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 Throughout my career as a composer, I have had two goals: to write music that moves people to consider living their lives differently, and to set texts that speak to pressing social concerns.
I have always worked with texts and themes that address the major issues facing contemporary society. My 1972 choral drama The War Prayer sets Mark Twain's harrowing anti-war parable. My 1976 Bicentennial Wagon Train Show went beyond the national anniversary celebration to address the social and political issues facing the United States at that time: American foreign policy and domestic civil liberties. The major work of my career, the 1996 Mountain Laurels: a choral symphony, combines poetry, history, music, social and environmental concerns, while uniting some seventeen performing ensembles, town and gown, young and old, amateur and professional so that the performative event itself became an embodied argument for the politics of unity.
My interest in writing for the stage began during my career at Columbia. I won a competition to set to music Michael Feingold's libretto The Bawd's Opera. The work was produced by Columbia Players in 1966 and went on to win the BMI Varsity Show Award as the best college musical in the country. The Award also allowed me to become a member of BMI's Musical Theatre Workshop, directed by Lehman Engel. My Workshop experience led to three additional collaborations with Feingold, The Pill, produced by Columbia Players in 1967; Little Do We Care for Riches, produced by the Barnard-Columbia Summer Theatre in 1967; and The Country Doctor, a twelve-tone opera based on the short story by Franz Kafka. I also collaborated with John Litvack on a serious music drama, Feathertop, based on a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and produced by Columbia Players in 1968.
After coming to Penn State, I collaborated with playwright Roger Cornish on two major projects. Unruly Children, a sardonic vaudeville musical, depicted our founding fathers in a human light and was produced by the University Repertory Theatre in 1976. Then Roger, Don Tucker, and I were commissioned by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to write the Pennsylvania Bicentennial Wagon Train Show. This was one of the major bicentennial projects, playing more than 2000 performances throughout the United States in 1975-76. The experience gained in writing and producing the show has influenced my career ever since then.
My collaboration with Jason Charnesky has been the most notable of my career. In the space of a decade we have produced a significant body of works. Our first collaboration was the cantata Santa Rosalia, based on the painting by Fernando Botero and dedicated to all those living with AIDS. The work was written for the opening of the new Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State and was filmed by WPSX-TV for broadcast on PBS.
Jason and I have written two commissioned song cycles. Songs for the End of the Recital, commissioned by Jan Wilson, and A Communion of Saints, commissioned by Suzanne Roy, combine lyrical writing, dramatic intensity and elements of pointed social commentary into a performative event which challenges listeners eloquently and elegantly.
Then Jason and I went on to write two more cantatas. The Last Voyage of Captain Meriwether Lewis, for men's voices, soloists, and piano quartet, began my interest in the Lewis and Clark saga. During my sabbatical of 1993-1994, while traveling to a residency at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in New Mexico, I happened to camp overnight at the Meriwether Lewis Monument. This is the site where Lewis took his own life only four years after the expedition of 1804-1806 and where he is buried. Visiting this lonely site prompted me to think about that man, so great in his accomplishments and so lonely in his desperation. These thoughts grew into a cantata which relives the entire expedition in a flashback on that fatal night as Captain Meriwether Lewis considers what his life has meant.
One Life: the Rachel Carson Project (November 2000) was our next project, a cantata for women's voices, soloists and instrumental ensemble, that integrated still projections and videos and dealt with the life and work of the founder of the ecology movement in the United States. Hundreds of students at Penn State were introduced to this important figure in American environmental history through this event.
My operas written with Jason include the trilogy Ever Since Eden, comprising Eve's Odds, Golden Apple, and Cleo; opera.com.edy, commissioned by Joe Hopkins for his opera program at the University of Evansville; and Holiday: a Greek Pocket Opera.
We also wrote a musical, The Diamond Child, to mark the United Nations' Day of Six Billion observances throughout the world on October 15, 1999. The work deals with the size of the world's population and the implications for the future. The final chorus in the work was sung by local schoolchildren in the audience who had been taught the song by their elementary school music teachers. Admission to the performance was free, but everyone was asked to bring a food item for our local food bank.
One of my most recent projects, York, is about one of the great unknown figures in American history. The contributions of the Euro-Americans to the Lewis and Clark Expedition are well documented; the central importance of the various Native American peoples to the success of the expedition is also being newly retold. But the contribution of York, the only African American on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, has been neglected, and perhaps even worse, distorted into caricature.
Over the past decade I have had the great good fortune to be able to work at a number of artist colonies. I am deeply indebted to all of the following, but especially to Karen Parrott at Dorland for allowing me to return summer after summer to that idyllic, inspirational place.
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