Fourteen part Women’s choir, piano and glockenspiel
September Beaches was originally a commission for the UT Womens Chorus. It ended up being a kind of lament for the end of summer. I told this story through a text collage of beach boys lyrics. As it turns out there are only a handful of Beach Boys songs with the word ’summer’ in the title. From those songs I culled individual words to create a text full of images and associations to summer. The result is something like a Morricone piece, where words convey an image, place, and mood, but dont necessarily have a narrative or even syntactical relationship to each other. It’s more like a tapestry of words evoking the pleasure of summer and the melancholy we feel as autumn approaches.
Premiered 4.24.07 St. David Episcopal Church, Austin, TX.
honors
Finalist 2008 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Awards