It's Only the Wind, for oboe and electronics, is dedicated to Jared Diamond, in appreciation for his tremendous work: Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. I've been particularly haunted by the story of Easter Island, a lush island when first settled, treeless half a century later. It's Only the Wind is partly an exploration of what could yet happen, here in the United States. The oboe is a grim protagonist, making melodic use of one of the darker modes, the phrygian, and various extended techniques such as multiphonics and combination tones, in a desolate and dangerous sonic landscape.

The Secret Door

In San Francisco, near a place called Baker Beach, out over the water
about a hundred meters up in the sky, there is a secret door.
It is invisible to humans, and only large enough for a crow or raven to fly through.

If you are lucky enough to be able to fly and also to make yourself small,
then a friendly bird may show you the exact location.

This small opening in the fabric of our time leads into another world.
The land and its contours are much the same as San Francisco,
but there is no city, and the plants and animals are different.

In a small valley near a beach there lives a wise and powerful magician
and his wife, who, being the only humans in this place,
are happy to receive a visitor.......

Roma
Flying back from Rome in August, I settled into my seat after taking a Tylenol PM to endure the trip. Soon a bizarre dream-like state overtook me, the low droning bass of the airplane engine became an ostinato, people walking by in the aisle were like woodwinds chattering past incoherently. Suddenly in the middle of this pleasant haze, the image of the chariots on the Vittorio Emanuele monument appeared before me, and I heard the melody and words of this song. Roma, for two sopranos and orchestra, is a loving tribute to the Eternal City.

night and trees is a three-stanza poem originally titled 3, which dates from my stripped-down 'minimalist' period when I was concerned with problems of rhythmic structure, and used lots of syncopation and sometimes regular straight-ahead rhythms in place of conventional anecdotal content, which is the common practice in most 'mainstream' American poetry. night and trees is Gerhard Samuel's setting of this short lyric which he chose from among 20 or so poems I sent him as possible candidates. The collaboration was as hands-off as could be, as I think that composers should, in the song form at least, be allowed to follow their own instincts. Poems in particular, and art in general, are, after all, as poet Tristan Tzara once said "a private bell for inexplicable needs." Everyone hears differently and Samuel heard night and trees with acute sensitivity. I owe my encouragement to being 'set' to two people: New York friend of many years, Peter Klein, and pianist Melissa Smith, who suggested I contact The American Music Center, New York, when she worked for Kronos Quartet -- which is how I met Samuel, whose work I'd admired for years. Gerhard dedicated night and trees to his composer friend of many years, Pia Gilbert. I would like to dedicate this performance to Pia Gilbert, as well as to the memory of Gerhard Samuel and his surviving companion and dear friend Achim Nicklis.

Continuing with the treacly investigation of romance and its elations, its euphoric pleasures, begun with Two Orchestral Waltzes for Lynne, the current work, Sweet Encumbrance, makes manifest, in sound, the joyous warmth, the sweet iron fetters and the small panics which flow from hog-tying oneself together with one's chosen helpmeet and companion. In this piece, it is demonstrated in some detail how much one can gain in life simply by giving up one's philandering, and -- while still given license to strut and flirt and still authorized to play the dandy -- one must now, for the foreseeable future, festoon one's costume with the leash and collar and electronic ankle bracelet, sometimes visible but most often invisible, like the line that one might be enticed to cross save for the memories of the previous attempts' resultant truncheoning and electric shocks. But let us not dwell on such past pains, but please to look to that bright future world illumined by the brightest and whitest of most pure light where, joined in glory and set upon one's throne just to the right of the Empress, in a new Sagrada Familia, happily holding court, happily holding the hand of the one most-beloved.

Open Ended is a very versatile work that will be composed before your eyes and ears. This work has no set instrumentation and can be played by any number of performers. It also has no set length; the piece could last 5 minutes or 24 hours. Based on Rova's Radar techniques, Open Ended is less of a composition and more of a color or tool palette. It is an ever-growing collection of rules and games for the performers that are triggered by hand signals by the conductor/composer. The conductor / composer then composes the piece live using these hand signals to guide the performers. Open Ended has been performed several times, including a performance four years ago by the SFCCO, but every time it is a world première and unique performance that can never be repeated.

Elijah Ghost, Op. 176, is a suite derived from Elijah Rock, Op. 71, an opera-oratorio on I Kings:12 through II Kings -- pertaining to the establishment and fall of the Divided Kingdom of Israel and Judah. The music is a prophetic re-utterance of Felix Mendelssohn's Elijah, with minor revelations drawn from atonal fugue, swing, Alban Berg's Three Pieces for Orchestra (III) and Wozzeck (Act II:1 and Act III:4), rock'n'roll, minimalism, and 12-bar blues. The characters herein include the rival pretenders to the throne Jeroboam and Rehoboam, Queen Jezebel, Elijah, King Ahab and his nemesis/pseudo-brother Syrian Behadad, a slap-happy Member of a Group of Prophets and another eaten by a lion, the anti-developer Naboth, and a hit-list Reciter of Dead Rulers.

