What's New
October 22, 2022
Dear Friends,
Spring and summer have passed since my last update, and the leaves are falling fast as we approach November of 2022. There are three late Fall performances of my choral music, all of them in the Boston area. I hope you may be able to attend one or more of them.
Wishing you a healthy and happy Fall,
Ron
My 2015 choral work When Music Sounds, on poems by Walter de la Mare, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Emily Dickinson, will be performed on the program “Letters to Our Children,” by Coro Allegro, Boston’s LGBTQ+Youth Chorus, David Hodgkins, Artistic Director. This piece was commissioned by the Fromm Foundation and Harvard University for Prof. Thomas F. Kelly’s famous “First Nights” course in 2015. Originally scored for mixed chorus with piano accompaniment, the present performance will have a version I made in 2018 for an accompaniment of string quartet and piano. The program was rescheduled from last May, but the venue is the same, and tickets purchased for the May performance will still be honored.
Letters to Our Children
Sunday, November 6 3 PM
Old South Church
645 Boylston St., Boston
Tickets and more information:
My 2006 choral work Why I Wake Early, eight poems of Mary Oliver for mixed chorus, string quartet and piano, will be performed on the program Contemporary American Voices Raised in Hope by the Harvard- Radcliffe Chorus, Edward Jones and Mary Weckworth, conductors. Why I Wake Early will be paired on this program with Gwyneth Walker’s Sing Evermore!
Contemporary Voices Raised in Hope
Friday, December 9 8 PM
Sanders Theater
Harvard University
45 Quincy Street, Cambridge
Tickets and Information
Harvard Box Office
(Available one month before the concert)
In 2014 I was commissioned to write a piece for the annual carol service performed by the Harvard University Choir in Memorial Church. I composed an a cappella setting of the well-known Longfellow poem “Christmas Bells,” which we usually know today by the title “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” Longfellow wrote the poem in 1863 while he was nursing his son Charley who had been severely wounded in the Civil War. My setting restores the verses customarily omitted that make reference to the war. It will be performed at a Christmas Concert by the Copley Singers, Andrew Clarkson, Artistic Director.
The Copley Singers Christmas Concert
Sunday, December 11 3 PM
Cathedral of the Holy Cross
1400 Washington Street, Boston