Evanescence (2026)

Buddhism teaches of the impermanence of all things.  If ever there was a period of history in which transience should be self-evident, it should be now.  However, having spent my entire career immersed in the field of Classical Music, as a performer and composer, I have become used to my working parameters being relatively fixed.  One rarely finds anybody able to stay in the same profession for a lifetime, let alone the same job doing the same thing, as I have done as a symphony orchestra musician.

But even Classical Music has made substantial changes in the last few decades, and as I approach my final decades, I find some of the fundamental principles that have dominated the art form to be slowly crumbling away.  Some of the changes, such as a computerized creative process, have brought great spurts of imaginative inspiration and have streamlined a cumbersome developmental process.  But I also feel the erosion of cultural norms that all seniors have faced for centuries, and I can’t help thinking that at least part of it is unusual, permanent, and tragic.

Evanescence (2026), for string trio, addresses the feeling of loss, but it also tries to celebrate that which we understand and cherish, despite its questionable future.  The first movement, Nocturne, centers around a gesture which takes a deep breath. The music veers off in other directions but always returns to the breath, like meditation.  I think the title refers more symbolically to the sunset of one’s life rather than nightfall, and is about attempting to hold on to that which we have found significant.  The second movement, Elegy, is more directly about loss.  There is a lot more to eulogize these days than close acquaintances.  

The last movement is more a celebration of now, an immersion in the present.  The title “Quintiola” is a made-up variant of “hemiola,” but instead of 3:2, “quintiola” refers to 5:2.  The actual musical term for that ratio is dupla sesquialtera, but that seems a bit cumbersome for the name of a movement.  The work is a joyous dance, but the 5/4 meter actually gives the piece some breadth and an unusually relaxed atmosphere, despite the activity.  The opening starts quietly with the pizzicato viola and cello, while the violin seems rather hung over from the emotional despair of the elegy but gets with the celebration eventually. The opening appears in the middle of the movement arco ponticello in a more light-hearted fashion and then returns triumphantly at the end.

The work is only the second string trio I have written, the first dating from 1974 over fifty years ago.  It was a medium I had often thought of revisiting, and some recent performances recharged my interest, in particular a trio by the under-appreciated composer Max Reger performed in Phoenix by the ensemble Urban Nocturnes.

Sheet music for Evanescence (2026) may be obtained from American Composers Alliance (composers.com) at https://composers.com/products/evanes…

Suite from ‘Celestial Palette’ (2025)

This piece is a bit of a potpourri of things that I do with transcriptions from my piano albums. These pieces are from the album Celestial Palette. (You can access Celestial Palette from the Piano Recordings tab in the menu bar.)

Sheet music for this piece can be acquired here from the American Composers Alliance.

PROGRAM NOTES for Suite from ‘Celestial Palette‘

Suite from ‘Celestial Palette’ is a transcription and reworking of three tracks from the piano album I released in 2022. These tracks, like all of my piano albums, are “polished” improvisations and were neither conceived nor developed in written form. For several years, I have also used improvisations as the inspiration for written works.  

The first and third movements of this suite are essentially direct transcriptions of tracks from the album. The first movement is transcribed in a traditional fashion, trying to approximate the original rhythms. The originals are very free rhythmically, and I have never found this traditional method to be entirely successful. The end result is fine but the process is difficult and time consuming. Over the years, I have tried many different methods of transcribing these pieces in a more efficient and flexible manner. The last movement of this suite is my latest attempt. The durations of the notes are true to the original and I have denoted the organization of the time with barring and bar lines, without reference to meter. I am hoping that the specificity of the durations actually makes it easier to be more expressive, as the meter offers no resistance.

The second movement, Dust Devil, is more than a transcription. Though in general it follows the original rather faithfully, it has been embellished with different figurations to give it more activity. I felt that the original was not “devilish” enough.  

Celestial Palette is about the sky, but also about the difference in the sky of my youth in the Pacific Northwest (i.e. – clouds) compared with my adult life in Arizona (i.e. – stars and sunsets). Cirrus clouds are those wispy streaks that punctuate an otherwise clear blue sky. Though they are actually formed from ice crystals, they seem to have a special gentleness, like a baby’s curls. Dust Devils are those little heat-induced cyclones that form in the desert when it is very hot. They are fun to watch and are mostly harmless, but some are a pretty good size and have knocked my car around on several occasions! They bounce along with a fury, throwing dust high in the air, but they eventually run into some obstacle and simply dissipate, leaving all that dust to slowly settle.

