Premiere: February 2027 at Heinz Hall, Pittsburgh, PA
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra & Manfred Honeck
Duration: 8’
Instrumentation: picc.2.2.CorA.2.bcl.2.Cbn – 4.3.2.1.1 – timp.3 perc (maracas, xylophone, BD, susp. Cymbal, crash cymbals/shaker, marimba, 2 tuned gongs; BD, SD, tam-tam, guiro) – elec. bass guitar (optional).hp.pno – strings
Program Note:
Semper Dowland, semper dolens is the title of a consort song by the great Elizabethan composer and lutenist John Dowland. It’s also the name of my second work for string quartet (completed in 2013), one that incorporates material that would otherwise have been lost from my first quartet, a now-withdrawn student composition called Lachrymae (written in 2005).
In that initial undertaking, I utilized Dowland’s lachrymae “If My Complaints Could Passions Move” and wanted to salvage some of its more striking moments, most of which involved this tune. I also endeavored to expand the piece and found, much to my amazement, that the melodic line for “Semper Dowland” fit perfectly with what I’d already written: it shared (or could be made to share) several harmonic and motivic gestures with “If My Complaints” and thus seemed an ideal basis for this new adaptation of some very old music.
The present Semper Dowland, semper dolens falls into two parts. The first, brisk and sometimes violent, presents shards of the lachrymae theme as well as one full statement of its melody under a vertiginous accompaniment. The second, slower and mostly in a quintuple meter, declaims the consort song, though, as it reaches its climax, material from the first half intrudes and the work ends with a final statement of “If My Complaints.”
The current orchestral version is the result of a June 2024 performance of my 2013 opus by the Kontras Quartet in Chicago. Manfred Honeck was in the audience and, afterwards, inquired whether or not there was an arrangement of the piece for “full symphonic orchestra.” I replied in the negative. He suggested I “think about” making one. So I did.