Scoring

ob.cl.vln.vla.db.

World Premiere

3/3/2013
The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY
Orchestra of St. Luke's

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Composer's Notes

My new piece, Quintet, is written for a mixed ensemble—oboe, clarinet, violin, viola, and contrabass—whose repertoire has (like several of my other recent chamber works, it occurs) a singular, large-looming precedent. In this case, it’s a pretty obvious one to those who take a connoisseur’s interest in rarities like the mixed wind/string chamber repertoire: a piece of the same name by Sergei Prokofiev—his Op. 39. So much so, that one, in naming the piece (“the Schubert Octet”; “the Prokofiev Quintet”; “the Debussy Trio”, etc.) actually describes the ensemble, no matter whose music is being played. There are plenty of reasons for and against in the great debate on whether attempting to surf the turf of a masterpiece is wise, but as someone who revels in feeling as a close as possible to one’s idols as possible, I jumped at the chance to work with this quirky, colorful, versatile group of instruments and Mr. Shepherd ended up with a Prokofiev Quintet.

Quintet appeared first on a St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble program called Spin Paris, which also featured works by Ravel, Saint-Saëns, and Debussy. Prokofiev was himself, for many years (starting in the early ‘20s, when his Quintet was written), a Parisian. Propelled and drawn by strong forces (not unlike Picasso, Hemmingway and so many others) to that fertile ferment of artistic activity, he both absorbed and influenced the work of those, both French- and foreign-born, around him. He embraced, for example, both the high restraint of Neoclassicism and the fascination with machines and mechanical environments so thick in the air at the time, as evidenced in his first two symphonies. The contrast between them is stark, and startling, and yet they are both symphonies that could have been written by no one else. To my ear, therein lies the essence of Prokofiev; he’s somehow akin to a character actor. Happy to highlight certain eccentricities and quirks, it’s moody stuff he’s made. And not a generic sound or sentiment goes by; like all greats, the beating heart of a defined artist can always be heard, no matter what the costume.

The short character pieces that make up my Quintet are intended as homage only in approach—by just that: from the point of view of character. I’ll claim these as my own, but after 20 years of keeping his music close, I’m sure Prokofiev is never too far away.

Quintet was commissioned by the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, and premiered on March 3, 2013 at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

— Sean Shepherd

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Scoring

vln.vlc.pno.

World Premiere

1/22/2012
Calderwood Performance Hall - Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA
Claremont Trio

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Composer's Notes

I. Florid Hopscotch
II. Calderwood
III. Slow waltz of the robots

I decided on a simple enough title for this piece early on: Trio. It's meant to reflect both the number of players and the number of movements that make up the piece. The names of movements themselves might leave one more curious than a quick glance at the title might reveal, and each movement does its best to stand alone, but in my mind these relatively short statements, taken together, make a complete musical paragraph.

It’s a piece for an occasion, and one for which I was very happy to contribute: the first concerts in a new concert hall in Boston at the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum, for the Claremont Trio, old friends and players I knew well. I scoured and researched on the internet, found the design plans of the architect, Renzo Piano, and watched the building grow in photos as I worked at home in Brooklyn. I was taken with the unusual shape of the hall, a vertical cube with four wrapping balcony levels hovering nearly directly over a square stage. The result, as I imagined: there is no front or back, left or right in what was eventually named Calderwood Hall. There is only up and down. I approached the second movement as a metaphor of homage to the hall: most of movement is vertical in nature, as was the intent. While I had focused on technical issues in composing the music, upon hearing it, I was surprised to find I’d hidden my engineering, those load-bearing columns, behind a skin that formed while I wasn’t looking. It was only as a listener that I realized the music in "Calderwood" formed the emotional core of Trio.

"Florid Hopscotch" serves as the intrada, albeit a slightly confused or frustrated one: a leaping staccato gesture starting in the piano argues for prominence with long flowing lines in the strings. "Slow waltz of the robots" is a pretty blunt take on something that, depending one’s view of such things, might be anywhere from sadly beautiful to horrifying and grotesque. Perhaps the music finds its way toward a bit of both, but the image hit me like a flash after I’d written the last note. I don’t like spoilers, but I’m inclined give this away: any battery-powered objects that would take it upon themselves to attempt such a charmingly useless human act as dancing would likely get a sympathetic view from me, at least until those batteries run out.

Trio was commissioned for the Claremont Trio by the Claremont Commission Consortium in honor of Calderwood Hall at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, MA, and premiered there on January 22, 2012.

— Sean Shepherd

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Scoring

ob-vln.vla.vlc.

World Premiere

8/11/2011
St. Francis Auditorium, Santa Fe, NM
Liang Wang, oboe / Orion String Quartet

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Composer's Notes

Many of my richest and most memorable musical experiences have occurred not in the concert hall or the opera house, but rather in smaller performance spaces (or even in a large living room) watching a few people in an advanced mode of non-verbal communication convey and interpret this or that profound musical utterance. Chamber music can be pure magic, and the human scale of the medium and the environment have often made—for me, in the best cases—an experience bordering on the ecstatic.

Composers who seem to shine with similar brilliance in both micro- and macro-theatres occur with astounding rarity (to me, anyway); perhaps as composers, we each come with a differently-sized internal megaphone. Someone whom I have always admired for his inspired (and seemingly intuitive) answers to the problem of musical scope, W. A. Mozart, had no problems getting his music to fit the room.

