Brian Holmes

Joyful Noise has been published by Brichtmark

Joyful Noise, four settings of insect poems of Paul Fleischman, has been put into print by Brichtmark. These songs are for children's chorus; they are in two parts, with piano accompaniment. The three songs are Water Striders, The Moth's Serenade, Requiem, and Cicadas. Here is Brichtmark's website ; and here is Paul Fleischman's web site. My website is still under construction.

Music at the American Choral Directors Association Convention

One of my chorus pieces, I shall keep singing!, will be performed by the National High School Honors Chorus II at the ACDA convention in Oklahoma City. I believe the concert is closing night, Saturday, March 7. The same piece will also be included on a reading session of newly published music for women's chorus; and another piece, A Christmas Lullaby, will be on another reading session. I'll be there!

The Tuba and Madame Mao

June 24, 2008: I have just uploaded a performance of this piece (also known as Tales of the Cultural Revolution) by the Cambridge Symphonic Brass Quintet. Scott Brumit is the narrator/vocalist. I have also written versions of this piece for tuba duo with narrator, and for concert band, solo tuba, and narrator. I can also provide a set of amusing illustrations to distract the audience from the music, if necessary. These are visible in the pics section of this web page.

Three new publications

William Thorpe Music Publications has just published three new pieces. They are:
Carol of the Field Mice for unaccompanied mixed chorus. The text is from The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. This is an arrangement of an earlier version for treble chorus and piano.
I shall keep singing! for treble chorus and harp (or piano). The poem is by Emily Dickinson.
A Christmas Lullaby for two-part children's chorus and piano. The poem is by Eleanor Farjeon.
For more information, visit my page on Thorpe's web site.

Concerto for Brass Trio and Orchestra

1. Marcia delle tre spalle
2. Canzone del cavolo
3. Popeye per sonare
The Concerto for Brass Trio and Orchestra was begun in the summer of 1997, and it was completed in December, 1998. The premier was in January 1999. I know of no other concerto for these solo instruments. The piece is in part a hommage to the antiphonal brass music of Giovanni Gabrieli. Writing the Concerto reminded me of the cartoon theory of gravity: if you step off a cliff, you will not begin falling until after you look downward.
The opening march theme of the Marcia delle tre spalle is announced by the bassoons, joined by the celli, and then by the trio. This builds to the second theme: the trumpet, trombone, and horn enter successively, each with a different solo variation. (The trumpet and trombone disrupt the horn's variation with bits of Gabrieli's Canzon 28.) The march returns, with the trio developing the material. A long crescendo (in which it gets harder and harder to hear the trio above the hubbub) culminates in a varied recapitulation of the second theme, after which the march subsides.
The second movement, Canzone del cavolo, suggests a procession at night. The opening theme, loosely based on Gabrieli's Canzon noni toni, leads to a folk-song like theme by the solo brasses. This alternates with a more romantic second theme. After a climax based on elements of the opening theme, the procession fades over a tolling bell.
Most musicologists deny that Gabrieli ever met Popeye the Sailor Man. However, the third movement, Popeye per sonare, combining Gabrieli's Canzon per sonare No. 2 with cartoon music based on a familiar hornpipe, suggests that they are wrong. This movement may be in sonata form, although the trio and the orchestra disagree on many details, such as the correct key to recapitulate the main theme.
Perceptive listeners will easily discover exactly how far I got before I looked down.

Death’s Jest-Book Overture

This overture is based on music I wrote for a production of the play Death’s Jest-Book by Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849).

What! You’ve never heard of Beddoes? Imagine that Edgar Allen Poe’s twin brother went to Oxford, then forsook a promising literary career to study medicine in Europe, hoping to discover the secret of life and death. (This was, after all, the same era when Mary Shelley was writing Frankenstein.) Alas! If he ever discovered this secret, he failed to reveal it before he committed suicide by poisoning himself. Or afterwards, which is even more disappointing.

Beddoes worked on Death’s Jest-Book for the last twenty-five years of his life. It is a gothic tale of revenge, written in blank verse, focused on death and resurrection of the dead, and interspersed with a variety of grotesque and death-haunted lyrics. I wrote music for a production of the play (produced and directed by Frederick Burwick, using a shortened version by Jerome McGann) given at UCLA and Scripps College in 2003. The music included settings of fifteen songs and choruses from the play and other Beddoes works. The play was also performed at Fordham University and Grasmere, England.

Death’s Jest-Book Overture deconstructs some of the pieces I wrote for the play and reassembles them as an early romantic overture. It quotes the plain chant dies irae, which Berlioz used in Symphonie Fantastique. (Like Beddoes, Berlioz studied medicine.) Attentive listeners will also detect the influence of Rossini and early Wagner. Actually, to detect the Rossini, you needn’t be attentive at all.

So, imagine a dark, ruined cathedral. On its crumbling walls you see a painting of the Dance of Death. Soon the conspirators will appear to plot their revenge against the Duke. But first, as the hour of midnight strikes, the images come to life and climb down from the walls, singing and dancing to a rattling music: Mummies and skeletons, out of your stones;
Every age, every fashion, and figure of Death:
The death of the giant with petrified bones;
The death of the infant who never drew breath.
Little and gristly, or bony and big,
White and clattering, grassy and yellow;
The partners are waiting, so strike up a jig,
Dance and be merry, for Death's a droll fellow. If you have nothing better to do with your free time, you could watch a performance of the song The New Cecilia , which is also from Death's Jest-Book. The baritone Branislav Radakovic is accompanied by the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra.
Here is a video of The Choral Project, under Dan Hughes, performing my piece Let Evening Come . Here is a video of the St. Louis Children's Chorus peforming Roger Bobo Plays the Tuba . The tuba player is Jeff Hoard . The Fashion God , a heck of an opera in one act, has now been loaded at youtube.