SamplesSamplesTo help you to understand my music a little better you have here the opportunity to download mp3 samples. These are no studio-recordings, but live-recordings from my Master Recital at the Northwestern University in Evanston, 1998. Please excuse the recording quality.
When I selected the pieces I've tried to give an overview of my musical style. The compositions are exclusively of American Composers.
John Anthony
Lennon
Distances within me (1979)
alto saxophone/piano
Yoko Yamada-Salvaggio, piano
(excerpt)
John Anthony Lennon was born in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1950. He earned the Liberal Arts Degree at the University of San Francisco and Masters Degree and Doctorate at the University of Michigan where he studied with Leslie Bassett and William Bolcom. Lennon has been commissioned by the John F. Kennedy Theatre Chamber Players, the Boston Symphony Chamber Players and many others. Among his honors are the Prix of Rome, Guggenheim, Friedheim and Charles Ives Awards.
Distances within me, written in 1979, was commissioned by James Forger. The title refers to a range of emotions and reflects the instinctive, rather than formal way the piece was composed. Several recurring themes or motives give the sense of a rondo form to the work although it is actually through composed. The composer varies density and levels of intensity to express different sentiments evocative to the individual listener.
William Albright
Sonata (1984)
Scherzo (3. movement)
Recitative et Dance (4. movement)
alto saxophone/piano
Yoko Yamada-Salvaggio, piano
William Albright was born in Gary, Indiana in 1944. He is composer, organist and pianist and studied with Oliver Messiaen, Aaron Copland, Ross Lee Finney, Leslie Bassett and Marilyn Mason. Since 1970 Albright is associate director of the electronic music studio at the University of Michigan. In 1982 he became Professor of music. Among his honors are composer awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Fullbright Fellowships, Guggenheim Awards and Koussevitzky Foundaiton Awards. His early works show influence from Messiaen in terms of color, registration and the use of chromatic. His later works combine a complex rhythmic and atonal style with elements of American popular music.
The Sonata for alto saxophone and piano was written in 1984 for Laura Hunter/Brian Connelly, Donald Sinta/Ellen Weelder and Joseph Wytko/Walter Cosand. The first movement, an invention, is highly contrapunctal. Is features the saxophone in a heroic cadenza before the pounding of the piano drowns it out. The second movement is dedicated to the memory of the composer George Cacioppo who died unexpectedly in 1984. The third movement depicts the will-o'-the-wisp, a light spoken of in folk tales that drew travelers form there paths in the woods at night. The fourth movement opens with an introspective recitative that gives way to a mad dance.
Scherzo.mp3 Scherzo (3. Satz)
Recitative.mp3 Recitative et Dance (4. Satz)
Mark Engebretson
She Sings, She Screams (1995)
alto saxophone/tape
Mark Engebretson born in 1964, began his composition studies in 1987 with Michel Fuste-Lambezat at the Conservatoire National de Region de Bordeaux, while studying saxophone with Jean-Marie Londeix on a Fulbright/Annette Kade Fellowship. He did masters and doctoral studies at Northwestern University, where he studied composition with M. William Karlins, Pauline Oliveros, Marta Ptaszynska, Michael Pisaro, Stephen Syverud and Jay Alan Yim and saxophone with Frederick L. Hemke. Engebretson was awarded a Harry N. and Ruth F. Wyatt Fund grant to support New York City performances of his saxophone quartet Not Loud. The same work was also chosen to represent Northwestern University at the 1990 Midwest Composers Symposium in Champaign, Illinois. He received several commissions from the Austrian Ministry of Culture.
She Sings, She Screams was commissioned by Susan Fancher, with financial support from the Austrian Ministry of Culture. The premiere was given in February 1995 by Fancher at the Stadtinitiative in Vienna. The piece represents the composers first work created in his own electronic music studio. It is of three large sections of increasing intensity, with a short coda.