The ideas that grew out of my conversations with Marc Neikrug and the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival began as a tabula rasa—a great but tough commission to start work on (if I can really do anything, what do I really want to do?). I began to settle on one of my personal favorite sounds in chamber music: the solo oboe (I couldn't tell anyone why), and my mind went toward Mozart's Oboe Quartet, K. 370. I adore the work's subtle, intimate choreography, and have often pondered the chameleonic role of the oboe, whose responsibilities as soloist are by definition more conciliatory than if it were paired with orchestra. I can't say that I intend to (or would dare to) replicate anything about his work in a specific way, but as has been the case with Mozart's music before, I found that revisiting K. 370 has been a natural way to unlock the vault of my ideas about subtle choreographies, conciliation, and the flexibility that great chamber musicians possess.

My Quartet for Oboe and Strings, in one movement, is also concerned, from a constructional standpoint, with change.  Continuous variation and juxtaposition of materials, characters and atmospheres marks the surface of a form in roughly 4 parts.  The rate at which those changes in temperament occur is itself subject to variation: the opening, marked Volatile, contrasts with later sections when blurted interruptions give way to gentle crossfades.

Quartet was commissioned by the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival and La Jolla Music Society for SummerFest, and premiered in Santa Fe on August 11, 2011.  The piece is dedicated to oboist Liang Wang with admiration.

— Sean Shepherd

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Scoring

vln.pno.

World Premiere

2/6/2009
Barnes Hall - Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
Ben Sung, violin / Jihye Chang, piano

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Composer's Notes

A piece for violin and piano is one I had long wanted to write, and Dust was a welcome break from working with larger forces just before and after. Originally intended as the first half of an equally balanced two-part Sonata, this movement quickly grew long and unwieldy for what I had planned, owing to the dictates of the musical materials themselves. The immediate solution was to complete Dust, and return at a later date to contribute a second part worthy of the cause. In years since, at least three valiant missions toward completing the task have gone down in flames. For the time being, this music intends to stand alone, and so I'm content to oblige.

The opening material, which returns to close, flanks a contrasting middle meant to stand a kind of polar opposite in tempo, behavior and character. Marked haltingly, with widely-spaced events in the piano, the violin enters pathétique, high on the deep fourth string of the instrument. I made the decision to have the long, widely-spaced line on the string purely as a timbral one, but watching a player’s efforts in executing the awkward difficulty of it in performance haunts me, as it seems to mirror my feeling about that music precisely. The music of the middle section seems at once preoccupied and darting, as well as fixated, obsessive and insistent. The two instruments are often sharing material, jockeying for position.

Such a race seems to me like nothing new in the genre, from works of Beethoven and Brahms, through the Fauré and Ravel Sonatas and beyond. This pair of instruments is a team of rivals if there ever was one; any struggle for predominance is at once laudable and futile. Perhaps aside from keyboard and voice, no duo has seen a more fruitful exploration in the repertoire—a testament to composer’s continued fascination in the possibilities of a virtuoso partnership.

Dust is dedicated to Benjamin Sung and Ji-hye Chang, who gave the first performance in February 2009, at Barnes Hall, Cornell University in Ithaca NY.

— Sean Shepherd

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Scoring

cl.vln.pno.

World Premiere

2/24/2008
Hans Arnhold Center - American Academy, Berlin
Trio Volans

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Composer's Notes

When my friends Trio Volans, whose members (pianist Xak Bjerken, violinist Stephen Miakhy and clarinetist Rick Faria) have premiered and performed my work on many occasions, approached me in late 2007 about a writing piece on short notice, I happily moved other projects around to oblige. Writing for those one knows and trusts, musically and otherwise, is a true joy, and knowing the sounds of a particular player often leads the way to envisioning the course the piece for them will take. This piece was, however, unusually difficult for me to write, and I felt several times that I was composing for the first time. My creative wheels, although properly greased, still locked up. Consequently, this relatively short work—around 7 minutes—takes some twists and turns that, for me, were surprising. Any musical depiction involving birds makes a reference to the music of the French master Olivier Messiaen hard to avoid, so I didn’t try to avoid it. But while birdsong (Messiaen’s area of fascination) might be an obvious point of departure, I found myself meditating more on the idea of the flock. Any music that came about via these thoughts was purely coincidental: any connection to be found would be at a subconscious level.

— Sean Shepherd

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Scoring

0.0.1.1-1.0.0.0-1.1.1.1.1.

World Premiere

5/22/2008
American Academy, Berlin
Scharoun Ensemble Berlin / Sean Shepherd

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Composer's Notes

The titles of my Octet are taken from the lines of a poem by Wallace Stevens: Sea surface full of clouds. While writing the piece at the American Academy in Berlin on the Wannsee, I told my fellow Fellows that I had a feeling that the piece I was writing had something to do with the color blue, and we started talking poetry. Ellen Levy and Ken Gross, both brilliant literary scholars, sent me running toward the water and the sky in all great directions, yet once I found these words, I kept returning to them. For each movement, I found the title at a different point of completion. Some were completely finished, some in the middle, and some started some musical possibilities for me. As titles go, these are not meant to provide anything that might be taken literally; a vague impression may, in the end, reveal more.

— Sean Shepherd

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Scoring

vln.vlc.pno.

World Premiere

4/30/2007
Weill Hall - Carnegie Hall, New York, NY
New York Youth Symphony

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Composer's Notes

I'm constantly interested in intersections between music and the other arts, but searching for true and meaningful connections between my work in music and what I find in other media always been difficult for me. I find myself (for example) enraptured by certain (well, maybe many) works of contemporary architecture, and have tried to find ways to bring my inspiration to a musical canvas. It's a notion certainly not without precedent—Dufay's motet Nuper rosarum flores (written in 1436 for the consecration of the Florence Cathedral) responds to the ratios of Brunelleschi's magnificent dome in way that highlights the simple elegance and ingenious construction of both works. But I find these truly organically informed connections to escape my grasp as a creator for now, especially in our post-modern world—how does one viably represent contemporary architectural concepts like Plasticism through music? I remain stuck on that one—but plan to continue my quest on the larger question.

