July 2025 News
Premiere of Requiem for Animals with the Brattleboro Concert Choir in Marlboro, VT
In May, my Requiem for Animals for Chorus and String Orchestra was premiered in beautiful performances by the Brattleboro Concert Choir!
I’ve been so pleased with the positive responses and reflections I’ve received from singers and audience members—it’s so gratifying to know that this requiem has impacted people in such a deep way, and I hope it continues to do so through this recording and (hopefully) more performances. Here are just a few things people have said about the work:
"I have successively described it as gut‐wrenching, bold, beautiful, and brilliant. In the end, I find it a towering composition...Musically, it is in a class all its own—fresh and new and timeless, undefinable. In its message, it is a work of purity, which invites us to assume responsibility for our treatment of animals, to acknowledge the implications of our own unconscious contributions to the suffering of others and the degradation of the planet, and ultimately, what it means to love our neighbors as ourselves. Requiem for Animals is for us human animals, too.” - A Choral singer
"Simply put, we were blown away by 'Requiem for Animals' at its World premiere performed by the Brattleboro Concert Choir last Saturday evening. Indeed, it was the most powerful and inciteful musical event we have ever experienced! Thank you for all your efforts in composing such a masterpiece." - Audience member
“There are more than a few sections that absolutely reduce me to tears. The power of what the composer writes about in words, layered over some of the most devastatingly beautiful music, is psychologically searing…I feel as though singing Requiem for Animals masterfully will both break our hearts and put them back together again.” -A Choral singer
Here is a 5-minute “highlights” video of excerpts from the requiem:
And here is the complete 50-minute recording:
I'm thrilled that my collaboration with the world-famous violin virtuoso Midori is continuing! I made another arrangement for her, this one for violin and ensemble of the Sicilienne by Maria-Theresia von Paradis especially for Midori to play with an ensemble of students with learning disabilities, which they performed together in May at a festival in Tokyo, Japan. Last month, Midori and three young musicians performed my string quartet arrangements of Rimsky-Korsakov's Dance of the Tumblers and Beethoven's Minuet in G again on tour, this time about a dozen times around Japan. And Midori has asked me to do even more arrangements for her, so stay tuned!
In May, my new wind ensemble arrangement of my Three Love Songs was premiered by the University of Massachusetts Symphony Band directed by my friend Lindsay Bronnenkant. These songs are dedicated to my wife, Diane (with whom I just celebrated our 13-year anniversary):
I'm thrilled to share that for the next two seasons I will be serving as Composer-in-Residence with Te Deum (Matthew Shepard, director), a fantastic professional chamber choir in Kansas City that sings sacred music. This will be my first time being composer-in-residence with an ensemble, and I look forward to writing several new works for them in these two years, plus we are hoping to do complete the residency with recording project of my sacred choral works as well.
In April, my Lamentation for String Orchestra was performed in Houston, TX by the amazing professional chamber orchestra ROCO, conducted by Alistair Willis, at Rice University (my father's alma mater). The performance was stunning and I got to watch the livestream of the performance from home.
In March, I found out that my In this short Life for SATB Choir was awarded 1st Prize in the Institute for Choral Creativity Composition Contest out of 238 anonymous entries! Vox Venti, directed by Ed Fraizer Davis, then performed the work in April in Chicago, and it will also be performed this fall by the William Baker Festival Singers in Kansas City!
Also in May, I heard the great guitarist and composer Aaron Larget-Caplan premiere All Through the Night, which I wrote for his "New Lullaby Project" and for which my wife Diane composed the melody, in Southbridge, MA. She came up with the melody when we were reading a book of lullabies and nursery rhymes to Theron but neither of us knew the tune (which is the Welsh tune Ar Hyd Y Nos) so she made a nice one up on the spot and I later made this guitar setting. Aaron performed it earlier this month in Maine and in Massachusetts.
In the leadup to the premiere of Requiem for Animals, I was invited to be a guest on "Here We Are", Brattleboro Community TV's talk show. I had a great time with host Wendy O'Connell discussing not only the requiem, but my musical upbringing, my philosophy of composition and the power of music, and many other things.
Looking ahead to the fall, the Vermont Youth Orchestra, directed by Mark Alpizar, will be performing part of my Appalachian Trail Symphony: New England on October 19 in Burlington, VT. I'm excited to get to collaborate with these students on the first performance of this symphony since 2018!