I don’t think I had ever seen a Falling Star until I moved to Arizona. There, of course, I could see one every night. I have even seen a couple of large fireballs. On the other hand, my conception of falling stars have been permanently and pleasantly altered ever since I read Neil Gaiman’s Stardust.

Nuance de Noir (2022)

This performance of Nuance de Noir (2022) (which uses bass clarinet) is from a performance by the esteemed chamber music collective Urban Nocturnes at Arizona State University, Katzin Hall, on September 13, 2024.. The performers are Viviana Cumplido-Wilson, flute/alto flute, Erin Finkelstein, bass clarinet, Christopher McKay, viola, and Glenn Stallcop, double bass.

PROGRAM NOTES for Nuances de Noir (2022)

Nuances de Noir was written in response to a commission from the Telluride Chamber Music Association for a chamber music work for dance.  The violist, Danny DeSantis, was an old friend from my early years with the Phoenix Symphony with whom I shared a passion for improvisation.  We had performed and recorded improvisation together many times over the years.  

The unusual instrumentation, especially the inclusion of tenor saxophone and double bass, gave the ensemble a rather French flavor.  It also seemed loaded with mellow instruments, which caused me to include alto flute in the mix.  When I started working on the piece, the sound suggested to me the French Noir films of the 1950’s and 60’s, especially the jazz-inspired film scores of Martial Solal for Jean Luc Godard.  

It then occurred to me that the atmosphere which triggered the Noir genre (the Cold War and threat of nuclear annihilation) was actually quite similar to today, albeit with a number of different threats (climate, pandemic, political extremism, etc.).  Indeed, the present threats are even more insidious, especially climate.  I began to see the present as different shades of “noir,” and the idea for the piece was born.

Most of the piece is lively and rather nervous and builds to a frantic climax, but the piece ends slowly with a rather sad flute melody.  The idea is that anxiety has its own dangers and can lead to life-changing decisions.  The work is about eleven minutes in length and was first performed on March 27, 2022, in Telluride, Colorado.

Alt Shift (2023)

I realized that I have never posted this performance by Urban Nocturnes of the sextet, Alt Shift (2023) for flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, and piano. They gave three stellar performances of this and two other works (Episodes (2023) and Nuance de Noir (2022)) in September of 2023.

Program Notes

When it comes to philosophy, I am a firm believer in “what you see is what you get,” or as Alan Watts would say, “This is it!”  But though living in the present moment is widely proclaimed, it is, as it turns out, not all that easy to accomplish.  It not only takes well honed levels of concentration and attention, it is, at least on the surface, not all that exciting.  Our tendency is to become more interested in life paths that are more stimulating.  So I decided to write this piece which focuses on some of these alternative lifestyles that most of us, including myself, find more attractive.  The title is an analogy referring to a keyboard, where ALT and ALT SHIFT are the keys you push to access the characters that are not visible on the keys.

Each movement explores a different popular alternative lifestyle. The first movement, Tether, refers to a lifestyle in which one’s experience is filtered through strong-held beliefs or firmly held principles.  The tether being so strong that it affects everything the person experiences.  In the music, the tether is represented by the low gong-like sound (often a perfect fourth) in the piano.  The piece both begins and ends with this sound, and it appears regularly throughout. 

The second movement, High Wire, is about a lifestyle full of adrenaline.  It is a dance movement that is roughly based on the Mexican dance rhythm known as a huapango, but I don’t think anyone will mistake it for mariachi music.  It is very lively, adventurous, and even a little risky.

The third movement, Fantasia, is about the plunge into fantasy of all sorts, reading, video, video games, role playing and/or make believe, that has become such a common pastime.  It employs non-vibrato chords and swirling effects to try to create a somewhat mysterious and unreal atmosphere.  It is a voyage of adventure and excitement, but is all good-natured fun and ends with a joyous coda.

The instrumentation for this work is flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, and piano.  This work was written for concerts in Sept. 2024 with the chamber collective, Urban Nocturnes, and is the first piece in their repertoire that includes all six members. 