I do find one element in what artists of differing ilk share has to do with the process itself. Regardless of medium, it seems that for the artist, the work must exist in a sort of haze until complete. One really can't know exactly how it will turn out, even with the best of planning and intention. An unfinished score is just as terrifying as a half-blank canvas to its creator. My mother is a photographer, and I have spent some time with her as she works. What impresses me most about a photographer's work is the time spent in the darkroom—the act of realizing the creation. It's tremendously physical work, requiring dexterity and finesse, and must also happen in strictly allotted amounts of time (not unlike a realization of a piece of music), but it all happens in near-complete darkness. One can't know what they've got until they are completely done. Aperture in Shift is for me a study in light and dark (an aperture being an opening through which light passes, and an essential element in any camera), my own chiaroscuro, encounter.

— Sean Shepherd

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Scoring

ob.cl.vln.vla.db.

World Premiere

4/19/2004
The Juilliard School, New York, NY
Juilliard School

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Composer's Notes

The first three of these Vinaigrettes were written in July of 2003, just after I had finished a string of serious (and I might say long-winded) pieces. Having played in a woodwind quintet for several years, I am all too familiar with not only the “standards”—from pieces by Reicha up to Harbison, but I sense that I have an understanding of the special strengths and weakness of the ensemble. In most cases I ignored both of these facts while writing this piece.

The resulting four short movements tend to address (or exploit) the most difficult aspects of playing in this particular group, intonation and unity of articulation. The first movement is basically a highly embellished unison throughout, and the crisp and pungent second movement is full of tricky unison articulations, among other things. The players can finally relax a little in the third movement, where, as throughout the piece, I explore (as well as I am able) my favorite thing about playing in and writing for this group—the five radically different sounds and personalities of the five radically different instruments involved. Honey Dijon, composed in May of 2005, pays tribute to Jean Francaix, composer of music that’s difficult to perform, yet never ceases to sound delightfully easy.

The titles are, of course, referring to the ever-trendy and ever more-popular salad dressings. Whatever connection between the music and dressings any listener would like to make is up to him or her. I won’t say anything more, but the one ingredient in all four is vinegar. I needed to write something light—or should I say “lite”.

— Sean Shepherd

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Scoring

bsn.vln.vln.vla.vlc

World Premiere

2/15/2004
Auer Hall, Bloomington, IN
Kim Walker, bassoon / New Century String Quartet

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Composer's Notes

Twilight was written for Kim Walker, and is cast in three movements, the last two of which occur without pause. When the opportunity to write for bassoon presented itself, I was thrilled and terrified at once. Since the bassoon is an instrument I know better than most, I felt especially responsible to write a piece highlighting what I felt was unique about the instrument—its tremendous range and color possibilities, natural clarity of articulation, and haunting lyrical capabilities - while trying to quell my natural tendencies toward making this a marathon for a performer. I chose string quartet (it being a rather homogenous sound, yet capable of incredible variation of color in its own right) specifically to contrast and highlight these perceived unique qualities. Consequently, I tended to treat the soloist and ensemble as two instruments, rather than five.

The titles of the movements are, of course, somewhat altered versions of the originals (scherzo, divertimento, etc.), and represent the music’s references to these formal idioms, but more importantly they reflect the skewed nature of the formal plan—they are merely hints toward what one should expect to hear. Musical material flows freely between each of the movements, and the final twilight occurs as the material from the opening is presented at its most transparent to close the piece. Twilight was premiered by Kim Walker and the New Century String Quartet in February 2004 as part of the Bloomington Arts Week recital series.

— Sean Shepherd

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Music Text

William Wordsworth

World Premiere

11/24/2013
Southwold Church, Southwold
BBC Singers / David Hill

Scoring

pno.

World Premiere

6/11/2006
Greenhouse House, New York, NY
Aaron Wunsch, piano

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Composer's Notes

While Sean has composed several works incorporating the piano, this is his first for piano solo. Each of the three preludes explores a different mood as well as a different approach to the instrument. The first is spacious and pensive, exploring the possibilities of sonority from the scarcely audible to the fullest fortissimo. A couple of brief outbursts punctuate a general feeling of timelessness, and the final outburst tells us a brief but important message, as if chiseled in stone, before receding back into nothingness. The second piece, to my ears, has echoes of some of Debussy's pricklier preludes. It is fleet and humorous, with occasional grotesque jabs, and it leads to a surprising quotation (as Debussy's Hommage à S. Pickwick Esq., P.P.M.P.C.). Although you definitely are familiar with it, you may not realize what it is until it is virtually over—which is the point of this charade. The third prelude is a delicate tapestry of sound. As if there are two separate pianos at work, a second, interloping idea—consisting of a massive, snail-paced single-note melody—works at cross purposes with the first. As in the first prelude, there is a moment of truth near the end, after which the previously heard material can never be resumed. It is both a chilling and poetic conclusion.

— Aaron Wunsch, dedicatee

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World Premiere

6/18/2014
Avery Fisher Hall, New York, NY
New York Philharmonic / Alan Gilbert

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Composer's Notes

Although it’s difficult to define, we recognize music as music; for most of us, whether it is for instruments, or uses unusual sounds, or best heard in an elevator, we know it when we hear it. But certain special categories have long remained – a song (or however you might call it: a chanson, a lied, a canzona) is something we can describe, and it’s not easy to imagine a song without a voice.

