INTERNAL DATA CENTER v2.1 (MySQL)
Home
Upload
CRUDs
Writers
Titles
Title Instruments
Title Categories
Title Sub-Categories
Title Media
Series
Products
Organizations
Performances
Back to WordPress
Home
Titles
B2A5A7B2-D3AC-4EDB-B59A-5060C6D49E31
Update
Update Title: B2A5A7B2-D3AC-4EDB-B59A-5060C6D49E31
ID
Titlecode
Title Name
Marketing Copy
Wulfstan at the Millennium is sort of a dreamlike musicological fiction: music composed as if Leonin, Perotin, Philippe de Vitry, Machaut, and a host of anonymous medieval English and Cypriot composers had been the direct antecedents of late 20th century music.
Instrumentation
Bass Flute(d Flute), English Horn, Bass Clarinet, Horn, Marimba(d Gong, Tom-Tom), Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello, Double Bass
Commission
Commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University for Parnassus
Dedication
Program Notes
Many years ago when I was still a practicing church musician, I dreamt that I had composed a set of propers and responsories for some important but little-known feast day -- dozens of pieces of differing lengths and characters, scored for a variety of combinations. I was deeply disappointed when I awoke to discover that my little volume was but a fantasy, that I hadn't had the foresight to page through it in my dream in order to bring some of it back with me. In a sense, this work is that set of pieces: a collection of stylistically diverse movements evocative in a quite abstract way of a liturgy. It is also something of a work of musicological fiction: music composed as if Leonin, Perotin, Philippe de Vitry, Machaut, and a host of anonymous medieval English and Cypriot composers had been the direct antecedents of late 20th century music -- as if the Renaissance, Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods had never happened. In addition to mirroring the general plan of a musical liturgy, this work also reflects its emotional and dramatic character. The more outward and public movements are the first five. These are then followed by the central, more inward and reflective movements, whose mood is broken abruptly at the end by the vigorous and insistent toccata of the recessional. But who, then, was Wulfstan? He was an Anglo-Saxon cleric and scholar at the cathedral of Winchester 1000 years ago, and the first composer of polyphonic music whose name has come down to us. His work survives in the Winchester Troper, the style of which is echoed from time to time not just in this work but in other pieces of mine as well. Wulfstan also represents, at least for me, the transitory nature of what we do, since, unwittingly, he lived at the height and, at the same time, the final flowering of Old English culture, soon to be changed forever by the upheaval of the Norman Conquest.
Title Brand
Year Composed
Copyright Number
Copyright Year
Duration
Ensemble Size
Date Created
Date Updated
Inhouse Note
5 yr term agreement.
Bsc Code
Text Author
Premier Performance Memo
Recording Credits
Recorded by Lisa Stidham, Soprano with Xtet/ Donald Crockett, New World Records (2003)
Review
"...quite a piece: absorbing and surprising from first to last..." --Richard Buell, The Boston Globe<BR><BR> "...a masterful and curious piece, spinning off the inspiration of Wulfstan, a polyphony pioneer around the first millennium..." <BR>--Josef Woodard, Los Angeles Times
Awards
Title Category
Title Movements
Title Grade
Set Series ID
Title Instrument Category Text
Title Sub Category Text
Title Sub Category
Title Instrument Header
Title Grade Text
Clean Url
Save