Delirium (2024)

Delirium is a work for two flutes, two alto flutes, two clarinets, two bass clarinets, two marimbas, two harps, and (one) double bass, that I wrote just after I had finished writing the music for my concerts with Urban Nocturnes in September of 2024. I was still excited from writing those works and didn’t want to stop so I started writing this piece with no other restriction other than this was the instrumentation I was hearing for the material I was working with. This is not always a good idea in the practical sense, but it certainly fit in with the ideas I was exploring for the piece. Berlioz would have liked it for sure.

PROGRAM NOTES

Finding inspiration for composing music is a complex subject.  Some composers engage in research, others wait for the lightening bolt of inspiration, and still others just work with notes and have little non-musical influence.  Though I tend toward the latter, I do take my initial inspiration from improvisation which is more right-brained than most.  However, I have known some very good composers who find their inspiration in dreams, visions, and outright hallucinations.  I have always found this mesmerizing.  

This work, in a sense, is an homage to one of history’s composers who traveled this mesmerizing route, Hector Berlioz.  Not only was Berlioz a wildly imaginative composer in terms of subject matter, his music is exceptionally creative all by itself.  Sometimes, it seems as if Berlioz becomes distracted by inspiration in the middle of a phrase, and decides to take it somewhere else.  I don’t believe this is true, but his ability to inject creativity into the smallest of details is a constant source of amazement.

I was working with the material for this piece when I had the idea for this unusual instrumentation.  The multi-leveled harmonies give the piece a rather disassociated, unfocused feeling, hence the title, Delirium.  The titles of the movements are taken from the two sections of the first movement of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, (1) Reveries and (2) Passions.  The first movement is not actually slow, but it is lyrical and mysterious at times.  The second movement is a scherzo or dance movement, a rather Latin-infused waltz, and it also has its mysterious moments.  The multi-tonal chord which opens the work is repeated at the end of the last movement in totally different circumstances.  There are two of each instrument in the ensemble, except the double bass.  There are also two movements of nearly equal length.  The work is just over twelve minutes in duration.

Sheet music for Delirium (2024) may be obtained from the American Composers Alliance at https://composers.com/products/stallcop-delirium?variant=45598159831260

Pillar of Fire

Riding into the sun

This is my last piano album.  It was recorded in the Summer of 2016, and I knew at the time that I was done.  After the very prolific Summer of 2015, in which I was totally exhausted at its conclusion, I just could not garner the energy and imagination necessary to do any more recording.  I finally gathered my gear together and took it to my cabin near Ash Fork, AZ for a week of isolation and one last chance.  I recorded for four days, and managed to produce one more album.  It is my swan song.

The title, in its reference to Götterdämmerung, is not so much delusion of grandeur as it is an acknowledgement of the path we, as a culture, seem determined to take with Climate Change.  We all seem to be riding our horses, cars, trucks, busses, trains, airplanes, and power plants into a sacrificial fire that is becoming less metaphorical and more real with each passing season.  

Our cabin in Ash Fork sits amid an immense forest of Juniper.  Every year we are nervous.  Juniper is notoriously difficult to burn, but under the continuous pressure of drought, we know it is only a matter of time.  We are somewhat resigned to the fact that in a few decades our house will be standing (if it survives) on several acres of grassland.  

Every year, the Summer monsoon is preceded by several weeks of hot dry weather.  In June, temperatures push into the hundreds, cattle tanks are empty, vegetation is tinder dry, and the clouds begin to build.  It is so hot and dry that the rain from the first storms never reaches the ground, but the lightening does!  The fire season has begun.  Eventually the rain extinguishes the fires, but some years it is later rather than sooner.  Some years, the rains never come.

In Seattle, where I grew up, the rainy weather used to be a joke.  Not so anymore, as droughts of several weeks or more have become commonplace.  As a result, seemingly every year in summer, the city is now choked with smoke!  The fires throughout the American West have become ubiquitous.  Biologists tell us that Nature is nothing if not adaptable.  Biomes will change as temperatures rise, but it doesn’t look as if the adjustment is going to be pretty.  

I remember a few years ago during a water shortage in Texas, people were worried about running out of water to drink.  An expert answered the question by saying that the city will burn to the ground long before that happens.  Recently, however, it was reported that in Northeast Mexico, people were indeed running out of water to drink.  I think we can say that in terms of climate change, all bets are off.