But it’s not a radical notion: composers have been experimenting with the idea for a good long while (Mendelssohn, for the piano, in Songs without Words; more recently Oliver Knussen’s Songs without Voices [1992] for 8 players). My earliest conceptions for this piece started from a similar vantage point, or to it more bluntly, from a composerly need: a mood to be lyrical. Songs is, in the end, conceived as an interlude (for a special and unusual program: nestled between Beethoven’s Second and Third Piano Concerti), a large musical palindrome that begins and ends in nearly the same place.

An early idea—taking on the old song forms and giving that music to instruments—gave way to imagining songs of my own. But rather than simply replace an imagined singer with real players, I chose to express my lyrical thoughts in a larger context, via the myriad ways that are natural to a great orchestra. Perhaps a glimmer of a sweet lullaby or of chant from centuries past (dutiful, constrained, surely noble, perhaps transcendent) will be apparent, however distorted, as refracted through my camera’s lens. I also began to imagine places where these songs might occur—a medieval fair, or a nursery of trees, or even in a cave that sings back, or a great meadow where all songs are distant.

Songs is warmly dedicated to Alan Gilbert – friend to singers, players and composers alike.

— Sean Shepherd

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Scoring

maximum instrumentation: 3.3.3.3-4.3.3.1-timp-perc(4)-strings.

World Premiere

7/11/2013
Performing Arts Center - SUNY Purchase College, Purchase, NY
National Youth Orchestra of the USA / Valery Gergiev

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Composer's Notes

In anticipation of my new piece for the National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America in its inaugural season and tour with the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, my thoughts naturally drifted eastwards. In writing a piece to precede two pillars of the Russian repertoire, and to be performed also in cities in Russia, I immediately thought of so much music that I adore in the great tradition of the Russian overture – from those of Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila and Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet through those of Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, and many of the 20th century, including Shostakovich’s Festive Overture. I also find myself drawn to a specifically Russian sense of magic – or magiya – in the stories, folklore and literature (old and new) of the country, a kind that often gets no explanation or justification; a ‘normal’, everyday magic. When these tales find their way to the stage (as, for example, in Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel and Stravinsky’s Petrushka, some of most colorful and most exotic – and some of my favorite – music of the age is the result.

Magiya is a celebration of a wonderful new orchestra and an exciting tour, and is a humble nod to a brilliant musical tradition.

— Sean Shepherd

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Scoring

4(III=afl, IV=picc).3.corA.3(III=Ebcl).bcl.3.dbn-6.4(IV=Bb soprano tpt).3.1-timp.perc(4)-harp-kbd(=pft, cel)-strings.

World Premiere

4/18/2013
Severance Hall, Cleveland, OH
Cleveland Orchestra / Franz Welser-Möst

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Composer's Notes

Tuolumne (“two ALL um knee” or, as some California locals say it, “two ALL ‘o me”), from the Native American language of Miwok, is a word of unclear meaning, but is often thought to describe the small group of indigenous people who lived in what is now known as Yosemite National Park. A number of places in the area have taken the appellation on, but for those who know the region, the mighty Tuolumne Meadows spring first to mind. One of the principal natural features of Yosemite, this large subalpine meadow (remember the one Bambi got so excited about? I’ve long thought it could be the very same) is further east of the well-travelled and better-known Yosemite Valley – and much higher at nearly 9,000 feet, near the “top of the park” and Tioga Pass (one of the few roads that crosses the Sierra Nevada for hundreds of miles). One could fairly call this place (not far from my family home a few hours north) my favorite part of the world, and they wouldn’t be overstating it.

It was also a favorite of the American photographer Ansel Adams (1902–84), whose work has occupied my imagination from my first exposure to his landscapes as a child, in books my mother had from her studies in photography. In 1938, Adams took a pack trip into the high wilds of Yosemite with the painter Georgia O’Keeffe, and patrons and friends David McAlpin and Godfrey and Helen Rockefeller, and made 3 copies of an album of photographs intended as a memento. I chose two images from that album, Plate 4 – Untitled (Water over Rock) and Plate 22 – Merced Lake Country, both of which were taken very near the Tuolumne Meadows, and paired them with one of his most iconic images, a view of the eastern Sierra Nevada not far away. The 25-minute piece I wrote is a kind of response to the set of three black-and-white photographs (with each of the three movements corresponding to one image), a meditation on and celebration of both the place and the images. Since good ideas are rarely new ideas (let’s leave bad ideas out of it for now, although I believe the same goes for those), it occurs that one could think of Tuolumne as being somewhere in the neighborhood of Ma Vlast, Smetana’s ode to his homeland, and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (but with plenty of caveats—read on), at least in terms of scope. Each photo is described below:

Untitled (Water over Rock): Upon first glance, the spacing of the fanned-out rivulets of water which are cast over a rock in a mountain creek seems nearly perfect, as if each finespun stream had been rationally measured. The scale is difficult to discern. The rock could be inches or feet across, and the elegant shape could even resemble a leaf over which the water flows in all directions, splashing brightly onto the hard creekbed and into the deep blackness of the pool below.

Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine, California, 1944: The brutal terrain of the Eastern Sierra escarpment and Mount Whitney (the highest point in the contiguous US) is in high contrast in this dawn shot. The snow-covered shards of rock appear both as sharp as teeth and as delicate as tissue paper, with the blinding white snow set in relief by the deep shadows of the range’s dramatic chutes and canyons. A few mists and thin clouds hover. A lower, gentler foothill in the middle ground just in front of the large mountains has not yet been exposed to the dawn light and lies dark and dormant. A patch of sun illuminates a meadow in the foreground of the image, where a single horse, made tiny in the grand scale of the view, grazes among a band of leaf-naked cottonwoods.

