece D’Arc, Woman on Fire, music by Jay Cloidt, at Footloose & Shotwell Studios.

D’Arc offers a surreal inquiry into the costs of dreams, lived and unlived. Weaving the threads of the Dark Ages with our own dark times, D’Arc depicts a present-day intercession by Saint Joan of Arc. We meet Joanne. Home alone, she fixates on letters from her daughter who vanished while working abroad in a war-torn region. Raging against loss, Joanne begins to receive bizarre visions through the cold flame of her television set. It is Saint Joan, burning through the TV twilight to answer her grief. Relating tales of her own battles and trials, Joan teases and admonishes Joanne, disrupts her obsessions and challenges her to listen anew to the call of her own life.

Jay Cloidt’s haunting music drives this D’Arc night of the soul. Integrating Moody’s mercurial vocalizations with acoustic and processed cello, the composition features original songs, underscoring, and sound design. His composition spans 14th century hymns, post-Romanticism, aggressive electronic music and heart-thumping gospel to evoke the strange dream of Joanne and Joan’s collision-course.

I haven’t seen it yet, but I can vouch for Amanda as a really interesting dramatic writer, and a powerful performer.

One of my earliest pieces, American Standard for clarinet and piano, is included on an upcoming CD of American works for clarinet and piano on the British label Clarinet Classics.

Performing on the recording are clarinettist Peter Furniss and pianist David Leiher Jones, both good friends since our Budapest Liszt Academy days a really long time ago. (They taught me all about Marmite and how to curse properly in English.) American Standard was originally written for Peter, who’s performed it numerous times around the world.

The disc also includes a magnificent performance of the Bernstein Sonata as well as works by Victor Babin, James Cohn, Robert Muczynski and Richard Dudas, another Budapest cohort.

The release is scheduled for June, and I will, no doubt, crow about it again here at that time.

Well, I made it! The first post in the About the Composer archive is dated August 17, 2005.

The blog started out as I was just rolling up my sleeves to work on Letter To Hungary, a commission I had recently received.  I thought it would be fun to write about the evolution of the piece. There was a bit of that, but eventually I found myself writing about all sorts of other things, including interesting friends, interesting music and my very interesting son.

As a one-year retrospective, I’m putting links to some of my more popular posts below in the “Related Posts” box (in reverse chronological order).

It’s been fun, and I plan to continue indefinitely. Thanks for reading!

In 2004 I wrote the score for Shakespeare’s Merchant, an independent film adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. The film is still making its way through the process of festival submissions, etc., but I’m so proud of the score that I’ve taken it upon myself to arrange for it to be released on CD.

It’s a short movie with an epic score. The director wanted a lot of underscoring, and so in many places the music resembles opera, where the orchestra frequently carries the subtext and the emotional weight. I frequently accuse myself of being derivative, but this is some of my most original work, (although any listener who’s a Sondheim fan will hear that influence). One of my jobs was to help set a scene where people are routinely nasty to each other, and so it’s mostly a dark, tense score with some lyrical and humorous moments.

The CD is available now at CD Baby, and will soon be on Amazon as well. Sound clips can be heard on the film’s web site. (Click “Soundtrack”)