Avshalomov – Gemeinsam (Together), a new piece for these fraught times

Dear colleagues, for months I have been holding back from sending out bulletins about my latest choral pieces, out of sensitivity to the current pressures on conductors and educators everywhere and recent deeply distressing events. But today I decided I have waited long enough, so I share this new piece with you, in hopes that it will be useful when we can all start singing together again.

“Gemeinsam” (Together) is a colorful, earnest, a cappella setting of a sensitive, artistic One-World poem. I composed it for a German composition contest in 2019. It spoke to me on parallel tracks–how we humans are “stuck” here together on this damaged and possibly dying planet, and how at the same time we are connected in all our basic human traits, good and bad, no matter how riven our societies have become. We are “ travelling together”, like it or not. I wrote this music well before the 2020 global pandemic lockdown began, not in response to it, and yet it turned out to be directly germane to our current situation–both the dire state of nature and the globe, and the agonizing state of humanity and our failing social structures.

The harmonic style is 20th Century tonal-modern, the prosody natural, the structure episodic, with numerous madrigalisms. It can be sung in either German or English; the English singing translation is my own. The voicing is S A T Bar with spot divisi and a few solos for high soprano. [Duration 7’15”]

You can see a video of a brand-new assembled recording of the last 2/3 of the piece by C3LA here:

The score with full lyrics, and full demo recording (in NotePerformer sounds) are on my website here:

Chorus

A mashup of live start, MIDI continuation, and live ending is here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VTrkk0Fv1jwTcH5_EsB17P28cGla7KzU/view?usp=sharing

If you are interested in this work, feel free to print a perusal score directly from my website. If you decide to perform it later, you can purchase the photocopy license then. For inquiries contact me directly at . I welcome your feedback.

THE C3LA RECORDING.
When the 2020 pandemic lockdown began, our chorus were frantic to find ways to remain vocally active, and creative, and artistically connected. One early obvious choice was the “virtual choir” assemblage. When that notion was proposed, I volunteered my brand-new piece as the guinea pig or crash dummy. We wanted to do really good recordings, with video, and the result far exceeded my expectations. This is an exceptional group of fine Los Angeles-area artist-singers (who include me because I am a tolerable low bass), many of them also composers themselves, all perfectionists, and they worked fiercely to provide some truly fine tracks for the assemblage. I was impressed and grateful, as I always am when they sing something of mine. I hope you enjoy the piece.