Merced Lake Country: The main object, a weather-battered pine tree, whose twisting trunk and figure seem to give the image a vertical thrust, occupies the foreground. Across a canyon the mountains behind consist of smooth, rounded granite features pocked by bands of hardy trees and other flora, a familiar sight in the high Sierra. Suggesting both a dancer’s grace and a desperate struggle against the punishing elements, the tree, with branches bare on one side, seems even to evoke a kind of humanity to me: intrepid, tragic, and utterly mysterious.

These photos move me, both as representational objects and abstract images. The rocks, trees, clouds and mountains; the precise, highly controlled play of light and dark. What we are shown, and how it is presented. Although the place is significant—and place has often held a special significance for me (in pieces like Wanderlust, premiered by the Cleveland Orchestra in 2009)—the three movements of Tuolumne are, in my view, best understood as emotional responses to these works of art. I intended neither to illuminate nor describe the photos in a deliberately programmatic or pictorial sense – not least due to the difficult translation from a spatial and visual medium to a temporal and aural one. Nor did I make an attempt at a companion set. The story of the music, with its twists and turns, peaks and valleys, and shifts of mood and character, may or may not mirror one’s experience of the images. That was by design from the very beginning. Tuolumne is built to stand on its own, but without these photos and without the work of Ansel Adams, it would not exist.

Musicians who know his work are quick to point out with pride that Adams trained seriously as a pianist while growing up in San Francisco, and was well into his twenties before he decided to pursue photography, then (in around 1930) still a relatively new medium, exclusively. It’s simple to imagine how he might have applied the rigors of his musical education to his processes and painstaking perfectionism with the camera and in the darkroom. Aides have described their surprise upon finding not one, but many negatives for his iconic shots. His rendering techniques, focused as they were, were yet still in service of expression, a process he called “visualization”: “As with all art, the photograph is not the duplication of visual reality. … The visualization of a photograph involves the intuitive search for meaning, shape, form, texture and the projection of the image-format on the subject,” he said in his autobiography. “The creative artist is constantly roving the worlds without, and creating new worlds within.”

In his work, a broad boldness flows effortlessly with his crisp austerity of tone in a way that strikes me as, well, distinctly American. As a young artist who often finds himself confounded by questions of national identity in my own work, I’ve taken comfort in the work of those, like Adams and Charles Ives, who seem to find their answers close to home. Whether they are the rocks and clouds of California, or the town squares and brass bands of New England, their answers are equally American (as answers to such a question are a simple “yes or “no”) and, for me, equally correct. I’m often reminded that when the New York patron Alice Tully commissioned French composer Olivier Messiaen for a new work to celebrate the American bicentennial in the early 1970s, he looked not to Philadelphia or Valley Forge (or New York for that matter), but to the rocks and wildlife of southern Utah and wrote Des Canyons aux Étoiles, one of his seminal works. He found the America he most wanted to describe, a license that (one who wrestles with such questions must often remind themselves) all artists are freely afforded.

The three movements of Tuolumne are ordered in a basic slow-fast-slow design, and much of the music is virtuosic, owing to the capacities of the magnificent ensemble for which it was written,, which I have been privileged to know more intimately as Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellow. Many of the musicians are deployed as soloists, starting with flute in the opening bars and the horn soon after. I wrote for a large orchestra partially to explore the coloristic possibilities presented both among and within sections. To one flute, three are soon added in the opening moments, for example, and some 20 minutes later, the solo cello meanders and floats ever higher while the rest of the strings flutter quietly in accompaniment. While there are many powerful tutti moments in between, the piece starts and ends softly, intimate by design in my largest, most personal piece to date. Tuolumne is dedicated to Franz Welser-Möst, and to the members of The Cleveland Orchestra.

— Sean Shepherd

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Scoring

picc.2.2.corA.2.bcl.2.dbn-4.3.2.btrbn.1-timp.perc(3):egg shaker(s)/maracas(s)/vibraslap/3 tgl(s,m,l)/antique cym/tpl.bl/ratchet/sus.cym/slapstick/crash cym; egg shaker(s)/cast/cabasa/tamb/tam-t/claves/cowbell/anvil/SD/slide whistle/sus.cym; egg shaker(s)/maracas(l)/2 bongos/sus.cym/2 tgl(s,l)/wdbl/brake dr/BD/sleighbells/metal bowl-harp-pft(cel)-strings.

World Premiere

5/31/2012
Kennedy Center Concert Hall, Washington, DC
National Symphony Orchestra, Washington / Christoph Eschenbach

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Composer's Notes

I believe the Shakespeare truism goes that brevity is the soul of wit. I'm not completely sure that it isn't the other way around. There is something deeply satisfying about hearing a piece that doesn't beat around the bush; it's one of the reasons why it's easy to love a good concert overture. Whether it's Beethoven's Egmont or Dvorak's Carnival, or delightfully clipped ruminations on fireworks by Stravinsky (and later Knussen), or the modern marvels of transport in works like Honegger's Pacific 231 and John Adams' Short Ride in a Fast Machine, I love sitting down for a concert and being promptly and efficiently dazzled. These classic works take their task, the fêtes en miniature, deadly seriously, and don't mince their notes while charming us, yes, to bits.

