To go to CF's Home Page, CLICK HERE. More links are below.

Greetings, Visitor, and Welcome!

Here's some of the newest news about my doings:

Recently I gave a "SHARP TALK" about my work at the S.H.A.R.P. Community Space in San Francisco, this included pieces from THE FESTIVAL and concluded with the first public reading of the text of Robert Jackson's Speech from my opera-in-progress THE NUERNBERG TRIAL. I even included a glimpse of my earliest juvenalia. For more info about this go to my UPCOMING APPEARANCES page, which I have not yet updated. A couple of online critics showed up; the first has reviewed the event; the other is planning to publish his article in his blog in several weeks. (I guess that means he's going to be researching me.)

Very good news: WIlliam Carslake, the conductor of the London Charity Orchestra, wrote to me on the 8th that he plans to give the World Premiere of my accessible orchestral piece THE LANTERN IN THE CRYPT on December 13 at St. John's Smith Square, London. Now to prepare the score and parts... just what I needed, another project!

I am pleased to present a report you can read about the work, genesis, and progress of my opera THE NUERNBERG TRIAL.

If you want to know where I think a good place to start is, probably the quickest thing to do is listen to my 9-minute orchestral piece MOYS ICOS. The most thorough thing you can do is listen to the 83-minute music theater piece, A MIRACLE OF RARE DEVICE, preferably while watching the score. The computer realization is not very subtle, since it lacks dynamics, but it's certainly accurate.

If you'd like to listen to pieces and peruse scores right away, just go to The Main Body of the Work.

Musicians: For your browsing pleasure, you may prefer the Portfolio Page I've created, where my pieces are listed by types of performances forces for which they're written: the
WORKS LISTING BY NOMENCLATURE page. Many portfolios have been completed, including those for conductors, and for various chamber ensembles, both instrumental and vocal.

I'm back at work on my epic translation and enlargement (get that) of Wagner's Ring Cycle, called THE RING OF THE DARKLING. Just prior to the latest performance of the Ring by the SF Opera, I completed Das Rheingold, called in my version THE PURE GOLD. It's over sixty pages long. For a briefing about this probably 350 page book, CLICK HERE.

So, to make the point quite clear, this year has seen the resumption of major work on two of my biggest projects, THE NUERNBERG TRIAL and THE RING OF THE DARKLING.

Phase Three of the construction of this web site is now very nearly complete - the uploading of all of my completed scores! The next-to-last PDF to be uploaded, the 283-page score of A MIRACLE OF RARE DEVICE, was sent up in October 2010. After that will be CELESTIAL SIXTIES II, which you can already hear. The next phase will be the uploading of my library of performances from the 1980s to the present. There are several dozen tapes and CDs to upload. Check in frequently for updates!

There are many new pages with essays in both my WRITINGS ON MUSIC and OTHER WRITINGS pages.

Though the idea for it seems pretty obvious, I have created the first "Interactive Program" I know of, my FIRST VIEWS OF THE FESTIVAL interactive program page, that I made after my eponymous 2009 concert. It is complete with videos, which you can also see at MY YOUTUBE CHANNEL. At the Channel, there are also newly uploaded videso from concerts in 1990 and 1998.

While in Australia in January 2010 I wrote a song... During a layover in the Sydney Airport I translated the Georg Trakl poem "In der Nachmittag gefluestert" into English - making sure to preserve the syllabic content too, since Trakl was so iinfluenced by French poetry - and then over the next few days I wrote the setting. This is my first piece to be written entirely in a foreign country. For now it's in SONGS BOOK TWO. The renouned poet Robert Haas has personally granted me permission to include a setting of a poem of his that I found clearly echoed the Trakl poem, so there will be a new piece in the Echoes cycle: ECHOES OF GEORGE TRAKL. I will write that piece in my copiuos free time. The rule in the Echoes cycle is that no two pieces should employ exactly the same meaning of the word or phenomenon of echo. Here, the echo is of one poem of another by a different poet. ECHOES OF T.S. ELIOT was of echoing poems by the same author. There will be musical aspects of this of course.

My involvement with Ancient Classics increased for awhile. I did a sexy translation of a naughty poem, CATULLUS POEM 32. A class I took on Virgil has given me more material for my reading of Homer, called OPERATION "TROJAN HORSE TAMER," which WAS nearing completion but now that I've got more to prove my thesis I guess it's another work in progress. I keep promising the answer to the great, 3200-year-old mystery very soon. If you just can't wait, hey, shoot me an email.

A one-page summary of my Sanskrit transliteration system, called MAHADEWANAGARI, is now online. There is also my MARTIAN SYLLABARY, which the editor of the ERB Fanzine found and invited me to add to that huge site, along with other developments I have made about Martian. My Martian language is way cool and oh so useful, especially at increasing my Google relevance...

My CD MODERNISM FOREVER is on sale for $7 at CDBaby.

Please become my FACEBOOK friend and MYSPACE is pretty lonely...

The photo on the right is of me at the grave of the great Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, one of my artistic ancestors (actually Great-Grandteacher, being the teach of two of my Grandteachers, Earl Kim and Richard Hoffman). The photo was taken in Vienna in December 2006, by my friend Patricia Velarde. For more about the lineage, go to MY MUSICAL LINEAGE. This is not meant to be a serious academic study, just something I slammed out in three or four hours using the Grove's Dictionary - that was the dictionary we used before the first New Grove's...

Best wishes,

Christopher

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