Summers are for fun, relaxation, and special rehearsals! I am using the summer months to complete my latest song-cycle, Langston’s Lot: Song is a Strong Thing. Commissioned by Jackie Edwards Henry and Gail Levinsky, two of my dearest friends and colleagues, the project is a follow up to Langston’s Lot (1996) for tenor voice, alto saxophone and piano. In this newest project, the tenor is replaced by a mezzo-soprano. Both cycles celebrate the wonderfully musical poetry of Lan

The picture is larger on the page, to match the man’s outsize personality. This is what Scott Huston looked like during my years of study with him at the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati. Doc passed away in 1991; my last lesson with him was several years earlier. I may have been one of his final doctoral students, as I finished up my DMA requirements in 1988. Doc came to my hooding ceremony; I still have a picture of the two of us at home in the

Grad school: composition seminar. This was a chance to talk shop with your fellow student composers, led by a member of the composition faculty at the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati, where we were diligently working towards the completion of our various degrees. We met once a week to examine the big picture; discuss new pieces, contemporary techniques, and/or what life might be like in the real world. I still remember the day where one of my peers brought in a r

"When I compose it's an inner discipline that controls me. No concerts, rehearsals, interviews! It's another way of living and I prefer it in a way. If you want to skip dinner and work all night, sleep all day, you just do it ... it's another person that emerges, more absorbed in an interior world. But it's hard to make the transition between the two lives [conducting and composing], and to clear everybody else's music out of your head to make room for your own. -Leonard Bern