Imagine my surprise: it's a tough job, saying a lot by saying a little. With no time to explain oneself, the musical distillation process is best kept to the sketches. I went about it by looking at the words I'd chosen for the title (yes, those Netherworldly blue blazes, and part of one of my favorite examples of that very important linguistic sub-category: the ever-useful exasperation idiom) and re-interpreting them as I liked, with hellish abandon. The piece's eight minutes unfold variously as orchestra intrada, with different sections introduced in sequence, starting with the low strings, percussion and clarinets (after marking, point by point, a new trail by peeling back bark on a tree, revealing the torchlike blaze), noble fanfare (after the German blasen, to blow), and wild, distracted, self-satisfied romp (what the …, indeed.).

Pondering blue, my thoughts tended toward the subtle, and the sensual. Perhaps a cool breeze or a visual cue—the gentle bobbing of boats of different sizes, all tethered to the same dock somewhere on the Mediterranean Sea—might make itself apparent. While considering the musical blue, I gravitated, among many other places, toward Jazz: toward blue notes, toward luscious complex harmonies. Unlike many concert composers of the 20th and 21st centuries and several close friends, I'm not a Jazz aficionado in any deep sense. But my admiration grows for the musical ethos of someone like pianist Bill Evans, of doing something for the hedonistic pleasure of hearing it, of lingering (or even wallowing) in great washes of cool blue sounds. I'd be surprised to hear someone point out a jazzy moment in this piece; any presence of homage is intended as a spiritual, not a literal, one.

Blue Blazes was commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington, DC, Christoph Eschenbach, Music Director, through a grant from the John and June Hechinger Commissioning Fund for New Orchestral Works. I dedicate it to Maestro Eschenbach and the dedicated musicians and staff of the NSO with gratitude.

— Sean Shepherd

Reproduction Rights:
This program note may be reproduced free of charge in concert programs with a credit to the composer.

Scoring

2.picc.2.corA.2.bcl.2-4.3.2.btrbn.1-timp.perc(3):marimba/glsp/2 tgl(L,M,H)/crash cym (L)-sus.cym(S, L)/vib/crot/tam-t/vibraslap/guiro/slapstick/tpl.bl-BD/tpl bowl/t.bells/sus.cym/wdbl/brake dr/xyl/antique cym-harp-pft-strings.

World Premiere

10/2/2011
Pioneer Center for the Performing Arts, Reno, NV
Reno Philharmonic / Laura Jackson

Scoring

2.2.2.2-4.3.3.1-perc(2):vib/syl/sleighbells/SD/susp.cym(L)/ratchet/temple blocks; glsp/tgl(s,m,l)/antique cym/BD/castanets/tamb/vibraslap/tubular bells-timp-harp-strings.

World Premiere

3/6/2011
Pioneer Center for the Arts, Reno, NV
Reno Philharmonic / Laura Jackson

Scoring

3.3.3.3-4.3.3.1-perc(3):glsp/xyl/temple blocks/BD/2bongos/susp.cym/cowbellslapsh cym/slapstick/wdbl; vib/tam-t/cabasa/ratchet/susp.cym/sleighbells/vibraslap/antique cym/unpitched steel plate/iron pipe; crot/tubular bells/tgl(s,m,l)/claves/tamb/susp.cym/brake drum/SD/anvil-timp-pft-harp-strings.

World Premiere

5/23/2009
Severance Hall, Cleveland, OH
Cleveland Orchestra / Oliver Knussen

Press Quotes

"Harmonically [Wanderlust] is often harsh and dissonant, but Shepherd's music shows real compositional skill with orchestral tone colors, creating evocative, if episodic, portraits of the landscapes."
— David Fleshler, Miami Herald

"Shepherd uses a profuse orchestral palette well."
— Richard Morrison, The Times (UK)

"[Wanderlust] brought the most freshness and inhibition of the program."
— Sebastian Spreng, El Nuevo Herald

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Composer's Notes

In recent years, I’ve been a well-treated vagabond, and relished every minute of it.  Time spent—in places like Berlin, a picture-perfect fishing village on the French Mediterranean Coast; London and the Eastern Shores of Britain; Los Angeles and a small town in upstate New York overlooking a waterfall—has drawn forth in me the kinds of realizations that extended travel often does, namely: a) people and places are all different, and b) people and places are all the same.  I am also distinctly aware of what this phase in life in which I find myself bears: a palpable sense of rootless-ness, which contradicts and battles the opposite inclination: a desire to sink roots.

The kinds of journeys Wanderlust (a wonderful concept-word generally known as “love of travel”) concerns itself with occur not just geographically, but through time.  Each movement reflects a broad span.  Prevailing Winds evokes my thoughts on a more distant past: the cool expansive windy desert of Northern Nevada (my home until age 18) drenched in sun and sagebrush, my ever-so-rooted family, my innocence in the wide world.  Distant memories and impressions are fragmented and piled up upon themselves and continue to swirl around the orchestra in various guises, and often reappear.  In essence, I sought to relay many thoughts, memories, visions and emotions (all distant, many vague) into an single abstract object, and what resulted is a kind of musical kaleidoscope: ever changing and circling, but only around itself.

In contrast, Seagulls on High reflects my thoughts on a specific time and place, one much closer the to the present.  The first version of this music had a quick incubation in Aldeburgh, the coastal town in Suffolk, England where Benjamin Britten made his home. The title refers most directly to the enormous resident birds that kept me company with a truly glorious cacophony in the early morning hours of the summer sunrise outside my cottage on Aldeburgh High Street.  The music, however, makes it roots known elsewhere. In the cold beaches and dark, roiling waves; the reeds and lowlands and coastal plains under grey, unsettled skies I came to understand Britten’s special, conflicted penchant for melancholy, and many the saddest tunes from Peter Grimes and the Serenade rolled through my head as I wrote in a small room in the Snape Maltings, the concert hall he built.  Seagulls on High was never intended as direct homage or a kind of compositional tourism, but in the end, a nod to a hero while staying in his place of choice was inevitable.

