The Composers of Choral Music Community ChoralNet Composer of the Month for April, 2012 is Greg Bartholomew.
Excerpt from blog post:
The quintessential element that separates choral composers from instrumental composers is of course, text. How a composer handles that text speaks volumes to the quality of the work. Greg handles text extremely well. Word painting and variety are the two trademarks of his work. He is not afraid to tackle texts that few other composers would dream of setting. In his SATB “To a Locomotive in Winter” he set a Walt Whitman poem that is about as complex a text for composing as they come. Here’s the opening 4 lines of the 25 line poem:“THEE for my recitative!Thee in the driving storm, even as now-the snow-the winter day declining;Thee in thy panoply, thy measured dual throbbing, and thy best convulsive;Thy black cylindrical body, golden brass, and silvery steel;”As you see, there is not much to build a standard phrase from but plenty of opportunity to propel the text. “To a Locomotive in Winter” is available through the Composition Showcase https://choralnet.org/view/306612 on ChoralNet. Click here for the entry, control-click (Mac) or right-click (PC) here for the PDF and here for the sound file. “
Read the rest of the article in the ChoralNet Composers of Choral Music Community Blog where there is an in-depth look at Greg Batholomew’s “The Tree” and “The 21st Century (A Girl Born in Afghanistan)” for SATB and SATB divisi respectively. Both are a cappella and very accessible. Click here for the entire article.
Greg Bartholomew says