Verrà la Morte e Avrà i Tuoi Occhi is a piece for chamber orchestra and two soprani about the acceptance, or awareness, of death, life passing by, and the longing for the beautiful days we must leave behind. The two sopranos sing:

The inspiration for the piece comes from the location for its premiere (the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland, a beautiful building by Julia Morgan); a memory: the song La Morte by Fabrizio de André, a popular Italian songwriter active in the 70's-90's; and a recent find (thank you, Google): a rather dark poem with the same title published by the Italian poet Cesare Pavese in 1960. My text tries to deliver a happier overtone: somewhere around the somberly playful de André, and well to the left of the dark poem by Pavese.

Librettist Michael McDonagh (b. May 20, 1951, Fresno, California) attended grade school in Fresno, San Jose, Livermore, Concord (CA), Mt Prospect, and Arlington Height (IL). He studied English literature at Loyola University, Chicago, spent a year abroad at its Rome Center, and graduated from Loyola-Marymount University, Los Angeles. McDonagh has written many critical pieces and profiles on the arts for The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Francisco Review of Books, The Advocate, Stagebill, In Tune, The Three Penny Review, Keyboard, Antiques and Fine Art, and many other publications. He currently serves as staff arts critic for San Francisco's Bay Area Reporter www.eBAR.com -- and also writes for www.alexnorthmusic.com, www.culturevulture.net, www.sequenza21.com, www.classical-music-review.org, and 21st-Century Music. His poetry has been published in El Playano, Anemone, Mouth of The Dragon, Mirage, and Stanford's poetry journal, Mantis, and he continues to at work on many poems, which have been published singly and as related cycles. McDonagh has done two poem-picture books with San Francisco-based painter Gary Bukovnik -- Before I Forget (1991) and Once (1997), and has written two pieces for the stage -- Touch and Go, for three voices, staged by Zack's Common Cultural Practice at San Francisco's Venue 9, in 1998, and Sight Unseen (1999-2000) -- a theatre piece for performer Jennifer Taggart.

Rachel Condry, clarinet/bass clarinet, is an advocate of new music who has commissioned and premiered many new works by both established and emerging composers. In 2007 she was featured in Lisa Scola Prosek's Opera Belfagor based on the story by Machiavelli, in which the bass clarinet portrays the character of the devil. In 2005 she made her Carnegie Hall debut as a member of The Matt Small Chamber Ensemble, a group that seamlessly blends jazz, improvised music and classical genres. As a performing member of the San Francisco Composer's Chamber Orchestra Rachel has been featured as soloist with the orchestra in works by Erling Wold, Lisa Prosek and Thomas Goss. Rachel continues to independently produce concerts comprised of recent and newly commissioned work for clarinet and bass clarinet by Bay Area composers such as Earl Zindars, Erling Wold, Mitch Marcus Andrew Shapiro, Lisa Prosek, Janis Mercer, Jono Kornfeld, Melissa Hui, Alexis Alrich and others. Rachel received a Bachelor of Music degree from Oberlin Conservatory where she was a finalist of the Oberlin Concerto Competition and was a soloist with the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble.

German-Jewish composer Gerhard Samuel (April 20, 1924, Bonn - March 25, 2008, Seattle, WA) emigrated to the United States in 1939 with his parents and his sister Erika. He attended Eastman School, and Yale where he took composition classes with Paul Hindemith. Samuel studied conducting with Koussevitzky at Tanglewood, and served as violinist and associate conductor, under Minneapolis Symphony head Antal Dorati. He was one of the co-founders of the Cabrillo Festival, serving as its first music director (1962-1968), and revolutionized programming at the Oakland Symphony when he was its conductor from 1959-1971. He then became Zubin Mehta's assistant conductor at the Los Angeles Philharmonic (1970-1973). Samuel headed Cincinatti's College-Conservatory of Music from 1976-1997, where he transformed its orchestra, taking it on international tours and recording several CD's ranging from Schubert to Ives. He composed many striking pieces in all media, including two string quartets (for the La Salle and Essex); Transformations, for solo violin and string orchestra; a large orchestra piece, Requiem for Survivors "and suddenly it's evening..." (in memory of the Oakland Symphony's late conductor, Calvin Simmons); Looking at Orpheus Looking; Nocturne on an Impossible Dream; Auguri (conducted for his friend Lou Harrison, in a birthday tribute at the San Jose Symphony); and a series of chamber works with texts by Los Angeles-based poet Jack Larson.

A native of St. Petersburg, Maria Mikheyenko has sung with the Russian Chamber Orchestra, San Francisco Russian Festival, and presents recitals of Russian Romances throughout the Bay Area. Opera credits include Berkeley Opera, Pocket Opera, Capitol Opera Sacramento, Bay Shore Lyric Opera, Opera Lafayette, Oakland Opera Theater, and the Austrian American Mozart Academy of Salzburg. In the world of contemporary music, she is a frequent collaborator with Bay Area composers. She has performed in three world premiere works by Lisa Scola Prosek: Leonardo's Notebooks, Belfagor, and Trap Door. With San Francisco Cabaret Opera, she has multiple San Francisco and world premiere roles in Mark Alburger's operas (including Lennie Small in Mice and Men, Delilah in Sex and Delilah, and Edward Gibbon in Diocletian: A Pagan Opera), as well as portraying The Prophetess in Henry Purcell's Dioclesian and a Quark Sister in John Bilotta's Quantum Mechanic. Ms. Mikheyenko has been a guest artist on the national radio show West Coast Live! and is a member of the award-winning Pacific Mozart Ensemble, collaborating with artists such as Meredith Monk and Dave Brubeck.