Bilbao is somehow the simplest and most obtuse movement, both referentially and musically.  The word alone conjures for so many Frank Gehry’s spectacular, terribly intricate, and downright funky designs for the Guggenhiem Museum he built in the 1990s, and the urban renewal brought about by its auspicious opening in this downtrodden port city in Northern Spain.  Since I have never been to Bilbao, this music is somehow about the future, of seeing this building that has captured my imagination since I was 15 years old, of visiting a place that was saved by art.  But, in concerning the prospect of a return to the home of my Basque ancestry, this music is also somehow about the notion of a past so deep, it may be lost already.  That both the future and the distant, ancestral past have an existence based only in reflection, I knew the piece would end with a question mark.  Perhaps appropriately, the path the music took in getting there is still a genuine mystery to me.

Wanderlust is dedicated to Sonya and Oliver Knussen in admiration and friendship, and to Syd Hodkinson in gratitude.

— Sean Shepherd

Reproduction Rights:
This program note may be reproduced free of charge in concert programs with a credit to the composer.

Scoring

1(=picc).2(II=corA).2(I=Ebcl,II=bcl).2-2.1.1.0-perc(2):I=vib/anvil/bell tree/brake drs/claves/iron pipe/splash.cym/susp.cym/3tgl(sm,med,lo)/tamb/wdbl; II=glsp/amlglocken/antique cyms/BD/cabasa/crot/Japanese temple bowl/maracas/ratchet/slapstock/sleigh bells/spring coil/tam-t/t.bells/vibraslap-harp-kbd-2vln.2vla.2vlc.db.

World Premiere

1/10/2012
Cité de la musique, Paris
Ensemble intercontemporain / Susanna Mälkki

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Composer's Notes

On planes and trains, I much prefer the window seat. When I'm moving fast, I like to be aware of it, and I usually prefer gazing out the window to reading a newspaper. In changing focus from the blades of grass or clouds just outside the window to the ranges and oceans in the furthest, haziest horizon, one can let their eyes drift from point to point, and to all points in between, and begin to see a world at different speeds, even though it is only oneself doing the moving. Rapid travel also makes me aware of everything I cannot be seeing (and to a lesser extent, everything that cannot see me). Cities often seem oddly empty from the air, and on the ground, high-speed means missing the pace and action of daily life altogether. One is simply moving too quickly to take it in.

The music in Blur moves very fast much of the time. Close to the surface, things fly by. Layers emerge, with objects appearing, moving and evolving at differing intervals and rates of change. The music of greatest intensity comes in a broad swath near the middle of the piece—it is the invisible, solid pit that makes an otherwise delicate peach (or tangy avocado) much more difficult to slice through. Blur is meant as a kind of romp: ebullient, frenetic, insistent and joyful. I dedicate it to Magnus Lindberg as a humble homage, with gratitude.

Blur was commissioned by the Ensemble Intercontemporain and premiered in Paris at the Cité de la musique on January 10, 2012, with Susanna Mälkki, conducting.

— Sean Shepherd

Reproduction Rights:
This program note may be reproduced free of charge in concert programs with a credit to the composer.

Scoring

1.1.1.1-1.1.1.0-perc(2):vib/glsp/bongos/susp.cym/BD/wdbl/tgl(s)/anvil/cowbell/slapstick; tubular bells/tam-t/tgl(s,m,l)/tamb/susp.cym/crot/xyl/TD/ratchet/brake drum/sleighbells/vibraslap-pft-harp-2.1.1.1.

World Premiere

4/16/2010
Symphony Space, New York, NY
New York Philharmonic New Music Ensemble / Alan Gilbert

Press Quotes

"There were plenty of striking moments within the detailed, busy work, with its kaleidoscopic use of orchestral color. "
— Vivien Schweitzer, New York Times

"Shepherd’s music has a wonderful way of making the orchestra shimmer."
— Christian Carey, Sequenza21

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Composer's Notes

These Particular Circumstances takes itself all too literally.   Even if the music doesn’t always wear its heart on its sleeve, its titles keep few secrets (Spectators, behold--it spins!  It teeters!).  The piece, in seven episodes, is a collection of contrasts: different characters and kinds of music are stitched together in time, without pause.  Although each of the individual parts may well stand on their own, they surely don’t; my specific intention sways toward putting each episode to use in service of the whole work, not unlike ingredients in a sauce.  It's a chicken-and-egg scenario for me to remember which came first: did the name Grinding—the title of the fourth episode—describe the music I had written, or did I decide to write music that must grind?  While I worked hard to form each episode around its own musical concerns and personality quirks, I bent and warped each as I saw fit toward my main objective: telling one twenty-minute tale, not seven short anecdotes. I viewed the large shape of the work as simply as I could: a waveform; or: up-down-up.

These Particular Circumstances was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for the inaugural season of CONTACT!, the New Music Series, and premiered, with Alan Gilbert conducting, on April 16th and 17th, 2010.  I dedicate it to my longtime teacher and mentor Steven Stucky, with deepest admiration and appreciation.

— Sean Shepherd

Reproduction Rights:
This program note may be reproduced free of charge in concert programs with a credit to the composer.

