counting time in central city

a three-movement cycle for mixed chorus and claves (2015), c.9’

Poetry by Charles Passy

There are several temporal narratives woven through Counting Time in Central City. The first of these is the 35-year history of Central City Chorus which commissioned this work to celebrate their 35th anniversary and gave its world premiere performance on June 4, 2016 at Saint Ignatius of Antioch Episcopal Church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. When Central City Chorus made its debut 35 years ago, my friend Charles Passy (who lived around the corner from me in Midtown Manhattan) and I were preparing to graduate from the High School of Music and Art and both sang in the school’s Senior Chorus. So I knew I had to set some of Charles’s poems for this project,

Charles Passy’s three poems about the passage of time are chock full of their own narrative implications and his words have had a very direct impact on my music. Septuple time (7/8), which sounds slightly too short, seemed particularly apt for a setting of his poem “Daylight Savings.” Similarly, I used a slowly moving quintuple meter (5/4), which sounds somehow too long, to further accentuate the wistfulness of “The Almost Winter.” The final poem, “Dreaming of Lechón,” cried out for Latin rhythms as well as the use of a pair of claves, a hand percussion instrument that is ubiquitous in salsa.