SKU: PR.140401340
ISBN 9781491134450. UPC: 680160684953.
Best known for his settings of spirituals and influence on Dvorák, Henry T. Burleigh was a celebrated baritone, and a prolific composer of original works. FROM THE SOUTHLAND is a suite of six atmospheric scenes of the American south, inspired by Black musical and cultural traditions. FROM THE SOUTHLAND is within reach of intermediate pianists and artistically suited for professional recitals.In 1835, Henry T. Burleigh??s maternal grandfather purchased his own release from slavery for the sum of $50, and traveled north out of Maryland to begin a new life as a free man. He established his family in Ithaca, NY, and then moved to the bustling lakefront city of Erie, PA, where three decades later his grandson Henry would be born and raised.For Burleigh, the ??Southland? that inspired this collection of piano sketches was a distant place that could not have been more different from the physical world he knew, up there in the northern snowbelt. And yet these southern landscapes and vignettes must have been intensely present in his consciousness, absorbed through the stories and songs he first learned at his grandfather??s knee.The music of the South ?? the spirituals and work songs he heard as a child ??would travel with Burleigh throughout his long and illustrious musical life. Even as he progressed through his early classical training, his career as a baritone soloist in Erie??s churches and synagogue, his move to New York to study at the National Conservatory of Music, and his rise to national prominence as a concert soloist, these ancestral melodies stayed firmly centered in his musical identity.When he wrote From the Southland, his only composition for solo piano, Burleigh was just beginning his career as a composer. The art songs that would establish him as one of America??s best known composers in the genre were still to come. And so were his iconic arrangements of spirituals that would bring the songs of slavery onto concert stages around the world, transformed into timeless and uniquely American music.These little piano sketches bring together all the things that made Burleigh the musician he was ?? the lush, late-romantic style of his time; a broad vision for American music; and a profound respect for his heritage, a memory of the world his grandfather left behind, and a love of the music he brought with him.
SKU: HL.14030975
ISBN 9788759860199.
Work for Chamber Ensemble dating from 1989. The composer writes: The Title SHADOWLAND refers on the one hand to a blurred 'Landscape' of shadows, where small shadows are formed behind other shadows, and where the outlines are constantly disintegrating. On the other hand, the title refers to the fanciful and unreal landscapes I felt in the music while I was writing it. SHADOWLAND has four movements, with proportions 4-7-4-3. These proportions can be found on various levels, from the smallest cell to the largest form. The first movement is divided into four parts which have exactly the same proportions as the whole pjece, and behind the fastrunning melodies and trills that dominate the whole movement one can hear, in the second, third, and fourth parts, anticipations of the second, third and fourth movements respectively. The second movement begins at the edge of silence with almost unperceptible glissandi and indistinct chorales. Gradually the hushed landscape is drowned out by sudden expressive melodic outbursts and ends with violent dance rhythms. The third movement is built up of clouds of staccato tones and is a further development of the pointillistic ideas from CLAIROBSCUR. In th last movement the horn plays a long soloistic melody line which the other instruments imitate and echo. These echoes swamp the horn line from time to time. SHADOWLAND was commissioned by and dedicated to The London Sinfonietta.
SKU: MB.97210
ISBN 9780786648009. UPC: 796279062350. 8.75 x 11.75 inches.
An extensive collection of reels, jigs, hornpipes and polkas from the French Canadian, Cape Breton, Scottish, Shetland, New England, and Southern Old-Time Traditions arranged for the piano accordion. Written with the beginner as well as the advanced player in mind, the arrangements are complete with ornamentation, fingering, left-hand notation and chord symbols. Appropriate for any G clef instrument.
SKU: HL.14021034
UPC: 884088814656. 10.5x14.5x0.096 inches.
Commissioned by the Primrose Piano Quartet with funding from the Scottish Arts Council, Mr and Mrs J. A.Pye's Charitable Settlement, the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, and the Hope-Scott Trust. First performance by the Primrose Piano Quartet on 13th July 2008, at the Pump Room, Cheltenham, as partof the Cheltenham International Festival of Music.