Scoring

1.1.1.1-1.1.1.0-perc-pft-harp-strings:(1.1.1.1.1)

Scoring

fl(=picc).cl.perc:crot/tgl/glsp/vib/brake dr/cowbell/wdbl/susp.cym/temple blocks/vibraslap/tamb.pft.vln.vlc.

World Premiere

2/11/2006
Barnes Hall - Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
Ensemble X / Cynthia Johnston-Turner

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Composer's Notes

This piece is, for me, about gratitude. Although it's not easy for me to say for what, specifically, I feel grateful, or why I needed to create an expression of it. Beyond the obvious—an opportunity to write for a group I know and whose membership I admire—my impressions as relayed toward this piece were more general. In short, I feel that I have much to be thankful for, and I am ever surprised as the positive elements in my life continue to accumulate in ways I can't always understand. As I see it, gratitude doesn't have to be sentimental or saccharine, or even an outward expression. And much music has been borne of angst, pain and fear. But, as we find our place in the world, one can't help but admire a beautiful random framework—events, people, places —that never fails to aid us in our journey but can never be controlled nor predicted. When I was writing the piece I confided to friends and fellow composers that it might be derisively called "pretty", and that I was worried about it. But ultimately for me, this music wasn't about those worries. As I wrote, it was a feeling I couldn't seem to shake, and that gave me something to say.

Lumens was commissioned by Ensemble X and premiered on February 11, 2006.

— Sean Shepherd

Reproduction Rights:
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Music Text

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819)

World Premiere

6/30/2005
Tanglewood Music Center, Lenox, MA
New Fromm Players

Scoring

1.1.1.0-1.1.1.0-pft-strings(1.0.1.1.0)

World Premiere

10/22/2004
Paul Hall - The Juilliard School, New York, NY
Members of the New Juilliard and Manson Ensembles / Simon Bainbridge

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Composer's Notes

In the fall of 2003, I was approached about a joint project between Juilliard and the Royal Academy of Music in London. An ensemble consisting of members from both schools would present concerts in New York and London in October 2004, and three composers selected from each school would compose a commissioned work and tour with the group. Joel Sachs chose a host piece to create a theme for the project. The piece would be performed on the concerts, followed by the works of the six chosen composers, who would respond to it in any way they felt.

The collection of 5 short pieces, or Metamorphoses, I wrote in response to Anton Webern’s Concerto for nine instruments, Op. 24, reflects my attempt to integrate those qualities I admire most about his writing into a piece I could call my own. His brilliant formal and textural economy, graceful sense of both gesture and color, and his ability to convey poignant musical thought in a brief and concise way were things I had long admired, and thus became the issues I grappled with in these miniatures.

What makes them unrelated to the Webern is what also gave them their title. Webern’s three movements each evoke a distinct atmosphere or character, and in large part due to his musical obsessiveness with clarity, the character of each does not change or mutate, even though his pitches may change. In each of my pieces, I sought to create an atmosphere, then spend the rest of the movement altering it or moving away completely while still keeping the same essential musical elements—a cell or gesture, sometimes even the same pitches. So, by using my senses (such as those I admire in Webern), I tried to keep each movement in a constant of metamorphosis, the rate and mode of which occur in varying degrees from piece to piece.

I dedicate these Metamorphoses to my teacher and mentor Robert Beaser with gratitude. Many thanks also to Professors Joel Sachs and Simon Bainbridge for posing a difficult musical question, for which any number of answers would be correct.

— Sean Shepherd

Reproduction Rights:
This program note may be reproduced free of charge in concert programs with a credit to the composer.

Scoring

fl.cl.perc.pft.vln.vlc.

World Premiere

11/17/2003
Paul Hall - The Juilliard School, New York, NY
Brenda Patterson, soprano / Juilliard School / Sean Shepherd

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Composer's Notes

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) composed the Neue Gedichte or New Poems in two volumes while living in Paris during his most prolific period of writing, the years just after his employment by Auguste Rodin as a secretary. In both volumes, known as breakthrough poetry and some of his earliest mature work, he explores the materiality of objects in the world in a more active and deliberate tone than that of earlier works like The Book of Hours.

The idea for a Rilke Cycle came about when I was in Switzerland in the summer of 2002, when all of Europe was experiencing some chaotic weather (one may remember headlines of devastating flooding in Italy and Eastern Europe). I chose to end my long trip by heading to the mountain village of Zermatt for a few days, and spent them inside while an August blizzard dumped a foot of snow outside my hostel door. There was a somewhat makeshift little lending library in the lounge of this particular lodge, most of which was in German. Here I found a two-language version of the Duineser Elegien (1923), a late work for Rilke. (He started it in 1910, but difficulties in completing it led to a 12 year hiatus from writing.) The book was in bad shape, but it was a trusted companion for the next two days. Upon return to the US, I dug up every book of his that I could find, and eventually settled on poems from the first part of the Neue Gedichte.

Each of the four poems evokes an instant as well as an object—the details in a Notre Dame cathedral column, the interaction of a bird and a tree branch, the marred innocence of those both old and young. Of the New Poems, I found these to be the most haunting and intimate, and chose to set them together. I found that setting the poems in the original German proved to be appropriate for what I wanted to express. Many thanks go to Dr. Edward Snow of Rice University, author of the English translations that appear in the program, for all of his help.

New Poems – 1907 was premiered November 17th, 2003, in Paul Hall at the Juilliard School. The composer conducted, with mezzo-soprano Brenda Patterson and Juilliard instrumentalists performing.

— Sean Shepherd

Reproduction Rights:
This program note may be reproduced free of charge in concert programs with a credit to the composer.