THOUGHTS ON COMPOSING

The passion and focus of my professional life is choral music. I have now been a choral conductor for over three decades. I have found choral conducting to be highly challenging and satisfying. Yet, perhaps the most fulfilling and important aspect of my professional career has been musical composition, specifically composition for choral ensembles. Composing for choirs has given me the opportunity to have a national voice in my field and has provided me with many rewarding experiences interacting with singers and conductors around the country. This has been a somewhat surprising and pleasing development for which I am most grateful.

A result of my music being widely performed around the country is that I regularly receive commissions to compose for various ensembles. These commissions have come from foundations, colleges and universities, high schools, community choruses, and churches including the Anne Morrow and Charles A. Lindbergh Foundation, The Arkansas Chamber Singers, The San Francisco Choral Festival, the Illinois Music Educators Association, Texas Lutheran University, The Alaska Chamber Singers, and New Mexico State University among many others.

Shortly after joining the faculty at Minnesota State University, Mankato, I developed a strong desire to compose quality choral music, setting significant, meaningful, and imaginative texts of great poets. I began working on this in the early 1990s. These works began appearing in print in 1997. A most important opportunity occurred for me in 1996. I was commissioned to compose a piece for the Minnesota All-State choir. I chose to set Henry Heveringham’s “If Music Be the Food of Love” made famous by Shakespeare’s misquote of the text in the opening lines of “The Twelfth Night.” The piece was a recognized success and was published the following year. I have been delighted and surprised by the subsequent success of this piece. It has been one of the largest selling choral publications in the last fifteen years and has been performed by professional ensembles, colleges and universities, community choruses, and high school choirs throughout the country and around the world. This experience opened many doors for me as a composer. I found that publishers were now eager to publish my music and that performances of my music increased dramatically across the country. I still regularly receive e-mails from conductors and singers throughout the country telling me about their experience with this piece. It has been among the most gratifying experiences of my career.

I received my most meaningful commission in 1997. Timothy Sawyer, Director of Choirs at Northwestern College in St. Paul, had an amazing vision. While on a European concert tour in 1995 as a professional singer, he visited the ruins of the Frauenkirche in Dresden, Germany. Formerly the largest stone dome in all of Europe, the church was bombed in March 1945 by the Allies near the end of World War II. Over 135,000 innocent refugees were killed in that bombing. The Germans left the ruins in place, determined to rebuild the church one day. They had just begun to rebuild the church when Mr. Sawyer visited Dresden. The rebuilding was an important symbol of peace and reconciliation.

Mr. Sawyer was eager to return to Dresden with his college choir with a musical gift to the city in honor of the rebuilding of the church. I am honored that he came to me with the commission for this project. He chose several symbolic texts from the Book of Isaiah as well as other representational texts for me to set. The piece is filled with imagery, from the dissonance of terror to an ancient hymn of reconciliation. My wife and I were able to accompany the choir on their trip to Dresden for the premiere in 1998. The audience included many people who were present in Dresden during the horrific bombing in 1945. Speaking with them following the concert was one of the most remarkable experiences of my life. I never dreamed that composing music would allow me to have such amazing connections with people whom I otherwise would never have met.

Another significant commission came in 1997 from the Anne Morrow and Charles Lindbergh Foundation. The foundation wanted a composition in honor of Charles Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight in 1927. I included a poem from Lindbergh’s daughter, Reeve, a recognized poet, that was published in “Life” magazine as well as a statement from Charles Lindbergh published in “Life” following the initial moon landing in 1969. The piece was premiered at a Lindbergh foundation celebration in 1997.

In the late 1990s I fulfilled commissions for several colleges and for the New York All-State choir. These projects were all very rewarding. One of the greatest surprises of my career has been the personal connections I have been able to make with people around the country as a result of my music. As E-mail developed in the 1990s, it made these kinds of connections more spontaneous and more common. Touching people’s lives with music that I have written has been a most rewarding experience.

I was fortunate to take a sabbatical in 2002. I accepted several commissions, both locally and nationally, and departed for St. Simon’s Island off the coast of Georgia to write. This was an amazing period of time when I could focus solely on composing. There I composed a setting of “Minneopa” for chorus and orchestra based on a poem by MSU poet Richard Robbins. It was premiered by the Mankato Symphony in 2003. I also set “Stars I Shall Find” based on a poem by Sarah Teasdale. This commission resulted from a nation-wide commissioning search undertaken by the Illinois Music Educators Association. I conducted the premiere in Chicago in 2003. I also composed “To Musique” based on a poem by Robert Herrick, “Psalm 42” for the Coral Gables (FL) Methodist Church as a response to 9/11, and “Ubi caritas.” All of these works were also premiered the following year.

Since 2002, I have received commissions from numerous institutions that have included residencies with commissioning ensembles. These have included The Arkansas Chamber Singers, the Alaska Chamber Singers, and The University of New Mexico. These experiences have been very meaningful. Working with singers and seeing fist-hand how they respond to my music is very inspirational to me as a composer.

The most significant residence experience for me was the commission and residency with New Mexico State University in 2007. The university received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to commission two pieces for children’s chorus, adult chorus, flute and piano. This is significant because the children’s chorus came from the Gadsden District between Las Cruces and El Paso. This is one of the poorest areas in the United States. Several of the children were homeless. It was an amazing experience to work with these children and see the power of music engage them and bring them joy. This was one of the most humble and meaningful weeks of my life.

As you can see, composition has been a vehicle for making significant connections with people whom I otherwise would never have met. The wide-spread dissemination of my music through publication, performances, and recordings has been very gratifying and has provided opportunities I did not anticipate. This has been a delightful surprise for which I am very grateful. I look forward to future projects and the new directions they will bring.

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