A song cycle in six consecutive sections.

Appendage
Tex yeux
Warm eyes
Appendage
Recognition
Last Lullabye

For more information, to read full text, click here

excerpt "Appendage" sung by Lauren Flanigan, soprano

1. Some of My Best Friends are Women           
2. Happy Earth Day    
3. Family Values                    
4. You'd Better Not       
5. Homophobia                 
6. Sex in Space    
7. Don't Dare Call Me a Lefty        
8. What's in a Name? -- U.N. Style    
9. Currency Crisis 
10. We Won the Cold War 
11. The P.C. Tango              
12. Election Ballad  
13. Televangelists in the Closet      
14. Honey, It Ain't Postmodern (to be Hankering for You)

Excerpt - The P.C. Tango

Excerpt - Family Values

In Classical mythology, the furies and muses had clearly distinguished roles: the furies exacted revenge through ingenious torments, the muses were shepherdesses to the arts and sciences. In pre-Classical times, however, this distinction was not so clear. The earliest sources indicate that the furies and muses were both aspects of the same goddess in her creative and destructive phases.

Furies and Muses is a musical juxtaposition of violence and elegance: throughout the piece, aggressive gestures are suddenly transformed into phrases of great delicacy, and vice versa. In many cases, the affect of the music is the only thing that is changed, i.e., the gestures retain all of their structural characteristics, but with completely different expressive results.

excerpt, Furies and Muses III with Jeff Keesecker, bassoon and the Cassatt String Quartet

Openings is written for winds and percussion. There are four movements: mouth, mind, eye and ear. The piece began in 2004 as I walked up the Spruce Spring Trail near Red Canyon campground in the Manzano Wilderness for the first time. Openings is physically connected to the density of the trail as one climbs up a ridge of the mountain. When you've reached a certain height there are openings out into the mesa where you can see for miles and miles. Openings is artistically connected to Encounter, the installation piece I made in collaboration with visual artist Hee Sook Kim.

Excerpt - II. Mind U of New Mexico Wind Symphony

Commissioned by the Center for Black Music Research, Chicago.

EXCERPT from 2nd movement - Chicago performance