On April 2, I will be releasing new recordings of David Alpher compositions: five sets of art songs. These recordings will be available on Spotify, iTunes, and Apple Music. I would deeply appreciate your listening.
If you hear something you like, please let me know of performance opportunities.
I would also love the prospect of a new commission—in fact, three of these five sets were commissioned.
I’ve been so fortunate to have three stellar singers perform with me on these recordings:
Sharon Harms, soprano; Courtenay Budd, soprano, and Robert Osborne, bass-baritone. I’d like to thank Vassar College for the generous grant that made these recordings possible.
It’s really difficult to describe my musical style. That’s because I go where the poems take me– be that romantic, jazzy, whimsical, spare, or (in one case) mouse-like. The sets, which I composed between 1983 and 2016, are as stylistically diverse as the poems which inspired me:
Songs on the Passage of Time (poems by Lisel Mueller, Robert Creeley, Mark Strand, James Wright, and William Butler Yeats): Wildly different perspectives on this topic, with music at times elegiac, scherzando, and nihilistic.
Between Twilights (poems by Marsden Hartley): Seven songs–charming, passionate, lyrical–to nature poems written by a celebrated visual artist. Hartley painted for many years on Cape Ann, Massachusetts, where I co-founded the Rockport Chamber Music Festival.
Songs of Transcendence (poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Jones Very, and Margaret Fuller): During my Massachusetts years, I became fascinated by the New England Transcendentalists, a small but influential intellectual fraternity based in Concord. These six songs express their ecstatic relationship with nature and the divine.
Kerouac Songs (poems by Jack Kerouac): Jazz settings of a self-described “jazz poet.”
Hinting of Other Places (poems by Anne Spencer Lindbergh): Epigrammatic reflections by Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s literary daughter.