When Brunhilde rides her horse into the fire at the end of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, the world is supposedly being transformed by her love.  Hopefully, our ride into the fire transforms the world through understanding.  Understanding gained, unfortunately, through painful experience.  We cannot neglect our world; we cannot squander its gifts.  It is the foundation of our existence.  

Midnight Sun

The polar magnet

I harbor a certain fascination with the Arctic.  Growing up in Seattle, I became aware that Seattle was known as the “Gateway to the Final Frontier,” i.e., Alaska.  The mother of the family I grew up playing with was an Aleut Native American, and five of the six children in that family moved to Alaska after school.  I finally was able to see part of Alaska a few years ago when my wife and I took a week-long cruise up through the Inland Passage to Anchorage.  It was stunningly beautiful and would have been even more so if the cloud cover would have lifted

I have read a number of stories about life in Alaska and what it is like to carve out a life there.  I have a violinist colleague who spent thirty years in Fairbanks and is a constant source of Alaska stories.  We had another friend who told of life in Whitehorse, Yukon.  She said they wore shirtsleeves when the temperature rose above freezing and told of an exciting time floating down the Yukon River with the ice in the spring.  The elements can be brutal in Alaska or anywhere in the Arctic, but there have always been people who enjoyed and preferred that sort of life.

However, there is nowhere that has been more dramatically affected by climate change than the Arctic.  The Greenland Icecap is melting dozens of times faster than predicted.  The polar icecap has receded dramatically in recent years, endangering the Polar Bear, of all things, which is pretty formidable in its own right.  The receding ice has opened up the Arctic Ocean to shipping and put one of the last pristine ecosystems at imminent risk.  

Climate change is also threatening to make some equatorial climates virtually unlivable forcing the migration of millions of people toward the poles and more hospitable habitats.  The uprooting of whole populations would have mind-boggling consequences.  Moving by choice is pioneering and full of hope, but to move from necessity is to be a refugee, which is a life of anguish and despair.

The Far North is beautiful and vast, and it is one in which we are not likely to forget our place in the natural order of things.  Environmentalism is a passion, but living in nature is survival.  Survival takes attention, understanding, and skill.  It is not comfy; it is all-consuming and difficult.  But even so, one can still bask in the midnight sun or gaze in wonder at the Aurora Borealis.  Change can be bitter and cruel, but life is what it is, and better than the alternative.

Over the Edge

Time to look down

“And so we find ourselves, all of us together, poised trembling on the edge of a change so massive that we have no way of gauging it.  None of us knows where to look, but all of us know not to look down. . . . Our question is: what would happen if we looked down?  Would it be as bad as we imagine?  What might we see?  Could it even be good for us?”

“We believe it is time to look down.”

Uncivilization: The Dark Mountain Manifesto 
Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine

When I created my album Uncivilization, I googled the title to see if there was something about it I didn’t know.  I have nixed a number of titles doing this.  I found that Uncivilization was also the title of a document (quoted above) which founded the Dark Mountain Project, a manifesto calling upon artists to craft visions of what the future will look like after civilization’s seemingly inevitable collapse.  They have been publishing two anthology volumes per year of responses from writers, poets, visual artists and scholars since 2010.  

I have been gradually working my way through this mountain of material ever since.  There are many different types of articles, stories, fantasies, interviews, artwork, and poetry.  Some of it is very poignant.  There are some common threads, of course.  

It seems a logical conclusion that climate change is caused in part because we have no longer cared about nor paid attention to the planet which spawned us and upon which we depend.  Several articles deal with how industrialization and the privatization (and consolidation) of property have cut our close ties to the land.  Some talk about the radical difference between how we and indigenous people see their surroundings.  How one takes from the earth and the other cares for it.  They discuss the sanctity of place.  They talk about how a collapse will leave many people, myself included, unprepared physically and mentally for the task of caring for themselves.  Some discuss the unexpected joys of physical labor and of mastering physical skills.  It will be a different world with little time to adjust.

History is littered with the remains of collapsed civilizations.  We have survived them all and still found a way to get by.  Of course, none of them threatened the planet with mass extinction, but it seems likely we will collapse financially long before that fully materializes. It will certainly be a warmer, wetter, hungrier, and less organized world. Scars and poisons will remain.  But maybe having to fend for ourselves will give us a little more respect for the planet which we need to survive.  We can only hope.

