Two Choral Compositions

[Elmer]

I am finally posting a couple of my real pieces to share on the forum now – the other piece I’ve posted is not representative of my real music.

One is a Christmas carol. These 2 are sung by the choir which my wife & I sing in, the Mobile Community Chorus. (Mobile is a city in southern Alabama, USA.)

"The Oxen" is from a set of 4 songs called "Creatures in the Snow". The poem is by Thomas Hardy, set also by such awesome composers as Benjamin Britten and Libby Larson. (Both settings were unknown to me at the time I composed it!) I was honored with an Honourable Mention in the Amadeus Choir (of Toronto) Annual Christmas Carol and Chanukah Song Composition Competition for this piece in 2005. Not bad for the first music I had composed in 20 years! I have since retired and compose full-time.
The 2nd piece is called "In Memoriam: For a Musician." It was written last year and is dedicated to the memory of my friend and high school band director, who remained as my mentor for the rest of his life. The text was selected from various verses of Tennyson’s long poem, “In Memoriam.”

Incidentally, my friend’s name was Ira Swingle, and his brother is Ward Swingle, the founder of the Swingle Singers. I add this because the current group of Swingle Singers are now based in London, where many members of this forum seem to be from.

Unfortunately, neither performance is perfect— too fast a tempo led to a bumpy ride during the cross-rhythm section near the end of “The Oxen” (The cross-rhythm, two dotted half-notes in the upper voices against three half-notes in the lower, the meter being 6-4, is my method of translating into music the divided mind of Hardy about the factualness of animals kneeling on Christmas eve.); and the trumpet player seems to have lost his focus worrying about high notes and could no longer play straight quarter-notes (quavers) straight by the end of "In Memoriam." Also he played several measures an octave lower than I wrote them.
Oh, well— at least I got a live performance! Also, there doesn’t seem to be much bass in these MP-3 versions.

http://www.mediamax.com/psychelmer/Hosted/TWO%20CONCERT%20PERFORMANCES/CONCERT%204%20THE%20OXEN%2C%20E.%20HARBAUGH%2C%20M OBILE%20COMMUNITY%20CHORUS.mp3


http://www.mediamax.com/psychelmer/H...Y%20CHORUS.mp3

Hope you enjoy them!

Elmer

PS: THE LINKS HAVE BEEN BROKEN AGAIN, BUT i'VE GOT THEM WORKING NOW. I forget that when I reoganize and put things in different folders in my on-line storage space that it will change the URL! Incidentally, I use MediaMax aand will highly recommend it for any media storage and sharing. It's the simplest thing I've found yet.