Joan La Barbara Joins PSNY

by Ted Gordon on April 19, 2016, 10:52 a.m.

(Joan La Barbara; photo credit: Aleksandar Kostic)

Joan La Barbara knows what it means to sing. And in the process of singing over the past forty years, she has redefined the possibilities of the term itself. Using her voice as an instrument, she has developed a vocal style that transcends convention, extending the technology of her voice to wildly new places of discovery and creativity. Since the early 1970s, La Barbara has been composing and performing works for her own voice and other collaborators: electronics, video, environments, dancers, synthesizers, and instruments. Each of these works blends the singularity of her voice with the wider world of sound.

PSNY is honored to publish four works by La Barbara that span several decades of her career. These highly evocative and unique works range in instrumentation from solo violin to chamber ensemble, but all involve La Barbara's voice in some way or another—either her compositional voice or in her scoring for live human voice.

This is perhaps easiest to hear in her work in the shadow and act of the haunting place (1995), for voice and chamber ensemble, which La Barbara calls a "sound painting in the style of some of my multi-track vocal works." This work sees La Barbara's extended vocal techniques translated to instruments—an act which La Barbara says evokes "moments of mystery and strange beauty with some hints of danger."

This work served as a model for a larger composition for the Nai-Ni Dance Company, titled Calligraphy II/Shadows, where several of the Western instruments were exchanged for close equivalents in the Chinese classical tradition.  

 La Barbara's talent for translation is also shown in Vlissingen Harbor (1982), a composition that evokes her time spent in the seaport village of Vlissingen in southern Holland. Scored for voice and ensemble, this piece reimagines the harbor soundscape in an instrumental realization, calling on all eight players to use their breath to evoke the sonic seascape.

Flash! (2005), a virtuoso piece for solo violin, again translates the composer's voice into the language of string instruments, evoking the thrilling potentialities of the solo violin in the tradition of film scoring. Challenging the performer to keep up with the score, Flash! is a showstopping piece that extends instrumental technique in the service of extending our sonic imaginations of what a violin is capable of. 

We look forward to publishing more works by Joan La Barbara in the near future, so stay tuned!

Remembering Stephen Paulus: The Postman Always Rings Twice

by Ted Gordon on March 10, 2015, 12:58 p.m.

Stephen Paulus, one of America's most prolific and celebrated contemporary composers of vocal music, has left us with a treasury of beautifully composed works, after his passing in late 2014. A Minnesotan originally from the East Coast, he found a home for his unique style of lushly tonal, romantic compositions in the mid-west, and beyond. This performance of his "Pilgrim's Hymn" at the Milwaukee Art Museum is a perfect example of Paulus' haunting compositional voice. Paulus has written about the composition of this work on his website; his son, Andrew Paulus, will be publishing these collected "work stories" every month. 

 One of his most widely-known pieces was his 1982 opera, "The Postman Always Rings Twice", based on the novel of the same name. A dark tale of forbidden love and conspiratorial murder, it has been performed throughout the United States. Now, for the first time, a full-sized study score for this powerful opera is available as a direct digital download. For a taste of this opera, check out this short documentary about a 2011 production at Boston University. 

The Vocal Music of Douglas J. Cuomo on PSNY

by Ted Gordon on July 21, 2014, 2:03 p.m.

Douglas J. Cuomo has been celebrated for his wide-ranging, vibrant, and completely unique compositional voice—which he has used in media ranging from television (Sex and the City, Homicide: Life on the Street), to instrumental music (Only Breath, commissioned by cellist Maya Beiser), to choral music, to opera. Composing for the voice, in particular, Cuomo integrates a worldly, ecumenical perspective with a fiercly original composerly craft. Arjuna's Dilemma, his 2006 opera based on the Bhagavad Gita, and Doubt, his 2013 opera based on the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning play by John Patrick Shanley, both contain arias and choral settings that are in demand by singers worldwide. 

And because of that demand, we're thrilled to announce that nine of Cuomo's vocal works are now available through PSNY. These include choral and solo excerpts from his two operas, Arjuna's Dilemma and Doubt, as well as works for SATB Chorus, and works for solo voice and piano. 

Check out some video and audio excerpts of Douglas J. Cuomo's works below!