One might expect an album of music centered around this topic to be rather ominous and tragic, full of harsh reality, death and sadness.  This is not the case.  The music is simple, patient, focused, and seems rather stoic yet remains compassionate.  Surviving is not a frivolous subject, and as lemmings have learned, jumping off a cliff is easier.  We will need each other.  We will need resolve.  Will it be good for us?  I can’t answer that one.

Interstition

The golden means

 This particular idea as the subject for an album was immediately inspired by an interview I read in Dark Mountain: Issue 21 (Spring 2022) with the author and poet Sophie Strand.  Her emphasis on interconnection in both her creative work and career pursuits is reinforced by her heart-wrenching lifelong struggle with Connective Tissue Disease (EDS) which causes her body to melt down in painful and debilitating ways for extended periods of time.

Ms. Strand talks quite a bit about fungi and mycorrhizal networks as symbolic life models, and I happened, at the time, to be reading Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Change Our Futures, a remarkable and mind-opening book by the mycologist Merlin Sheldrake.  This multiple exposure to the hidden and intriguing life of vital connections triggered an exotic and more intricate take on my own music-making experience.

When I was in college, decades ago, I became fascinated with musical transitions.  I tried to categorize them and make notable use of them in my music.  I have also had a continued interest in musical process, how my music developed and progressed within a piece from beginning to end.  My use of improvisation as an inspiration is an extension of this creative obsession, as how things go from here to there has always been important to me.

But this emphasis on interconnectivity impinges on the Romantic notion of creative freedom and independence.  Socially interconnected creativity is something I’m not sure I’m totally ready for.  Musical collaboration has become more and more common.  It has been important in pop music and jazz for decades, but it has now made its way into Classical music as well.  Sometimes contemporary composers do more collecting and assembling than traditional composing.  I saw a video recently of a composer searching and collecting ethnic music for a film score.  The music was fantastic, but I am not sure I could even relate to what he was doing. 

However, a person is by themselves an interconnection of influences and experiences.  Our brain continues to make and strengthen synapses all through our lives.  Even if we have trouble making physical connection with others, we are ourselves a network of time, space, and activity that becomes mixed and re-mixed in all that we do.  I try to reach out and explore music and ideas that are different than those I have touched on before, but I realize that I am merely making connections.  Nothing we do, no matter how novel, truly stands on its own.  It is a flowering, a mushroom, a hub of influence.  We are neither heads nor tails, we are the coin in between.

Disconnect

The Lure of Isolation

 Every once in a while, I have come across someone who has developed such an altered view of reality that it is really quite difficult to know where to start when talking to them.  These people aren’t stupid, in fact, they are usually intelligent enough to have “deduced” all kinds of conclusions from that which they believe to be true.  The problem, of course, is that it isn’t.

I used to see this problem in some of my older relatives who had been alone for long periods of time.  Between lack of contact and insecurity, they could come to believe all kinds of bizarre conclusions they had extrapolated, usually concerning those who had not shown up to see them for a while.  Just talking with them would usually clear up any confusion, but not always.  

Those with mental health problems are just as intelligent as anybody else, they just have made strong habitual connections to harmful or distressing conclusions which make it hard for them to function.  (This, of course, is an oversimplification!) These connections are very difficult to break, willfully or otherwise, and can lead to more forceful therapy such as shock treatment or psilocybin therapy in order to attempt to break those connections and possibly form more helpful ones.

In light of the unfortunate reality of the mental health situations associated with isolation, it is beyond my comprehension why anyone would knowingly seek out misinformation in the pursuit of delusional fabrications!    Then again, neither did I believe people would knowingly give up their privacy for cute cat videos.  People make disconnections from reality almost routinely, it seems.  There are multi-billion dollar industries based around coercing people into forming opinions about products, people, intentions, politics, employment, lifestyle, or anything else associated with a source of revenue.  Sometimes, it seems truthfulness itself seems to have become an opinion. Sometimes I think people mistake freedom of expression with equality of ideas.  Not so.

As we become mired in our “information” society, we lose contact with what that information refers to.  Words and ideas represent reality and not the other way around.  Plato was a smart guy, but he got that one backwards.  When information and opinion become reality there is a disconnect, and this can lead to delusion and tragedy.  It is the consequences of this disconnect that this album is about.